Internet, Social Networking | featured news

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says his company is now seeing almost 250 million tweets every day, up from 100 million at the beginning of 2011. That’s a billion tweets every four or five days. Costolo made the comments in an on-stage interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Monday night.

Google is getting ready to press the mute button on Buzz, an online social networking service that turned into a massive faux pas.

One of the big, enduring questions of the technology world: “When will iPad users get their very own Facebook app?” The answer is —now. Facebook is releasing an updated version of its iPhone application on Monday afternoon, one that’s also designed to fill out the larger screen of the iPad. Like the previous iPhone version, it’s free.

Facebook’s use of software that enables it to track users’ online activity after they log off of the social-networking site came under scrutiny in Washington this week, with lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups demanding a federal investigation.

Twitter confirms it: People tend to wake up in a good mood and are happiest on weekends. The fast-paced forum is offering scientists a peek at real-time, presumably little-filtered human behavior and thoughts. Cornell University researchers turned to the microblog to study mood and found a pretty consistent pattern.

Here, direct from the S-1, is the figure that matters more. Operating income in the most recent quarter declined year over year from $13.4 million to $13 million – not the big 95% drop reported in the news.

Reports of Google+'s demise may have been greatly exaggerated, as the upstart social network exploded in traffic last week after the service opened up to the masses.

Hacker group The Script Kiddies successfully hacked another news organization when it logged onto USA Today's Twitter page and posted false statements Sunday evening.

Users and privacy advocates have expressed concerns about Facebook’s planned redesign, the way the change will affect third-party apps and the network’s general approach to privacy. Third-party apps will be fully integrated into a user’s profile page, with updates about activity on each app. That means that users won’t actively click to share updates from apps — the apps will add that information to a user’s page automatically.

Police found a woman’s decapitated body in a Mexican border city on Saturday, alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for her postings on a social networking site. The gruesome killing may be the third so far this month in which people in Nuevo Laredo were killed by a drug cartel for what they said on the internet.