Social Networking | featured news

It must be something in the air. Spring perhaps. But when high level employees start to leave perfectly good startups before a liquidity event, there's usually something pretty important that they think they need to work on.

Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday's visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week.

Although many retailers are reducing their online marketing budgets, spending on social media is falling at a slower rate than spending in other online marketing channels.

The Obama Administration wants to open government with social networks. Privacy advocates worry that gives the government too much access to our lives.

It's happened: America's favorite Tina Fey character - Sarah Palin, former Republican Vice Presidential nominee - has joined Twitter. With the handle AKGovSarahPalin, Palin jumped on the social phenomena the other day and has started posting things like Alaska's swine flu status and her staff being misquoted.

A French hacker posts 13 screenshots of a Twitter product manager's admin interface to prove the claim.

The software giant thinks it can make money in social networking the old-fashioned way - charging subscription fees.

Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it's pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third party sites and services to built on top of it.

Charter reservations are sailing in for Free Spirit Yacht Cruises this year despite the turbulent economy, and co-owner Angela Motola-Donofrio attributes it to a social media push.

MySpace parent company News Corp. continues to leak, off record, that Owen Van Natta is in the final stages of becoming the new CEO of MySpace (one of the more obvious candidates on our list yesterday).