Google is rolling out a confirmation screen where Buzz users can check who they are following and see whether they are displaying that information publicly. The service has seen a number of changes as a results of privacy concerns raised after it went live in February. Read more »
Plenty of authors take to Twitter to promote their new books, but few of them have the stature of Margaret Atwood — and even fewer of them take to it the way the Canadian fiction writing legend has. She says it’s like “having 33,000 precocious grandchildren.” Read more »
Some younger Facebook users are changing their names — using their middle name instead of their last, and so on — to try and keep their profiles hidden from prospective employers. But that could play havoc with Facebook’s claims about the verified identity of its users. Read more »
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Random Guardian is an app that Guardian developer Chris Thorpe and a colleague came up with after an offhand remark during a Clay Shirky presentation about “ChatRoulette for news.” But while it may be trivial, it taps into a powerful force — a desire for serendipity. Read more »
Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. Read more »
Wikipedia says it is close to rolling out a new design for the site that it hopes will make the encyclopedia easier to use for new visitors and will encourage more contributions. The new design, code-named Vector, will start to be rolled out in April. Read more »
A British public health official has blamed Facebook for a rise in cases of syphilis, in the latest example of a wave of stories blaming social networks such as Twitter and Craigslist for most of the evils of mankind, regardless of a lack of evidence. Read more »
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre auditioned singers via YouTube video clips for a performance of a piece called Lux Aurumque, and then stitched together 185 of the clips that were submitted in order to create a virtual choir composed of individual singers from a dozen countries. Read more »
Swiss and German privacy regulators say they are taking a close look at the practice by Facebook and other social networking sites of allowing users to upload photos, email addresses and other information without the consent of all the individuals who own or appear in them. Read more »
Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has launched a Twitter-based application called Sleeping Time, which interprets a user’s tweets in order to estimate when they are usually asleep. The service joins a growing number of similar “lifestream analysis” applications such as Please Rob Me and Hunch’s Twitter Predictor.TW Read more »
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Thanks to World of Warcraft and social games on Facebook, gaming is becoming a bigger part of our culture than it has ever been. Web sites like Wikipedia and Slashdot use game-style principles to control behavior, and some see these principles moving into education and the workforce. Read more »
Craig Newmark talks about how he thinks the web needs to develop a “distributed trust network” to allow users to monitor and manage their own reputations and the reputations of others online. He says this is the next big problem that the Web has to solve. Read more »
Hitwise research shows that less than 0.2 percent of Twitter users go to news and media sites after they visit the social network’s web site, which says more about the failure of media outlets to take advantage of Twitter than it does about Twitter users. Read more »
After weeks of speculation about what Twitter was going to launch at SXSW, the company unveiled @anywhere. But even after founder Evan Williams’ keynote, it’s not clear what the new service is exactly, apart from the fact that it provides popup windows on participating sites. Read more »
As Google continues to try and adapt Buzz to the changing needs of users, debate continues over whether the service should be its own separate publishing platform, like a blog, or whether it should be used to aggregate content from other social networks such as Twitter. Read more »
In the wake of the plagiarism case involving New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, blame has been placed on the high-speed nature of blogging. But the real issue lies with the paper’s failure to understand the culture of the web and the value of the link. Read more »
One in four Facebook users now come from Asia or the Middle East, according to O’Reilly Media research analyst and blogger Ben Lorica — about 100 million people. And the number of users from Asia is growing much faster than any other major geographic region. Read more »
Researchers at IBM found many bloggers run out of ideas, so they came up with a recommendation system they called Blog Muse that allowed users to suggest topics they wanted to read about. Posts written through the system got more views, more comments and more “likes.” Read more »
A recent survey of social media use by Liberty Mutual shows that men are more positive towards and use social networks more frequently than women, but this conclusion is the exact opposite of the gender breakdown that several other surveys based on user-profile data have reported. Read more »
GetGlue, a social network that offers a toolbar with related content to users browsing the web, along with recommendations from their friends on the network, has launched a new feature that provides the same kinds of content and recommendations through popup widgets on any web site. Read more »
