Tag: SOCIALNETWORK

Cloud Girlfriend, despite what it sounds like, doesn't really have anything to do with cloud computing. Rather, it uses a cloud of women to pose as your girlfriend on Facebook, or your favorite social network of choice. The service is scheduled to launch 'soon,' and there's no indication of how much it will cost. With the tagline 'The easiest way to get a girlfriend is to already have one,' ...

The Facebook Photos service has always been a bit limited when compared with competitors like Flickr due to a hard and fast limit of 720 pixels maximum resolution. Thankfully, that limitation has been lifted thanks to an overhaul that includes a new photo viewer and an improved upload and tagging engine. Photos uploaded to the world's largest social network can now be up to 2048 pixels at their ...

If you're the biggest social network around and you need to tap someone for video chat, who better to do it than the biggest name in video calling? That's what Facebook thinks, and they're teaming up with Skype to deliver SMS and voice/video chat using Facebook Connect. As Kara Swisher reports, Facebook hopes that giving users stronger communication tools will lead to a tighter community -- ...

Now here's something to sink your teeth into: take a look at the graph above. It comes from a long series of demographic and growth reports by Inside Facebook. It illustrates that, in June 2010, only 320,000 Americans joined Facebook -- but more importantly, it shows that 250,000 of the primary 18-to-44-year-old demographic actually left Facebook. Inside Facebook says the figures could be the ...

I just woke up to find a shiny new Digg 'V4' alpha invite in my email inbox. Squealing with delight I hurried to the new website (you can register your interest there, if you haven't already) and begun the 'upgrade' process. First, it's just like frickin' Twitter. Seriously, the first step, after logging in, is choosing a bunch of Digg accounts to follow. The Wall Street Journal, The ...

Speaking at the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Facebook's Tom Cook presented a slide that puts Facebook's rapid user growth into perspective. Actual numbers were carefully omitted, but Data Center Knowledge performed some easy deduction to conclude that the top peak represents 60,000 servers. The plateau towards the end of 2009 represents 30,000 servers -- so they've installed 30,000 servers ...

If you follow the rumor mill, you probably heard about Google Me a few days ago. Digg's founder Kevin Rose tweeted about it a couple of days ago. It's not that people didn't believe him, but it just seemed a bit random to come from someone like him. Now, thanks to the added confirmation of early Facebooker and Quora cofounder Adam D'Angelo, it seems like Google Me is all but confirmed. It's ...

As incredible as it sounds, the United States Patent and Trademark Office actually awarded Amazon a patent for the "Social Networking System." To make it truly ridiculous, the abstract on the patent reads as though it were succinctly describing Facebook. Amazon's reasoning throughout the whole process has been that, since they purchased PlanetAll in 1998, and PlanetAll is often considered to be ...

Despite being the largest image sharing service in the world, Facebook still has a depressingly short list of crippled features when it comes to photo albums. You can add a description, tag friends... aaaand... that's about it. When news broke yesterday about Flickr and Facebook teaming up I actually squealed with delight -- this is it! -- and then I realised it was just Flickr importing your new ...

My friends think I'm crazy ... overreacting. I've gone and done it, though. I've deactivated my Facebook account. My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn't feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect ...

BrightKite was already the Cadillac of location-based social networking, but it just got even better with the release of an iPhone app. Checking in is a breeze using the iPhone's GPS, and the app is pumped up with new features that make it a dramatic improvement over the old web version. There's been a buzz around Brightkite for iPhone for some time now, and it totally lives up to the hype. The ...

AOL completed its acquisition of social networking site Bebo today. You may remember that AOL announced it would buy Bebo for $850 million back in March. According to InformationWeek Bebo will be the center of AOL's new People Network business unit. Heading up this business unit is Joanna Shields who will serve as president. This "People Network" will consist of three AOL services: AIM, ICQ, and ...

Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, is becoming known for buying up some of the most creative WordPress hacks out there. They've already snapped up the global avatar service, Gravatar, and added a handful of quality themes by Chris Pearson to their selection of default templates. Now Automattic is taking WordPress into the arena of social networking by hiring designer ...

Twitter users love to gripe that it's too hard to track a topic of conversation as it spreads across the service. Being able to keep up with an interesting piece of news depends on finding the right people to follow, and that's not always easy with the limited search tools Twitter provides. Twemes (it stands for Twitter plus memes) is a site that aims to solve that problem by grouping Twitter ...

Fancy Last.fm? Fancy Windows Mobile? Then you'd probably fancy the Last.fm Windows Mobile app currently in development, which happens to be called Last.fm Mobile. The Pocket PC version includes scrobbling and experimental radio functionality, but the Smartphone version can only scrobble from Windows Media Player. The app has a healthy backing of supporters at the Last.fm forum, which is where you ...