Twitter, Social Media | featured news

Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com.

Twitter is now selling its "Promoted Tweets" for $100,000, according to an article in this morning's Wall St. Journal. "Promoted Tweets," which allow companies to buy the top spot on Twitter's Search results page, is just one of the microblogging network's new advertising initiatives as of late. The idea behind these digital ads is that the service allows companies to associate themselves with a certain trend or keyword.

At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long.

Facebook has more users than ever, says comScore. With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the U.S. during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, beating its previous record (set in May) by better than 11 million.

If you're a frequent Twitter user, you've probably noticed that the microblogging site has been crashing repeatedly this week.

Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader is getting access to Facebook and Twitter, along with several other enhancements, as part of a software update being sent wirelessly to the devices.

In a posting on Amazon's site, the company says the new software will let users share book passages on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The update will also let people sort books and documents into collections and lock their Kindle with a password. There also will be larger font options and the ability to zoom in on PDF documents.

Hugo Chavez is starting to use Twitter to counter his opponents online, forcing a president who often talks for hours to sum up each thought in 140 characters or less.

Nokia has announced it will bring social networking to the masses on its freshly minted C3, C6 and E5 phones. This comes just a day after Microsoft did the same for mobile Windows users, and Sony Ericsson is promising to catch up. The Nokia phones will communcate with Facebook and Twitter, as well as Ovi Mail and Chat. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson's Spiro and Zylo add Walkman branding to the inevitable Facetwit connections, as money ceases to be a barrier to social networking.

Ads will be rolled out to two to 10 percent of users via search on Twitter.com beginning today.

A 25-year-old unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and Britney Spears, the pop star.