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The first iteration of multiprotocol chat-client Digsby that circulated earlier this year made a splash, but fell short of its potential. Although it incorporated e-mail and social-networking notifications with its instant-messaging services, it was a massive resource pig. Even users with top-of-the-line computers found the drag it caused not to be worth the convenience of having all communications wrapped up in a pretty bow.

The latest version, released last week, is a huge step forward in the resources department. In the changelog for this release, Build 32 r17926, the publisher directly addresses the RAM hogging. ''We optimized from the ground … Read more

CNET News' Greg Sandoval is following the last-minute goings-on in Washington which enabled Web music providers extra time to reach an accord on royalty payments.

With the stock market in free fall today, what might be the likely impact on the technology sector? ZDNet's Editor in Chief Larry Dignan weighs in.

Hard to believe but Henry Ford's Model T, one of the most significant breakthrough products of all time, celebrates its centenary.

Today's stories:

Photos: The Model T turns 100

Gadget hounds get ready for CEATEC

Nero Liquid TV:TiVo for your PC… Read more

Facebook has hired the former chief of staff to onetime U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales as its general counsel, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ted Ullyot, currently a Washington, D.C.-based partner for the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, will relocate to the Bay Area and join the Palo Alto social network next month.

He appears to have been hand-picked by Elliot Schrage, the former Google executive who joined Facebook as vice president of communications and public policy this spring, and Sheryl Sandberg, another Google alum who now serves as the company's chief operating officer.

Ullyot "… Read more

Web 2.0 activists keep repeating that there is no such thing as privacy. Now the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it tends to be known in movies, has declared that it is using Web 2.0's finest creation, Facebook, in order to find new devotees.

A spokesperson for the UK's Foreign Office whispered: "The Secret Intelligence Service's open recruitment campaign continues to target wide pools of talent representative of British society today. A number of channels are used to promote job opportunities in the organisation. Facebook is a recent example."

This … Read more

A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.

As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader … Read more

For years, Amy Jo Kim has been a well-known and respected member of the video game design community, as well as the author of perhaps the best book ever written on building online community.

But for the most part, through years of working on other peoples' projects--Ultima Online, The Sims, the virtual world There.com, Rock Band, and many others, as well as consulting for countless companies--Kim has played a supporting role.

That's all set to change. Kim, along with her husband and consulting partner, Scott Kim, are in the midst of what might be their most ambitious project ever: Building their own game company from the ground up.

Their start-up, known as ShuffleBrain, plans to announce the public beta of its first effort, a Facebook game called PhotoGrab, in a matter of weeks. On the one hand, PhotoGrab is a puzzle game, tasking players with matching small snippets of photographs with the full pictures they're taken from--and doing so against a clock that's quickly counting down. The more accurate the placement and the more snippets you can match, the higher the score.

But PhotoGrab is also a social platform that is built around the idea of encouraging photographers to upload groups of their own pictures and make their own games from them.

So, for example, after playing for a little while with a few of the games already in the system, I uploaded five pictures I took last summer while visiting the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Ky., on my CNET Road Trip 2008 project, and then spent a few minutes selecting small circular pieces of the photos for players of my game to identify. … Read more

The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.'s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.

Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 … Read more

I bet you think this podcast is about you. Don't you? Don't you!? On today's show, we learn how easy it is to spot a narcissist on Facebook (stay away!), terrible ideas that will criminalize professional eBay sellers and kill eBay even faster than it's killing itself, and how video games might be the only thing that can survive a recession.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Bill would give retailers power to halt online auctions http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-bill-would-give-retailers-power-to-halt-online-auctions.html

Users fail to spot fake pop-ups http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7633402.stm … Read more

The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It's essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times' Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they've been recommending or commenting on.

In other words, it's a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed--stories you've commented on or recommended--to your profile on the … Read more