Webware

Statistically speaking, it had to happen at some point or another: New numbers from market research outlet Inside Network say that for the first time, Facebook's U.S. traffic growth may be plateauing.

After acquiring a jaw-dropping 7.8 million new monthly active users in the U.S. in May, it only picked up 320,800 in June, the research found, and among users age 18-25 and 35-44 it actually lost traffic.

It's perfectly logical that Facebook's growth would be slowing down in the country where the social network took hold in the first place, way back … Read more

Polling firm YouGov, which said in May that Facebook had experienced a notable drop in consumer confidence right around the time of all that negative press about its changing privacy policies, now says that public attitude toward Facebook has taken a turn for the positive. In fact, the social network is YouGov's top "improving brand" for its BrandIndex numbers in the month of June among U.S. adults age 18 and over.

Facebook climbed from a YouGov rating of 2 in the weeks of June 1-15, to 17.5 in June 16-30. To put things into perspective, … Read more

Facebook announced Wednesday that it's beginning to institute a new interface that will pop up when users connect their Facebook accounts to third-party services--one which the social-networking company says will bring more "transparency" (yes, that word again) to how much information its nearly 500 million users are sharing across the Web.

Consequently, when a third-party application that connects to Facebook asks a user for permission to do so, it has to stipulate exactly what parts of a user profile it'll be accessing: photos, friend list data, basic public information, and so forth. This is something that … Read more

Facebook announced Thursday the hire of Marne Levine as its first-ever vice president of global public policy. She'll start at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech company next month, but will remain based in Washington, D.C.

Currently, Levine serves as chief of staff for the White House National Economic Counsel; previously, following a background in the online payments space, she worked in the Department of the Treasury's Office of Legislative Affairs and Public Liaison, and was chief of staff to former Treasury head Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard University.

"I'm excited that … Read more

eBay announced Wednesday that it has purchased a start-up called RedLaser, an iPhone application that scans product bar codes for price comparison and product search purposes, as well as "related technologies" from RedLaser parent company Occipital. As part of the acquisition, the RedLaser app--which has been downloaded by more than 2 million iPhone users--has transitioned from paid to free in Apple's App Store.

A price wasn't disclosed.

Though RedLaser's app will remain intact, the technology behind it will be integrated into numerous eBay products so that a prospective buyer can scan a bar code and … Read more

In March, Twitter CEO Evan Williams first unveiled @Anywhere, a new platform aimed at media outlets to knit Twitter more deeply into their own sites. After all, Twitter has become more or less synonymous with real-time, breaking news--so it seems like any publisher would want to work @Anywhere into its code to put the latest, freshest information front and center. Right?

Unfortunately, Twitter has recently indicated that it still can't handle breaking news.

On Wednesday, when the U.S. soccer team defeated Algeria 1-0, advancing the team to the next round of the FIFA World Cup in South … Read more

Sports fans are raising Twitter's usage to a new level: A goal by Japan's World Cup soccer team against Cameroon on June 14 led to a record number of "tweets per second" for Twitter, only to see the record beaten again a few days later when the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in the deciding game of the NBA championships.

The Japanese goal, which led to a 1-0 victory for the team, resulted in a peak of 2,940 tweets per second in the 30 seconds following the game according to a post on the Twitter blog. … Read more

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong may finally have made good on his promise to figure out what to do with Bebo, the company's pricey digital albatross, by the end of the spring.

Mashable reported on Wednesday morning that Bebo had been sold; The Wall Street Journal followed up later in the day by saying that the deal is "close" but not complete and that the buyer is Criterion Capital Partners, a hedge fund based in Studio City, Calif. An AOL representative did not respond to a request for comment; a price isn't yet clear, but the Journal … Read more

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and that this spring one-upped critics by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability … Read more