The Social

I count this as one of social networking blog Mashable's greatest accomplishments: installing as many Facebook Platform applications as possible onto a single profile and then taking a screenshot.

I've copy-pasted the screenshot below, but I'm warning you, it's enormous. Scroll down at your own risk.… Read more

When I was in San Francisco earlier this month, I witnessed firsthand the unwritten rule that new start-ups have to throw their debutante balls at the bar-gallery-event space known as 111 Minna, packed right into the dot-com-friendly neighborhood of SoMa. Here in NYC, our enclave of tech companies tends to cluster around SoHo and into the northern edge of Chinatown, but the sizes of properties around there are way too small to accommodate substantial crowds--let alone live music or DJs.

(Case in point: when a TreeHugger/Apartment Therapy/MoCo Loco party a few months ago during New York Design Week … Read more

My colleague Phil Ryan has posted an entry over at our Crave blog about some new permit proposals in NYC that will undoubtedly make it a lot tougher for people to take photos and video of the city they love.

I'll quote Phil here: "The new rules require permits for any shoot that includes two people or more for a period of longer than 30 minutes and restrict tripod use to ten minutes, including set up and break down times. I don't know about you, but for a complicated shot, it can take me ten minutes just … Read more

"This Week in Social Media" is a completely straightforward and unbiased recap of recent industry moves and hot topics, pulled from all over the Web, so that you can go out on Friday night and impress people with how in-the-know you are.

Is there double trouble in Facebook's future? That was the big question this week, as the hallowed social network went to court over allegations that founder Mark Zuckerberg had nabbed code and business plans from one-time rival ConnectU while the founders of both sites were undergraduates at a little-known, fifth-rate Massachusetts educational institution called "… Read more

Office time-waster alert! AOL's AIM Network has launched an interesting new service, CircaVie, which allows you to create a timeline of just about anything--your kid's life, your job, your backpacking excursion in Southeast Asia, or the chronicle of last week's party's devolution into debauchery. You can then embed your timelines into your blog, share them with friends, I played around with it, and I like the concept (a lot), but this is the kind of service that's left me wishing there was more you could do with it.

It's clear that CircaVie is trying … Read more

Nothing, actually. But I think this is pretty funny nonetheless.

As we've all heard over and over and over again by our faithful news media, troubled actress Lindsay Lohan was arrested on Tuesday night for driving under the influence, driving with a suspended license, and cocaine possession. (Last we heard, she said the coke wasn't hers.) Another day, another celebrity party-girl drug bust--same old, same old. But for those of us who went to the E3 Media and Business Summit in Santa Monica earlier this month, this one was particularly funny because the intersection where Lohan was arrested--Main … Read more

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

The most rapidly growing IM client, according to the study, is Meebo, which launched just over a year ago. The fact that it's so new may be partially responsible for its rapid growth--354 percent from August 2006 to June 2007. But Meebo also packs a double punch: not only is it Web-based … Read more

Larry Ellison aside, those Middle Eastern businessmen sure do put Silicon Valley to shame when it comes to extravagant displays of opulence. Typically, we don't get names to accompany the tales of pimped-out Airbus A380s and the like, but generally the price tags speak for themselves. My favorite new "oh my gosh, I can't believe how much cash that guy spent" story was covered in the British press earlier this week: a band of partiers, led by an anonymous Dubai cash cow, spent a total of $210,000 at the posh London nightclub Crystal last Saturday … Read more

The founders of online television start-up Joost, who also count Skype and Kazaa as bullet points on their resumes, have announced that the service now has one million users. Still in beta and technically invite-only (though invitations are now easy to find), Joost was one of the most-talked-about tech products of last year. Originally known by the Bond-worthy codename "The Venice Project," Joost was widely touted as a "YouTube killer" before people really knew what it was--in truth, the service is a slick interface for free, ad-supported video content on-demand. No cat videos there.

Joost co-founder … Read more