Social Networking | featured news

We knew that the Human Right Campaign’s (HRC) red and pink logo in support of gay marriage had spread across the web at a record pace, but Facebook is now confirming that with some numbers. Facebook says that millions of people change their profile photos every day, but on Tuesday, March 26, the day the HRC asked gay marriage supporters to “paint the town red” with a new logo, 2.7 million more users changed their photo compared with the previous Tuesday. Profile photo uploads were up by 120 percent, it says. Facebook has more than a billion users.

Yes, this again. Facebook on Thursday sent out invitations for a press event that promised to show off the company’s “new home on Android,” which naturally led to fresh speculation about the company’s intention to produce its own Facebook-centric smartphone.

Facebook's stock market debut left founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a paper fortune currently valued at $13 billion -- and a 2012 tax bill of around $1.1 billion.vZuckerberg's whopping tax hit stems from his move last May to increase his stake in Facebook. On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each.

Facebook announced on Monday it is rolling out a new feature so users can reply directly to comments left on their page. Finally.

One of the Vatican's main Twitter accounts and the website of its communications office were running stories about Batman on Thursday with the headline "Holy Switcheroo!" — raising concerns they might have been hacked.

The BBC Weather Twitter account began posting some peculiar updates Thursday. You could argue that they were loosely weather themed, yes, but the tweets were a series of digs at countries and heads of state in the Middle East.

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

As if Facebook weren't annoying enough. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social network may adopt Twitter's arguably most tiresome -- and arguably most Corporate -- feature: the hashtag. Facebook is testing the effectiveness of hashtags and is considering adding the categorizing feature to its site, reports the WSJ citing sources familiar with the matter.

U.S. prosecutors obtained an indictment on Thursday accusing Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor at reuters.com, of aiding the group Anonymous to hack into a Tribune Co website.

Most North Koreans can't access the Internet, and only foreigners can use the country's brand-new 3G cellular network. But the country has still developed its own rudimentary social network -- which you can now see for yourself, thanks to a SXSW panel the Associated Press's Jean Lee gave this weekend.