Facebook, Social Networking | featured news

Worried about when you might get dumped? That's according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.

Despite a few outages in the past few months, Facebook continues to zip along as the fastest social network in terms of average response time for the site, according to a report by web analytics company AlertSite.

Facebook said its head of advertising sales, Michael Murphy, is stepping down in December, leaving a vacancy in one of the social-networking giant's key positions.

A Facebook engineer said that some applications were passing along personal data in a violation of policy.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

Facebook has done a remarkable job of getting developers to adopt its Credits virtual currency before the program was fully fledged. Today that company announced a partnership with PlaySpan to add 20 additional ways for users to pay for credits and plans to accelerate rollout.

As companies actively court customers through Facebook and Twitter, and as more travelers spend time glued to their smart phones, it's time to ponder if travelers are overloaded by social media.

It's smart, it's helpful and users will be grateful.

Facebook users can determine what groups of friends see what information.

Facebook is down and has been experiencing outages since about midnight Eastern Time tonight, Oct. 5, 2010.Many Twitter users are reporting the outage, with hundreds of tweets appearing about it in minutes. DownRightNow.com confirms the downtime, with the first widespread problems starting about 11:52 p.m. EST.