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A little more than a month after announcing it had 150 million active users, Facebook has reached 175 million active users--the statistic the social-networking site prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

Dave Morin, who runs Facebook's application platform team, announced the milestone Friday evening on his Twitter/FriendFeed. Facebook reached 150 million just more than two months after reaching 120 million and about four months after reaching 100 million.

While Facebook got its start at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 2004, most of this recent growth is coming from outside the U.S.

"This includes … Read more

With the economy reeling and layoffs piling up, business-networking site LinkedIn has been not-so-surprisingly hopping.

Market researcher ComScore reported that LinkedIn's unique visitors rose to 7.7 million, a 22 percent increase over December, TechCrunch reported Saturday. And not only are more people visiting LinkedIn, but they're hanging around longer as well. Total minutes spent on the site last month more than doubled from December to 96.8 million, according to TechCrunch.

More people are helping out friends looking for jobs as well. Recommendations were up 65 percent last month over December, TechCrunch said.

Yahoo said on Friday that it will discontinue its MyWeb service on March 18 and is encouraging people to use other Yahoo bookmarking services.

"As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo Bookmarks, we saw that MyWeb users' needs are being served by our newer products," the company said in a posting on its Yahoo Search Blog.

The company has been de-emphasizing the service since at least October 2006 when it started sending MyWeb users to Delicious and offering them the option of using Yahoo Bookmarks.

Yahoo launched MyWeb … Read more

Inside warehouse studios and lofts in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood, Internet television network Revision3 is leveraging the viral nature of the Web by chasing the latest memes and creating content that showcases the best of geek-tech culture.

Founded in 2005 by Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, and David Prager, Revision3 is a TV network for the Web. It's on-demand content you can watch when you want and where you want.

We stop by the studio, as well as Kevin Rose's loft, to see what it's like to shoot The Digg Reel and Diggnation.

A rodeo association has agreed to pay $25,000 to an animal welfare group to settle a lawsuit over the improper removal of videos from YouTube that showed roped calves being dragged off to die and tasers being used on tame horses to get them to buck.

In December 2007, YouTube removed dozens of rodeo videos after getting takedown notices from the Colorado-based Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association that claimed copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The group that posted them, Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the rodeo group last summer. … Read more

Correction, 12:11 p.m. PST: This story inadvertently gave an incorrect number for the tech job postings at Dice.com in February 2008. The actual number for that month was 94,423. The percentages that stem from that number also have been corrected.

Jobs posted on technology jobs site Dice.com rose 3.1 percent in February, its first sequential increase since late last summer, just before the economy started to really turn sour in September.

Tech job listings rose to 57,337 as of February 2, up from 55,609 in January, according to the company's monthly … Read more

The refusal of the government in Victoria, Australia, to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.

With over 1 million page views since Sunday, the Google Map overlay showing Victoria's bushfires has been invaluable for tracking the extent of the disaster.

Google Australia engineering director Alan Noble told the Broadband and Beyond conference in Melbourne yesterday that he became involved with the bushfire mapping effort after Google engineers woke in shock Sunday morning to read about the horrific … Read more

Apple is preparing to allow iTunes customers to stream video from the company's servers to any Web-enabled device, according to a film industry source.

The source declined to provide details but did confirm a report published Wednesday by the blog AppleInsider, which broke the news.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

According to the report, Apple is working on a feature for iTunes 8 that will enable users to stream movies and TV shows "for playback anywhere," and in this way help them avoid having to store large video files on their hard drives.

The service will … Read more

Authors and publishers of tens of thousands of out-of-print books have submitted claims for compensation from Google Book Search as called for in a settlement agreement to a copyright lawsuit, a lawyer in the case said on Wednesday.

Under a $125 million settlement Google reached in October with book authors and publishers who sued over the company's book-scanning project, the search giant is required to provide notice to authors, publishers, and their heirs and successors that they may be eligible for payment.

The notice is being published in 218 countries and 72 languages, according to a statement from Boni &… Read more