social

The U.S. Department of Defense issued a memo Friday that states it intends to begin blocking network access--including that of soldiers serving overseas--to several popular "Internet entertainment sites" on Monday, according to the Associated Press. The 12 total sites to be blocked include several large social networking and media sharing sites like MySpace, YouTube, MTV, Pandora, and Photobucket.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Army cracked down on soldiers' personal blogs, citing security concerns. Operational security, according to the memo from the DoD that was cited in Monday's AP article, is also a reason behind the … Read more

Facebook's new "Marketplace" classifieds feature launched quietly this weekend, giving the social networking site's members the ability to post Craigslist-like ads and make them visible to their friends and "networks" (which, if you aren't familiar with Facebook, are based around regions, high schools and colleges, and companies). I gave it a quick run-through to test it out; here's what I found.

When you click on Marketplace, which is accessible by a link in the left sidebar (along with other Facebook staples like photos, groups, and notes) you are directed to the Marketplace homepage for your primary network, with tabs where you can navigate to the corresponding pages for your other networks if you're in more than one. In the image below, you can see the CNET network is the one displayed; I also have access to listings from my former university's network and to the NYC network. The interface is more or less just like the rest of Facebook--blue and white, without much clutter.

Read on after the jump...… Read more

Very recently, Facebook launched its new "Marketplace" classifieds ads feature, a potential rival to services like Craigslist. The service, according to a New York Times article, was supposed to go live on Friday. At least in the networks that I have access to, it wasn't actually available until Sunday night. (Facebook occasionally will roll out features to select school, workplace, or regional "networks" within the service before they become widely available. But it looks like now the Marketplace is available to everyone.)

Look for our review of Facebook Marketplace very soon.

Throw away those beanie babies; they are old news. There is a new sheriff in munchkin town.

Webkinz.com is a Web site children can join and interact in an online society while adopting a physical representation of the pet. The catch is that a Webkinz stuffed animal must be purchased first, followed by entering the "secret code" found on an attached tag. The cute plush toys have been quite popular, grossing over $45 million last year for Canadian gift company Ganz, the creators of Webkinz. Like its TY Beanie-Baby predecessor, Webkinz also has a high collection value, … Read more

The people search engine Spock is still in very private beta, but the doors opened up a crack this morning when a few more people were let in to the system, including me. Now that I've been able to play with the service, it's easy to see that Spock's creators are trying to build more than just a Google of people. Spock is also being built to map the relationships of people to each other.

This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you … Read more

Me.com has launched a new tool called SNAPP that lets people put together their own social networking hubs. Like Ning.com, which launched a similar service in March, SNAPP gives users ready-made tools such as a blog, live chat, forums, and shared photo albums to create a fairly full-featured site without knowing any HTML. SNAPP also integrates Me.com's social networking system, so existing Me.com users will be able to join your network without any special signup.

While some of the tools and features are aimed at the younger social networking crowd (like the am i hot? rating tool), … Read more

There were a number of presenters at Tuesday night's New York New Tech Meetup, but the one that everyone seemed to want to know about was Gatsb, which has the potential to be one part Twitter, one part Radar (previous coverage here), and one part Yelp. I say "has the potential" because those comparisons largely sprang up from the audience at the Tech Meetup. Founder Andre de Cavaignac, who was demonstrating the site, just portrayed it as a cool way to share camera phone pictures online with location data.

(And, yes, it's pronounced "Gatsby.")… Read more

YouTube has added a new feature to its TestTube section as of last night, called Active Sharing. With this feature enabled, YouTube will keep track of videos you watch, for both archiving and real-time interaction with other users. If you're watching a video with other Active Sharing-enabled users, you'll be able to see their names with a little green dot next to it to signify they're watching too. Clicking on someone's profile name will show you the last five shows they've watched using the service.

Active Sharing joins the other TestTube projects, Audio Swap [hands-on] … Read more

Meshly is a new nanoblogging platform that's built around publishing via instant messages. Users can create and publish posts in AIM, Google Talk, or Windows Live Messenger using IM bots. Creating posts is like having a conversation with someone. Type "post" to the IM robot and it will ask you to fill out the post title, body, links, and tags, before it publishes the content to Meshly's post queue.

Once post are there, other Meshly users can vote to decide which ones are interesting. Stories that have piqued enough user interest will be promoted to the … Read more