Social networking

Facebook lawyers have asked a judge to order Paul Ceglia to pick up more than $84,000 in legal fees.

Ceglia, the man who claims a contract with CEO Mark Zuckerberg entitles him to a 50 percent stake in the social network, was fined $5,000 earlier this month over delays in making his e-mails available in his case against Facebook. He was also ordered to pay reasonable attorneys' fees.

Facebook also asked Leslie G. Foschio, the federal magistrate for Buffalo, N.Y., to order Ceglia not to file any additional "non-responsive papers or pleadings in the case" … Read more

Twitter brought the malware-fighting startup Dasient into its team today.

"Effective immediately, we will be bringing our technology, tools, and team to the revenue engineering team at Twitter," Dasient wrote on its blog.

This company, which specializes in malware protection and Web security, launched its Web anti-malware platform in 2009. In 2010, it debuted the first anti-malvertising service to protect sites from "malicious ads."

"By joining Twitter, Dasient will be able to apply its technology and team to the world's largest real-time information network," Dasient wrote on its blog. "As part of … Read more

Almost since it debuted, Google+ has wrestled with the idea of how users can identify themselves on the social network.

The company wanted to create a service without pseudonyms or impersonation. But Google+, which now claims 90 million users, had plenty of people sign up who are better known by some other identity than their real name. Google has suspended many of those accounts, much to their users' chagrin.

Google is changing the policy to "broaden support" for some pseudonyms, Bradley Horowitz, a co-leader of Google+, wrote this afternoon in a Google+ post. Now Google+ will allow users … Read more

Ever since Google CEO Larry Page announced plans to put "more wood behind fewer arrows" last June, the Web giant has cleaved a few dozen services from its portfolio, everything from Google Health to Google Labs.

But none of the cuts has caused as much outcry and as many allegations of Google underhandedness as the closing of its Picnik photo-editing service. The company said Friday it will cancel Picnik and move many of the popular service's features to other Google properties, including the Google+ social network.

Since the move was announced on Picnik's Web site, the … Read more

Following complaints that Google's new social search tool gives skewed results instead of the most relevant ones, a group of social networks have banded together to offer an alternative.

Engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace created a proof of concept that lets people use Google to get search results from those sites as well as LinkedIn, Flickr, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github, and Google+. The results show the highest social media results for a given search and not just the Google+ results that Google's new Search Plus Your World does.

Dubbed "don't be … Read more

Tumblr is on a roll.

The company's founder and CEO David Karp spoke at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich earlier today, and revealed that Tumblr is visited by over 120 million unique users each month, helping it tally over 15 billion monthly pageviews. What's more, the nearly 42 million microblogs currently in operation are re-blogged via RSS, Twitter, and Facebook an average of nine times, dramatically expanding their footprint across the Web.

The Next Web was the first to report on Karp's comments.

Just four months ago, Tumblr announced that it was generating 13 … Read more

"While it is true that Facebook has at least 60,000 servers, it is still possible to bring it down."

These are the words of the anonymous voice that purports to represent Anonymous in a video posted to YouTube today.

"An online war has begun between Anonymous, the people, and the government of the United States," the narrator begins. The reason: SOPA, PIPA and other perceived threats to Internet rights.

In order to bring down Facebook, the video asks for everyone who understands and supports Anonymous' position to participate in this online protest. This is a … Read more

Having worked for years to connect with voters on the Internet, President Obama will actually hang out with some in a Google+ video chat.

Later this month, Obama will meet with selected members of the public in a videoconference chat using the Google+ hangout feature on January 30, said Ramya Raghavan, YouTube's news and politics manager, in a blog post yesterday.

It won't be just anybody, though. People must submit questions at the White House's YouTube page, either in text or 20-second video form.

"Your YouTube questions will drive the interview, and several participants with top-voted … Read more

Following the MegaUpload shutdown and indictments last week, FileSonic, one of the Internet's most popular file-sharing services, has disabled its sharing functionality.

The service can "only be used to upload and retrieve files you have uploaded personally," according to a note posted on the site's home page. FileSonic also suspended its affiliates rewards program, which paid users when people downloaded their files.

Some users on Reddit say the online digital locker has already begun deleting files and even accounts, as ZDNet's Zack Whittaker notes.

TorrentFreak called the development "a pretty big deal. Filesonic isn'… Read more