Twitter engineer Alex Payne says he is putting his personal blog on hiatus, in part because of comments he made about additions to the service were misinterpreted. Payne says he will continue to use Twitter, but will be more careful about what he says there. Read more »
Citibank has admitted that a staffer blocked the bank account of gay-networking startup Fabulis and threatened to terminate the company’s account because of what it termed “objectionable content” on the Fabulis blog, but says it has now clarified its internal policies for Internet business accounts. Read more »
Google has launched a new feature in Street View that allows users to navigate through a virtual 3D panorama of a location using photos that have been uploaded through Panoramio and Flickr. The feature is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth, but is available to anyone with Flash. Read more »
An Italian court found three Google executives guilty of privacy violations for a video uploaded to the company’s site, focusing attention on a key question: Is Google a service provider or a media company? And if it’s the latter, what responsibility does it have for content? Read more »
As they did during the earthquake in Haiti and other natural disasters, social-media tools such as Twitter and various other web resources have become a key source of information on what is happening to the country. Here is a partial list of some of those resources. Read more »
Jason Goldberg, co-founder of socialmedia.com and Jobster, says that Citibank blocked the bank account of his new startup Fabulis due to what the bank called “objectionable content” on the company’s blog. Could it have something to do with Fabulis being a social network for gay men? Read more »
A Twitter executive who suggested during an advertising industry panel that the company was within a month or so of launching its advertising platform has denied this interpretation of his comments, and says while the company is working on a platform, its launch is not imminent. Read more »
Scribd, which calls itself the world’s largest social publishing company, has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and will soon launch mobile apps for the iPhone and Android. Read more »
DocStoc, the document-hosting service, has launched an online store and related services that allow members to sell professional documents both through the DocStoc marketplace and through the service’s embeddable document viewer. CEO Jason Nazar says he sees it as different from Scribd’s similar online document store. Read more »
Twitter will roll out an official advertising platform likely within the next month or so, Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, said while on a panel at a conference on Monday. Will advertising change your experience or make you use Twitter less? Read more »
Hooked Media has launched a social-gaming platform called Yoo-Mee that is designed to allow casual games played on Facebook and elsewhere to be embedded in any website and also played via mobile devices. The platform is a “social wrapper” for games, says CEO Prita Uppal. Read more »
Every once in a while, a new service or feature comes along that crystallizes everything that is both wonderful and shocking about the Internet and the social web. ChatRoulette is one of those services, drawing both revulsion over its X-rated content and investment interest from VCs. Read more »
What do people ask their social networks? A recent study by Microsoft and MIT found that the most popular questions ask people for recommendations and opinions on things like which cellphone to buy, but also more rhetorical questions such as “Why are men so stupid?” Read more »
Google’s new Buzz service has generated a flurry of privacy concerns, but what has been Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s response? To suggest that users are overreacting, that “no one was harmed,” and to effectively blame users for misunderstanding the terms of the new service. Read more »
There have been plenty of complaints about privacy and other concerns with Google Buzz, but the biggest problem with it is that it’s just so darn hard to use, and so convoluted in its design. Even quitting Buzz is way harder than it needs to be. Read more »
Google’s donation of $2 million to Wikipedia cements a long-standing symbiotic relationship between the search engine and the user-generated encyclopedia. But is that relationship a good thing or a bad thing? Some critics believe that Google gives Wikipedia preferential treatment in its search results. Read more »
The typical picture of an online gamer may be a teen lacking in social skills, but players of “social games” on sites like Facebook are different. According to a recent survey of players in the U.S. and UK, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Read more »
Google says that it is “very, very sorry” for the way it launched Google Buzz and the features that some felt intruded on their privacy and revealed personal data. The company has made several substantial changes in response to complaints, and says more are coming soon. Read more »
Analysis from Compete shows that Facebook is driving more traffic to major portal sites than Google, and has become a top source for other web sites as well, another sign of how important the social web is becoming in terms of Internet traffic flows. Read more »
A new site called ChatRoulette has been getting a lot of attention lately because it features live video chatting with random strangers, with predictable results. But among those interested in the site is venture investor Fred Wilson, who has invited the founder to New York. Read more »
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