Internet, Social Media | featured news

One of the Vatican's main Twitter accounts and the website of its communications office were running stories about Batman on Thursday with the headline "Holy Switcheroo!" — raising concerns they might have been hacked.

The BBC Weather Twitter account began posting some peculiar updates Thursday. You could argue that they were loosely weather themed, yes, but the tweets were a series of digs at countries and heads of state in the Middle East.

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

As if Facebook weren't annoying enough. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social network may adopt Twitter's arguably most tiresome -- and arguably most Corporate -- feature: the hashtag. Facebook is testing the effectiveness of hashtags and is considering adding the categorizing feature to its site, reports the WSJ citing sources familiar with the matter.

U.S. prosecutors obtained an indictment on Thursday accusing Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor at reuters.com, of aiding the group Anonymous to hack into a Tribune Co website.

Clicking those friendly blue "like" buttons strewn across the Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga. It could out you as gay. It might reveal how you vote.

Last spring, the future for Viddy, a video-sharing Facebook app, seemed as sunny as southern California's skies. Based a block away from Venice Beach, the 30-person startup impressed prospective investors with skyrocketing user growth figures and won funding from them at a $370 million valuation. The tech press hailed it as the "Instagram for video," potentially ripe for a billion-dollar-plus buyout. Justin Bieber wanted to invest — and the pop star eventually did just that.

Sheryl Sandberg's explosive "Lean In" — a muscular manifesto on the gender inequities of the professional world — is being published within weeks of the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." It's a convergence destined to invite disparaging comparisons, to prompt people to holler about how they knew Betty Friedan and that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and one of the most powerful women in the tech world, is no Betty Friedan.

"What we're trying to do is give everyone in the world, the best possible newspaper we can," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when he stepped onto the stage during a press event in Menlo Park, Calif. on Thursday. A News Feed redesign that focuses on more visual posts, the ability to view content-specific feeds, and consistency between mobile and desktop experiences is the topic of the day.

U.S. universities have responded to China's exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.