Internet, Social Media | featured news

It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site.

The popular site Twitter crashed again on Wednesday morning.

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube.

We've seen some major world events unfold on the social media stage in the past week, the biggest being Google's threat to pull out of China and the Haiti earthquake.

Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Well that didn't take long. Just four days in 2010 and we already have an acquisition. Social networking application Seesmic has acquired the social status updater Ping.fm.

The move positions the various Seesmic applications (web, desktop, and mobile) to be able to update some 50 social networks very easily.

Digg founder Kevin Rose dropped a morsel of information about a major overhaul to the social news website that's been a long time coming...Instead of limiting the pool to input from its own users, Rose indicated that Digg may also begin taking into account link-sharing data from other social networks.

An escaped British prisoner is taunting police and attracting a growing fan base from a Facebook profile page.