Facebook, 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.

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

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.

An escaped British prisoner is taunting police and attracting a growing fan base from a Facebook profile page.

The buzz around realtime search of social networks has mostly surrounded Twitter and Facebook. Collecta, OneRiot and the search giants, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all tap into Twitter (and Facebook too) to capture the realtime stream of content. But MySpace is also getting into the game, recently releasing a set of real-time APIs that both OneRiot and Google will be tapping into to provide content from the social network. Today, real-time search engine Collecta has launched a search platform that offers a real-time view into MySpace.

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.

Just last week, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. But it's one main advantage is that it still commands a large audience, and in fact was the fourth largest Website in the U.S.—until last month. ComScore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook surpassed Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol.

Facebook's new privacy controls remain a work in progress a full 24 hours after release and months after they were announced.

A large pop-up box will greet Facebook users logging on to the social-networking site on Thursday, asking them to modify their privacy settings.

Google will supplement its search results with updates posted each second to sites like Twitter and Facebook.