Technology, Social Media | featured news

Facebook on Thursday began rolling out a new design to its more than 350 million users, with various tweaks to encourage people to use the popular social network in new ways.

It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site.

The popular site Twitter crashed again on Wednesday morning.

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube.

We've seen some major world events unfold on the social media stage in the past week, the biggest being Google's threat to pull out of China and the Haiti earthquake.

Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples' Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today.

5 years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.