Internet, Social Networking | featured news

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.

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.

Everyone's made a joke they thought was funny only to see it fall flat, but Park Jung-geun's attempt at humor could see him jailed for up to seven years in South Korea. Park, a photographer by profession, re-tweeted some messages from North Korea's official twitter feed, such as reports on the late leader Kim Jong Il's travels across the country and negative tweets about South Korea.

A New York judge has ordered Twitter to give prosecutors tweets and account information from an Occupy Wall Street protester who was among 700 people arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in October.

Executives at the Internet company are pinning much of the blame on Nasdaq, according to several people close to the company and its underwriters, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continuing shareholder lawsuits. Tensions remain so high that Facebook is still considering switching exchanges and is weighing the costs of such a move, these people said.

On most days, Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile gadgets, rather than from ads on Twitter.com, company executives said. One key reason: People who see a Twitter ad on their phones are more likely to click or interact with it in some way, which is how Twitter gets paid for advertisements.

The idea, it seems, is to allow everyone with an empty Google+ page—that'll be most of us, then?—to fill it up with content that has previously been posted online. It's a bit like buying a new house that you don't want to live in, then filling it with all your old junk from your adolescence so it looks used. Used, yes. Only a little hollow and depressing at the same time.

Zynga announced plans to offer a central hub to connect players of multiple games who use various devices.

Facebook has changed your email address. At least that's how many felt after a quiet but vast change in the way the company displays users' contact information. Facebook replaced the email address users chose when they signed up and changed it to a facebook.com address. The Facebook email accounts allow users to communicate with outside email addresses via Facebook.