Facebook, Twitter | featured news

The U.S. government's new system to replace the five color-coded terror alerts will have two levels of warnings - elevated and imminent - that will be relayed to the public only under certain circumstances for limited periods of time, sometimes using Facebook and Twitter, according to a draft Homeland Security Department plan obtained by The Associated Press....

Long-form blogs were once the outlet of choice, but now sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are favored.

Executives at microblogging company Twitter Inc. have held "low level" talks with executives at Facebook Inc and Google Inc in recent months, about a possible takeover of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.

Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder, says he understands Facebook's reluctance to let Twitter users look up friends on Facebook or send Facebook posts to Twitter. But the two companies are still talking.

Despite a few outages in the past few months, Facebook continues to zip along as the fastest social network in terms of average response time for the site, according to a report by web analytics company AlertSite.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

As companies actively court customers through Facebook and Twitter, and as more travelers spend time glued to their smart phones, it's time to ponder if travelers are overloaded by social media.

Facebook is down and has been experiencing outages since about midnight Eastern Time tonight, Oct. 5, 2010.Many Twitter users are reporting the outage, with hundreds of tweets appearing about it in minutes. DownRightNow.com confirms the downtime, with the first widespread problems starting about 11:52 p.m. EST.