Social Media, Social Networking | featured news

Facebook now uses your name to post the things you "liked" maybe long ago, in a way that can get you in hot water in the here and now.

Digg rose to prominence years ago by changing the way people share news online. But its subsequent downfall – and $500,000 sale to Betaworks on Thursday – underscores the swift evolution of technology that is helping people discover content online.

Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.

Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

Facebook announced that it is testing an online-banking service with Australia's Commonwealth Bank expected to debut this year. The new system lets people make payments to other Facebook users, and will become a test of how well Facebook can handle the deep-science realities of financial privacy and security.

Reddit has lifted its ban on popular news publication The Atlantic, thus allowing its users to submit links to the community news sharing site once again. The news publication — along with BusinessWeek, Phys.org, GlobalPost, Discovery News, ScienceDaily, and others — was first put on a domain blacklist by Reddit about a month ago, as VentureBeat previously reported. Reddit management determined that these sites were guilty of artificially promoting their content on the site.

Do we really need another Social Software Platform? Given Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer, I for one am glad to see another contender jump in the game. And this one is carrying a big bat.

A report in the tech blog AllThingsD says Facebook and Yahoo have reached a deal that settles their patent squabbles and expands their licensing and advertising partnership.

Facebook is gearing up for a huge social commerce push. The developer who recently discovered that the social network is testing a “Want” button, which would allow you to add products to a virtual wish list, has found a series of new coding for actions that would allow users to share product purchases, charitable donations or items purchased within Facebook games to profile pages and Timeline.