Facebook, Social Media | featured news

Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it's seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth.

Just as bearded hipsters migrate from bar to bar in pursuit of young ladies to ogle, so too have scammers and hackers followed their prey from MySpace to Facebook. As a result, the social network once deemed the "safe" option is now plagued by legions of 419 scammers, phishers, and peddlers of malware.

As social networking grows increasingly pervasive, more employers are utilizing these sites to screen potential employees.

If it wasn't bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really has something to worry about. Facebook is growing faster than Twitter in the U.S., even though it is more than four times larger.

Everyone is obviously talking about the Facebook/FriendFeed deal, but everyone wants to know one key detail: How much did Facebook pay?

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below).

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

Universal McCann has released a new report that looks at the state of social media today. Apparently, this trend is showing no sign of slowing down. In fact, it's still growing. From posting photos to writing blogs, the desire to share has become a universal phenomenon.

News Corp. is planning to position its MySpace unit as a Web site for accessing entertainment and related information, amid tough competition from Facebook.

It’s tough to argue against the perception that Facebook’s been on a Twitter emulation spree. In the last month alone they announced public content sharing, profile fans, real-time search, and brand new privacy changes. All of this seems to be an attempt to directly confront the Twitter threat.