social networking

Germany is currently contemplating a law that would ban employers from using social networking sites like Facebook for hiring job candidates. 

Google Wave has gathered “numerous loyal fans” reports the company in its official blog posting which announces the discontinuation of the service. In an effort to save Google Wave the fans of the service have created a dedicated webpage the “Save Google Wave!"

The new “Save Google Wave!" website at SaveGoogleWave.com. It offers visitors the chance to express their support by giving the cause a virtual thumbs up, and a little over 20,500 individuals have done so to date.

As it became known, Facebook has purchased all of Friendster's social networking patents and patent applications for $40 million.

Such an acquisition might protect social networking giant from lawsuits or prepare it for an IPO.

Google is ending the development of Wave, the cross-platform communication tool it launched in May last year.

Google said in a post last night that "Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked" and that elements of Wave's technology, including drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are now as open source so users can "liberate their content from Wave".

Bodog, an online gambling company, started to lay odds on whether Facebook will first attract 1 billion users or make an initial public offering.

Well, each of the outcome is possible and seem pretty sure things. In fact, Zuckerberg figures that hitting that ellusive 1 billion user mark is practically a sure thing. "It's almost guaranteed," he says.

So, Bodog is asking in reference to Facebook's user count, "[W]ill they reach 1 billion before January 1st 2012: Yes Evens, No 8/11?"

A social networking giant Facebook has launched a long-rumored question-and-answer section in beta to allow people send questions to those users who spend more time on Facebook. The new service is dubbed Facebook Questions.

"Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day. What new music should I listen to? Where's the best sushi place in town? How do I learn to play the piano?" reads a blog post from the company, which now boasts 500 million users.

As showed the new study from Compete, rising number of people are increasingly using their smartphones for local search, social networking and gaming. 

About 30% of smartphone owners has called or stopped into a local business after finding it using a local search application.

Google expressed its belief in that Facebook is not the only successful social network and other social networking websites could becomes as big as Facebook.

While being not new to the Internet users online scams that defraud unwitting people of money through social engineering are still on the rise, as reported by the FBI and its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). In these fraud schemes perpetrators try to steal victims’ money posing as a good friend left stranded somewhere in need of quick cash.

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.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has started the company targeting to defend social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, from kids pornography

Cuomo has thus created a database aimed at keeping child pornography off of social networking platform. The database holds digital signatures of more than 8,000 child pornography images.

As it became known, a number of major media companies have started to launch users’ authentication via third-party logins by using as many as 16 different social-networking providers, like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo LinkedIn and others.

Facebook reported that it is now offering "experimental, non-production" support for IPv6, the Internet's main communications protocol. During the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference in February Facebook said that it had plans to support native IPv6 user requests "by the midpoint of this year." At that time Facebook's network engineers said it was "easy to make [the] site available on v6."

People searching for an alternative to Facebook in the social networking market will soon be offered a new tool by Cisco. The company is planning to launch a new professional social networking site later in the year.

A new open protocol was launched last week to simplify sharing. The protocol dubbed OExchange was signed by Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. Google's Open Web advocate, Chris Messina, explained how the protocol can benefit website owners and businesses, as reported by WebProNews: