Internet, Social Networking | featured news

As we noted yesterday, the launch of the new Google Buzz API means that applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Plancast and Boxee can now integrate directly with Google Buzz. Seesmic Desktop released its first version with Google Buzz support yesterday and today TweetDeck joins the Google Buzz party.

Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube indefinitely in a bid to contain "blasphemous" material, officials said on Thursday.

Tween heart-throb Justin Bieber is the center of attention on Twitter again, after a very brief exile. Last night, Mashable reported that Twitter had updated its "trending topics" algorithm to highlight topics that were actually trending, rather than just consistently popular. The most visible, and widely discussed, impact of this change was that Justin Bieber -- a permanent fixture in the trending topics -- disappeared.

Concerns over Facebook's new privacy policy and the online social network's recent efforts to spread its information across the Web have led some of the site's faithful to delete their accounts -- or at least try to.

Facebook's latest modifications make it pretty clear that the company is eager to spread its brand even further across the Web -- and that's left some privacy advocates a little freaked out as they look at the vast amount of personal information that Facebook has on hand.

Twitter advertising network Ad.ly, which launched last year, has raised $5 million in additional funding led by GRP Partners with Greycroft Partners and Matt C

As we reported over the weekend, Facebook is gearing up to launch a new "Places" tab on (at least) the mobile version of its site. This new area is likely to contain a list of venues close to your current location that you can check-in to. Yes, it's basically what you do on Foursquare (and several other location-based services).

This week, Facebook users suddenly found themselves able to monitor the private conversations their friends were having on the site's chat service. TechCrunch's Steve O'Hear reported the bug early this morning. When we attempted to recreate the experiment, we found Facebook's chat feature has been disabled entirely; Facebook explains that chat is "down for maintenance", presumably to fix the hole.

Consumer Reports, a longtime trusted name in product ratings and reviews, has today released their annual "State of the Net" report, whose findings suggest that over half (52%) of social network users post risky information online. Among the transgressions: using weak passwords, listing full birth dates, ignoring privacy settings and making mention of when you're away from home, to name a few.

Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader is getting access to Facebook and Twitter, along with several other enhancements, as part of a software update being sent wirelessly to the devices.

In a posting on Amazon's site, the company says the new software will let users share book passages on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The update will also let people sort books and documents into collections and lock their Kindle with a password. There also will be larger font options and the ability to zoom in on PDF documents.