Technology, Social Networking | featured news

Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark in August, according to an analyst... You know what’s cool? A billion. Users, that is. Having passed the $1 billion revenue mark some time ago, Facebook is now closing in on 1 billion users. The company claimed 800 million users in September, so it’s not surprising that claiming membership of one-seventh of humanity is now within the social network’s grasp.

One of the newest Twitter-ers: First lady Michelle Obama.

For Google, it's personal. The Internet search giant is no longer going to roll out the same search results to everyone... It's doing this in three ways. First, it's expanding search beyond public Web pages to the photos and posts you and others have shared privately. Second, as you type a person's name into Google, it will automatically suggest people you are close to or may be interested in. Third, Google is guiding users to profiles and Google+ pages related to the topic of interest.

SoundCloud, a startup focusing on audio-sharing in social media, has announced a new (and reportedly sizable) round of funding. The round, which was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, may have been as large as $50 million, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reports. A SoundCloud rep confirmed all the details except the amount in an email exchange with VentureBeat this afternoon.

A phone hacking scandal may have cost Rupert Murdoch his biggest-selling newspaper in 2011, but the billionaire media mogul managed to end the year with a modest addition to his empire -- an account on Twitter.

Facebook and other social media sites are becoming a go-to place to find a person with a kidney to spare.

A survey by a UK-based divorce website shows that Facebook figures prominently in one-third of divorce petitions, an increase of 13 percent from two years ago.

Although Facebook dominates Twitter in many areas, it lost to its smaller competitor in at least one metric for 2011. Twitter was discussed in about 50 percent of media coverage regarding social networks this year, while Facebook was only talked about 45 percent of the time, according to HighBeam Research. The report did not even bother mentioning Google+.

Our overall happiness is apparently in decline. How do we know? It's on Twitter. A team of mathematicians from the University of Vermont analyzed 4.6 billion Twitter messages worldwide over 33 months. They assigned happiness grades to more than 10,000 of the most common words, crunched all the numbers and plotted them on a graph that shows a gradual downward slope during the past year and a half or so, through mid-September.

Google has added several new Google+ features and improved old ones, among them some of the most popular requests from users.