Facebook, Social Networking | featured news

Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it's seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth.

Social gaming startup Zynga is seeing some impressive traction. It now boats 129 million monthly active users across its portfolio of more than 30 games, according to both Inside Facebook's AppData(see chart) and Developer Analytics.

Just as bearded hipsters migrate from bar to bar in pursuit of young ladies to ogle, so too have scammers and hackers followed their prey from MySpace to Facebook. As a result, the social network once deemed the "safe" option is now plagued by legions of 419 scammers, phishers, and peddlers of malware.

As social networking grows increasingly pervasive, more employers are utilizing these sites to screen potential employees.

If it wasn't bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really has something to worry about. Facebook is growing faster than Twitter in the U.S., even though it is more than four times larger.

Everyone is obviously talking about the Facebook/FriendFeed deal, but everyone wants to know one key detail: How much did Facebook pay?

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below).

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

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.

The microblogging service fears the social network could put it out of business.