Webware

A small but notable development at Facebook means that if you're replying to a comment posted on your profile, you can now do so through regular e-mail.

A post on the Facebook blog explains it: "These notifications--for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts--allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends' activities without being logged in when you're on the go, on your phone or at work. Today, we're launching the ability for you to participate in these conversations by replying directly to these e-mail notifications."

So, basically, if … Read more

Have you seen a bunch of Facebook statuses consisting only of colors--white, black, pink, beige--recently? That's not a coincidence.

Somehow, a viral campaign bubbled up through the nooks and crannies of the massive social network this week--female members of the site changing their status messages to the colors of the bras they're currently wearing in order to spread awareness about breast cancer.

According to The Washington Post, no one is really sure where or on behalf of whom it precisely started, but it appears e-mail chain letters went around earlier in the week to encourage it.

As far … Read more

Its CEO might have famously spurned college in favor of Silicon Valley, but Facebook announced on Friday a new outreach to academia: a "Facebook Fellowship Program" for Ph.D. students, designed "to foster a strong relationship with the academic community and help solve some of the complex technical problems facing the social Web."

In other words, Facebook is looking to align itself with some top-notch academic talent.

Until February 15, full-time Ph.D. students for the 2010-2011 school year in U.S. universities are invited to apply for the program, which will ultimately award five selected … Read more

The geo craze has come to Google search: Open up a Google.com window in the browser of an iPhone or Android cell phone and you'll now have the option to click a "Near me now" option to bring up search results close to your immediate location.

"First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you're standing right in front of a business or if it's just a short walk away," a post on the Google Mobile blog Thursday read. &… Read more

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late … Read more

Attention, suburbanites: You, too, can be the mayor of your local Home Depot.

That's because New York-based mobile location-sharing service Foursquare has made a subtle but big improvement. It's no longer restricted to a list of a few dozen cities in North America and Europe, which means that people anywhere in the world can use their mobile phones to "check in" through the service. (Foursquare currently has applications for the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Google Android, as well as a BlackBerry app in development and a mobile Web site.) The new feature is considered to currently … Read more

Earlier this week I wrote a post about how I didn't like that I couldn't alter the Facebook Connect privacy settings for updates from Foursquare, an iPhone app that shares my location through a GPS-enabled city directory. It didn't make sense to me that Facebook Connect information was automatically visible to anyone who had access to posts on my "wall," whereas privacy settings on a third-party app embedded directly on my profile were much more fine-tuned, allowing me to restrict them to specific subsets of friends.

I've been e-mailing back and forth with Facebook, … Read more

This one's a surprise. Twitter will have turned a profit in 2009, a BusinessWeek report claims, citing sources. What happened? Search deals with Google and Microsoft brought in a nice chunk of cash for the company, which has raised well over $100 million in venture capital and has a paper valuation floating somewhere around $1 billion.

Considering the company has not yet put forth a long-term revenue strategy, this would be one of those Christmas miracles along the lines of a neurotic mom getting home to her stranded 8-year-old by fortuitously hitching a ride with a polka band fronted by John Candy.… Read more

Maybe they read the Yelp review that says Google's headquarters is infested with skunks and raccoons.

Just a few days after reporting that Google was about 80 percent likely to be acquiring business reviews site Yelp for a totally sweet $500 million, TechCrunch has backtracked. Late Sunday, TechCrunch reported that Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman personally walked away from the deal and that company representatives informed Google over the weekend they aren't selling.

That's odd. People seemed to think it was generally a good deal. TechCrunch isn't exactly sure what went wrong but speculates that Yelp may … Read more