It’s been a pretty big week for Facebook. Not only is there a lot of talk about Facebook’s potential for becoming the top news source on the web, but the company celebrated its sixth birthday, is passing the 400 million user mark, and began rolling out some new design changes. In addition, the company is said to be rewriting its messaging feature and preparing to launch a webmail product, but first things first.
The Birthday and 400 Million Users
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed it in a blog post last …

Google often takes a lot of flack for not being incredibly successful with its social media efforts. Most recently, Caroline McCarthy and Tom Krazit tackled this subject in a CNET article claiming that "Google struggles with social skills." I would not go so far as to say that I completely disagree with them. They make plenty of factual points that are simply undeniable. Orkut hasn’t set the world afire. Jaiku and Dodgeball didn’t work out. YouTube was pretty much established by the time Google bought it, and even since it …

I have a question for you. Where do you get the majority of your online news? Is it from a feed reader? Is it from Twitter? Is it from Google News? Yahoo News? Do you spend your time simply checking specific news publications? There is talk that Facebook could become the number one place online for people to get their news.
Here’s one for discussion. Facebook users can set up a news list, which will aggregate stories from different news sources who publish their stories to their Facebook pages. All …

Update 2: Facebook has responded to the privacy concerns with the dashboards: "To ensure that the dashboards meet user and developer expectations for a trustworthy experience, we’re giving developers the ability to hide their applications in the Friends’ Recent Activity, Friends’ Applications, and Friends’ Games sections of the dashboards. We’re also working on giving users the ability to control how their application activity is featured in the dashboards, and it will go live shortly after the dashboards launch to users. "
Update: According to Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, there is a "slight privacy …

Is the world really ready for geo-location? That’s a question that a lot of companies are answering with a resounding "yes." The rise of smartphones has led to a variety of businesses looking to cash in on your whereabouts. Smartphone users have their devices on them all day long, wherever they go. Naturally, these companies can find ways to capitalize on this.
Will location sharing become mainstream practice? Share your thoughts.
Google can use your location to deliver you "more relevant" search results on your phone. It can let you and …

Even as social media has grown to be a much more widely accepted form of communication among businesses over the years, there is still plenty of data out there depicting the flaws and setbacks that can occur when social networks are used in the business environment. Just as with email or web surfing in general, there are security concerns, and a new report (pdf) from security firm Sophos claims that malware and spam have increased by as much as 70% on social networks from a year ago.
How big of …

We recently discussed how social media complements the news industry, and how a study has even found news to be a top priority of Twitter users. Facebook wants to let users know that it can also be used to keep track of news, when you set up a news list.
This isn’t so much a new feature, as it is a way to use the social network that you may or may not have thought of. Basically, Facebook is encouraging users to set up a list for news, as if …

If you are one of those people still skeptical about the business uses of social media, you may be interested to know that Google’s Social Search is no longer just an experiment. Though it does have the beta tag on it, it is now mainstream. This is something we’ve all known would come sooner or later, but now it’s here.

Have you established enough connections to do well in social search? Comment here.

If people were already seeing different search results from one another before, that is really going to …