Sean Parker, a co-founder of Facebook and the inventor of Napster and Dustin Moskowitz, another Facebook co-founder, have donated $170,000 in support of California Proposition 19, a pro-pot measure.

According to CNet Parker donated $100,000, while Moskowitz added $70,000 to the coffers of pro-marijuana supporters.

While Parker and Moskowitz are no longer with the company, they have both earned millions of dollars from their ownership stakes in the world’s largest social networking website which is valued upwards of $34 billion.

Sean Parker’s large donation came just after the “Yes on 19″ campaign committee announced that they were running low on funds in the final weeks leading up to the bills vote. read more

During the beginning of October an eighth-grader in Connecticut posted the following message on their Facebook account: “I swear to God I’m going to kill Mr. Robinson” to which a female classmate responded with “Let’s bomb the school together,” both were quickly arrested.

According to the Gothamist the student has been charged with disorderly conduct, second-degree breach of peace and threatening. Both students were also suspended for 10 days, while expulsion has also been put on the table.

The boys mother has blamed the school, stating that her own comments about and clashes with Principle Robinson caused her son to be suspended, apparently threatening to kill the principal and destroy their school had nothing to do with it.

The boy’s mother said to the New Milford News-Times

“If I was arrested every time I told my children I was going to kill them because they didn’t do what I asked, I’d be on death row.”

Seriously? You tell your kids you are going to kill them all the time, this is definitely a case of blame the parents. read more

A recent study conducted by the Internet security firm AVG has discovered that nearly 92% of children in the U.S have some type of online presence by the time they reach just 2 years of age.

The study included 2,200 mothers who told the firm that 81% of their babies have photos uploaded to their accounts or have their very own social network accounts setup for keeping friends and family informed of their daily activities. The total number of toddlers (2 years and under) with accounts in the U.S. alone is a staggering 92% compared to 73% in Europe.

That same study states that nearly one in four children in the United States have an online presence before their even born, while that number increases to 37% in Canada and falls to just under 15% in western Europe. read more

Color me confused, but it looks like Google is attempting on making Google News more social by showing your tweet friends what stories they share from the service.

While Twitter’s addition is not surprising, Google Buzz’s absence is.

Friends is an experimental section in the side column that helps you find news articles that your friends are sharing on Twitter.

In the open text box, enter your Twitter username and click “Save.” Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow. Please note that Friends only shows you articles that can be found in Google News. If someone you follow has shared an article or a link that cannot be found in Google News, then you will not see that update in the Friends section. (Google News Help)

Note: Emphasis Google’s. read more

Most users probably won’t notice any differences when they use the Twitter search function, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been approved.

Twitter announced today that they have changed the architectural way in which their search platform makes queries to their systems database.

According to Twitter, the new functionality allows for a better system of scale, including the ability to index more Tweets per second, while using less Twitter system resources, an important improvement given the number of recent fail whales.

According to several sources, the new program is no longer using MySQL queries due to the issues that arise when trying to manage an ever increasing database with the program. read more

After ushering in an era of blog links upon the sidebar, it looks like Blogrolling has finally decided to shut down their site on the day after Halloween.

BlogRolling will be shutting down November 1st, 2010.

If you are not using BlogRolling code on your site anymore, you don’t need to do anything.

If you are using BlogRolling code on your site, you’ll want to follow these simple steps before the end of this month. (Blogrolling Status Blog)

Note: Emphasis theirs. read more

The boys and girls at Automattic (the company behind WordPress) have released a new feature for VaultPress that should help make WordPress more appealing for those who live and die by their analytics.

Today, we’re announcing the first release of VaultPress stats, available immediately for all of our beta customers on their VaultPress dashboards.

VaultPress stats complement stats packages you may already be running, like the WordPress.com stats plugin or Google Analytics. [...]

Because VaultPress backs up activity on your blog in realtime, we can help you understand time-based patterns. What time of day do you blog most often? What day of the week do you blog the most? We’ve crunched these numbers for you so you can see at a glance when you’re most productive. (Official VaultPress Blog)

At first glance the new VaultPress stats dashboards seems more of a “Google Reader stats meets Disqus analytics“ mash up, in which Automattic blends the best of both services upon one dashboard.

However one feature I did find distinct about the VaultPress dashboard was its ability to track the number of media files uploaded, as well as pages created (2 features that may appeal to group blogs as well as analytical geeks).

Unfortunately there is no way to segregate between media types (i.e. images, videos, audio, etc.) which could help further distinguish VaultPress from the sea of WordPress backups available.

Despite presenting users with basic stats from “behind the curtain,” the new dashboard is pleasant to look upon, which may help convince a few of my Joomla friends to make the WP switch (as they have been watching VaultPress with envious eyes).

Facebook went down again on Tuesday night. The issue began around 9:30 PM PT and affected site wide functionality. It’s still not known if the issue had anything in common with the issue that knocked the site out of commission on September 23.

After the outage various users took to the web to talk about what they did while Facebook was down. Some users posted comments such as “I fed my cat.” Poor cat apparently only gets fed when Facebook is down. read more

Considered by some to be the “WordPress of Twitter” (since you can host the software upon your own server), Status.net is slowly gaining popularity in an age where everything social is centralized (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

With version 1.0 immenent, Status.net has announced plans to release a new feature which could help differentiate the software from its (larger) Twitter rival.

Unlike twitter’s lists, we have used a new concept we call people tags. People tags are self-descriptive keywords that you can associate with one or more profiles (including your own). People tags are easy to create and maintain, just browse to a user’s profile and click on the edit button next to the existing tags to edit them. You will be presented with a list of tags you have already created to choose from or you can go ahead and type a new one. Clicking on “Save” then saves the tags. Each people tag by a given user has a timeline of updates from its members. If the people tag is not private, you can subscribe to it. Each people tag also has its own editing interface where you can remove existing members or search and add new ones. (Status.net Blog)

Truth be told this feature looks very similar to Twitter hashtags, with the only difference is that Status.net’s hyperlinks them upon your profile while Twitter thus far has not (even thought people put hashtags in tweet profiles).

Since people tags are “federated” (or in non-geek speak available to Status.net and self hosted users), users will be able to easily socialize with each other across decentralized networks without fear of fragmentation.

The feature is in beta testing right now, and Status.net plans on rolling out the feature when version 1.0 goes live later on (hopefully in the near future).

Good websites should do more than just look pretty. Although people often judge books by their covers, they also eventually open the books and expect a good read. Websites are very similar. Appearance may be enough to draw in someone’s attention, but to keep it, your website needs to function well, be usable, load quickly, and deliver its content in the manner the creator originally intended.

There is no one tool that can automatically tell you if your website will do all of that, but there are many tools that can help you determine how well your site has been designed and how well it performs in various browsers and environments. read more