Internet, Social Networking | featured news

Facebook recently passed 350 million users worldwide, but the lingering question about the social network (and social media in general) is if it’s making any money.

Log on to Friendster today and you’ll see a background image that says ‘Watch this face! … on December 4′. Turns out the pioneering social network is in for a major revamp tomorrow, including a new logo, tagline (”Connecting Smiles”) and an entirely fresh look.

Yahoo continues their strategic defeat from the front lines of innovation. Earlier today they announced that they'd be "deeply integrating" with Facebook Connect, allowing Yahoo users "to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo!

Later today, Digg will open up its rumored read/write API. Up until now, developers could only read data from Digg. With the new API, web and desktop apps will also be able to contribute data to Digg. This will allow developers to write desktop and web applications that enable users to interact with Digg without having to go to the site, for example.

Twitter spam and scams: We know that they have been appearing more frequently and have become more dangerous. And it’s been a problem since relatively early on for Twitter.

In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol's oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks.

This morning, professional social network LinkedIn announced that it is opening up its API for developers to build applications around the platform.

A Canadian woman on long-term sick leave for depression says she lost her benefits because her insurance agent found photos of her on Facebook in which she appeared to be having fun....

Yahoo Inc. is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in its latest attempt to get people to use its Internet search engine more frequently. Beginning Thursday, Yahoo will mine the short messages posted on Twitter to find fresher information about hot topics. Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. had earlier announced plans to incorporate Twitter messages into search results, but Yahoo said it will be the first among them to include such "tweets" on its main search results.

Newspapers should become "radically open" if they want to make money in the online world, the co-founder of Twitter says.