Twitter, Social Networking | featured news

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.

Tweeting your favorite stories may be getting a little easier. Twitter introduced Thursday a "tweet" button that websites can place alongside their content. The button serves as an invitation to Twitter's legion of users to share what they're reading without having to copy and paste the Web link.

Consider it a sign of the times, or even just success that Twitter now has a policy in place to handle ownership of a user's account once they've died.

This state's tourism ads make people feel good enough to cry. They give hope to the jobless and goose bumps to the jaded. Daily they win new fans on Facebook, new followers on Twitter. When they come on the radio, they inspire listeners to turn up the volume.

There have now been more than 20 billion tweets since Twitter (Twitter)’s inception, according to tracking service GigaTweet. The milestone comes just two months after the service hit 15 billion tweets and about five months since it reached 10 billion, indicating that activity levels on the microblogging service continue to accelerate.

Twitter Will Now Suggest People You Might Be Interested In Stalking. It can be tough to find fascinating people to follow on Twitter, but now and then you'll find someone whose tweets perfectly match your interests and you'll wish there were more people like that.

Here's something different from the world of online dating. "Wings," a Facebook app from a company called Triangulate, pulls in data from your account and analyzes and uses what it finds to populate your dating profile page. You can also opt to let Wings access data from your other social and media accounts on Netflix, Twitter, Pandora or Foursquare. It was built around the concept that actions speak louder than words.

The e-reader's introduces a new social features. PCMag takes it for a for a test drive.

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.