status update

A Facebook backed social networking browser RockMelt secured financing of $30 million from two investors. Accel Partners and Khosla Partners joined existing investor Andreesen Horowitz in this latest round, the company and investors said. Accel's Jim Breyer and Khosla's Vinod Khosla will take observer roles on RockMelt's board.

As social networks have been raising concerns over its negative effects researchers at the University of Texas have conducted a study and arrived to different conclusion. Contrary to widespread point of view social media websites such as Facebook do not weaken personal ties, they strengthen them in unique ways for different age groups.

"Our findings suggest that Facebook is not supplanting face-to-face interactions between friends, family and colleagues," said S. Craig Watkins, an associate professor of radio, TV and film who headed the research team.

A hidden feature on Facebook allows outside people follow your updates when you in fact are not friends with them. Yet, this is only applicable for updates that are shared publicly.

As you may know recently Facebook changed its friend confirmation functionality (at least for some users). Before, when someone requested to be your friend, you could either confirm them or ignore them. Now, "ignore" has been replaced with "not now". It's unclear if the change is just being tested or is still rolling out.

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston decided to measure moods of online users analyzing Twitter messages, or tweets, and have created a Twitter Mood Map for these purposes.

As the analysis shows people are happiest in the morning and in the evening, with happiness peaking on Sunday morning and dipping Thursday night. Twitter users appeared most gloomy at mid-afternoon, shifting to better moods in the evening. Of course, weekends were unconditional days when people are happier than in other time.

A new survey of 1600 social media users from lady-oriented US network Oxygen revealed that for 1/3 of young women the morning priority before visiting the toilet and cleaning their teeth is checking their Facebook account. The survey polled people aged 18 to 35 who have "Live out Loud lifestyles". The poll revealed that over half spent more time talking to people online than face to face.

According to the latest speculations on the Internet Google is preparing to launch a kind of Facebook rival service. According to a brief Twitter update by Digg founder Kevin Rose the new service would likely be dubbed as Google Me and in some way it would offer up a social profiling functionality that could rival Facebook's.

According to a new survey commissioned by Fleishman-Hillard and conducted with market research firm Harris Interactive, people trust more those companies who use microblogging websites like Twitter to provide real-time responses.

The research showed that about 75% of consumers polled say they view companies who microblog sending frequent messages on sites like Twitter or updating their status on social networks like Facebook as more trustworthy than those who don’t.

This week Yahoo is introducing more features that make users’ access to updates from social networking website Facebook even more convenient and easier, which marks the expansion of the partnership between the two companies.

Now Yahoo and Facebook accounts will be more broadly linked together to allow Yahoo users to have a Facebook newsfeed delivered to their homepage or mail. Besides, users will be able to avail of more features that make it easier to share activities performed on Yahoo sites, such as photos uploaded Yahoo's Flickr, across Facebook.

Facebook is shutting down Facebook Lite edition and users who try to access the website now are redirected to the main version. Facebook Lite was launched in September for users who wanted to pop in and check out the status of their friends. The Lite version had a very minimalist design. Users found a simplified settings menu, no obtrusive menu bars, and no applications bugging them.

It is uncertain why the social networking company is pulling the plug on the Lite version. According to some speculations it is because no one could find it. Users had to know it was there.

Twitter has launched a new version of its homepage which offers several improved features that makes the service more user-friendly and attractive. The new section called ‘See who’s here’ introduces new Twitter users to some of the celebrities and brands they can find on the service. It also includes a new, constantly updated section for Top Tweets, which are algorithmically selected interesting tweets.

Last summer Twitter upgraded its homepage and started featuring its search engine front and center.

An online instant messenger ICQ, owned by AOL and widely used outside the United States, has added the support of Facebook Chat.

Earlier AIM, which is also owned by AOL, also added Facebook Chat support to its services. In January ICQ launched its 7 version with Facebook support but that included only status updates while the Chat has gone live on March 25 yesterday.

On the basis of analyzing positive and negative words used in status updates in the English speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom Facebook made a conclusion and determined when people in those countries are happy.

Thus, the study revealed that overall Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day were among the happiest across-the-board. Besides, everybody seems to be happier on weekend days such as Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

In a tweet message on the Twitter microblogging website the search engine giant Google announced that now public status updates from Facebook are included into the search engine's real-time search feature.

This announcement means that only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed, and according to Danny Sullivan, that includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners. On the other hand Google indexes Twitter updates that aren’t only from branded sources.

According to the reports by the Wall Street Journal who cited sources familiar with the matter Google will launch a new social networking addition to its Gmail Web service as early as this week.

Thus, according to the reports the new social Gmail functionality will supposedly include the following items: