Social Media, Blogs | featured news

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.”

With new food, revamped decor and an embrace of Twitter and mommy blogs, McDonald’s has returned from the brink of a public-relations nightmare.

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.

If you're trying to figure out who to follow on Twitter, you might soon be turning to fellow users for help, rather than the company itself....

Blogger Meghan McCain, daughter of former presidential candidate John McCain, caused a brief stir on Twitter on Wednesday night when she posted a voluptuous photo of herself online.

It's no secret that Twitter has become a preferred playground for spammers. Hashrocket's TweetBlocker sets out to change this by giving users a simple tool to easily identify spammers in the group of users they are following. TweetBlocker automatically identifies the spammers in your follow list and lets you easily unfollow and block them right from the TweetBlocker dashboard.

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.

Twitter seeks legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked and a number of blogs publish some of the stolen material.

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine.

Twitter has hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel, we've confirmed.