Social Media, Social Networking | featured news

At Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, Seesmic's founder and CEO Loic Le Meur just announced that the company will release a native Windows version of its popular Twitter client later today. Seesmic developed this client on top of .NET.

It seems that “word of the year” announcements have become the de facto way for dictionary makers to grab some social media buzz by selecting a word from our neck of the woods. And sure enough, they’ve done it again, this time with Oxford Dictionary declaring “unfriend” the word of 2009.

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students tonight at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July.

At this point, a fair number of Twitter users have the new retweet feature enabled (and if you’re not one of them, don’t worry, the rollout continues).

Twitter and LinkedIn have struck a deal for tweets to be shared on LinkedIn, boosting the efforts of both services to be a hub for professional conversation.

The social network Tagged.com agreed to change misleading e-mail invitations and will pay $750,000 in fines to settle litigation by New York and Texas.

We’re always interested in understanding the habits, preferences, and future trends of Twitter and its users. For example, we were fascinated by a report listing the most engaging celebrities on Twitter, and by a new site that analyzes the 50 hottest brands on Twitter on a daily basis.

Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client.

Some LinkedIn users will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark?

Facebook Inc., the world's most popular social-networking Web site, was awarded $711 million in damages against a spammer who gained access to users' accounts and sent phony messages.