Social

Google’s latest attempt stab at a social network, Google+, has proved to be quite the hit amongst the tech elite and casual users alike – so much so that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has joined to check out the competition, and is currently the most-followed user.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. One-time king of the social networks, MySpace, has finally been sold by owner News Corp for a rather paltry (rumoured) $30 million to advertising firm Specific Media. The amount is less than a third of the $100 million News Corp were hoping to recoup with the sale of the iconic social network, which paved the way for current social supremo Facebook.

Google may not be the media darling it once was, having lost mindshare to social upstarts such as Facebook and Twitter in recent years, but when it comes to raw traffic the search giant is still top of the pile. Research firm ComScore estimates that last month Google’s family of web properties notched up one billion unique visitors.

A recent phenomenon of the social web – aside from your parents commenting on drunk pictures of you on Facebook – is the smattering of buttons now adorning every website, from Justin Bieber fansites to CNN. These buttons allow you to share the information on the page with your friends or followers on the likes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any number of link aggregators.

While all manner of cool new hardware is shown off in Taipei at Computex 2011, the Silicon Valley rumour mill keeps churning. This week’s choice titbit is that eponymous social network Twitter is due to launch its own photo upload and sharing service imminently, potentially when CEO Dick Costolo takes the stage at the D9 conference on Wednesday.

Eponymous video streaming website YouTube is today celebrating its sixth birthday, while mobile advertising platform AdMob is marking one year as a Google property. In separate blog posts today both the YouTube and AdMob teams shared some impressive numbers showing how the two services continue to grow.

Although we first heard about it a few weeks ago, today Twitter has gone official with their purchase of UK-based Tweetdeck, makers of the popular desktop social media client of the same name. The papers were finally signed yesterday, with Twitter reportedly paying between $40 million and $50 million in cash and stock.

A spat over data privacy that has been rumbling on between social network Facebook and search giant Google has today erupted into a Tom Clancy-esque game of subterfuge, after The Daily Beast pinned down the source of anti-Google stories planted in the press as none other than Mark Zuckerberg’s baby.

A few weeks ago Google lifted the lid on its next social effort, and its answer to Facebook’s “Like”, the +1 button. The functionality is simple – a small +1 icon appears next to search results and embedded in pages for you to press if you think the content is useful or noteworthy. The wider implications, however, could be far more meaningful.

Following the spectacular failure of Amazon.com Inc.’s Elastic Cloud Compute service last Thursday, another giant Web service, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network, has crashed and is showing no signs of coming back up soon. The network, boasting about 70 million users worldwide, has apparently been floored by an “external intrusion” and has been offline since around the same time Amazon.com’s service went down.

Google Maps is one of the few things that is universally loved by internet users. Find a person who doesn’t like Google Maps and I can guarantee you they’re either insane, a moron, or both. That said, the ubiquitous cartography service isn’t without its little quirks.

As excitement in anticipation of the royal wedding reaches fever pitch, T-Mobile seems to also be finding it hard to restrain itself, releasing an advert showcasing its vision for the special day.

Uruguay’s state-owned telecommunications company hopes to start laying the foundation of an LTE network this year, but in the meanwhile has established a number of low-cost programs to bringt wireless …

. The Computer Science department at the University of California at Santa Cruz has a few tricks up its sleeve with regard to artificial intelligence.  RCR Wireless News spoke with …

Google Inc. has today taken the wraps off yet another enhancement to its increasingly diverse services, the +1 button. At its core the +1 button is the same as a Facebook “Like” button, although it can be deployed anywhere on the Web, most importantly in search results.

Google Inc. has been rolling out plenty of new features to its Docs productivity suite over the last few months, most noticeably enabling editing on mobile devices in response to the increasing proliferation of smart phones and tablets. Now the search giant has added another one of those features you didn’t realise was missing until you try it, “Discussions.”

This week marks Twitter’s fifth birthday. Since it was first launched to the public, the micro-blogging service has noticeably changed the way we broadcast, organise and digest information.

While most of this week is about SXSW interactive, there’s no denying the importance of indie music at the festival and Songkick, the home for live music on the Web is teaming up with Facebook for a digital, social collaboration.

Google Inc. veteran and VP of Consumer Products Marissa Mayer took the stage at SXSW in Austin, Texas, today and provided and interesting snapshot of Google’s mapping products. Google Maps is provided on all major handsets, and functions as the default service on iOS and Android, the two biggest fish in the smartphone pond.

It seems a month can’t go by at the moment without some kind of viral worm weaving it’s way through the Twittersphere, leaving a wake of dodgy linkbait and annoyed users behind it. This week’s Twitter exploit, TweetViewer, once again plays on the insecurity and gullibility of the average Twitter user, and purportedly allows people to find out who has been viewing their Twitter profiles.

As you may (or may not) have heard, the United Kingdom has recently seen a series of protests aimed at reversing the government’s controversial spending cuts, which have lopped a massive £7 billion from the budget of public services across the country.

If you’re a social geek like me, then Flipboard is the iPad app you’ve been waiting for, aggregating Facebook, Twitter and other feeds into a very appealing magazine-like style.

With all the apps and functions today’s phones can perform, we often tend to forget that their main purpose and basic function is to make actual phone calls.

For the majority of us, the only thing more irritating than listening to someone yap away on their mobile phone on public transport is the realisation that we ourselves don’t have reception to facilitate our rant.