Zynga has purchased company number 8 in less than one year, announcing today the acquisition of Flock a “social web browser” organization.

Flock launched in 2005 and allows users to move seamlessly between their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn statuses via a sidebar. The social browser also features link-sharing features and a “Social Search” option where users can track their friends conversations based on various topics.

While the cost of the acquisition is not known at this time, we do know it was largely a talent buy with the Flock team joining the Zynga team moving forward.

Company CEO Shawn Hardin wrong about the acquisition on the official Flock blog: read more

As many of you already know, Twitter has launched an official app upon the Mac Store to compliment their universal iOS app.

Twitter is proud to introduce an appropriately slick and simple desktop application for Mac computers. Twitter for Mac has launched today as part of the Mac App Store.

This app gives Twitter users another fast and convenient way to stay connected to what they care about the most. Tweets appear in real-time (using our streaming API), and the app auto-shortens URLs and has lots of useful keyboard shortcuts. (Official Twitter Blog)

After the release of their Mac app, many within the blogosphere and twitter began wondering when the company would launch an official Windows app for the rest of net population.

While Twitter’s embrace of Mac makes sense (if not to absorb the Tweetie for Mac fan base), it might be wise for the company to forgo a Windows app for the following 3 reasons. read more

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a social world? I don’t mean a connected world like we current reside in, but rather to actually exist INSIDE the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites. That’s the premise behind Intel’s newest online ad.

In “The Chase Film” the main character is chased across several social networks, while taking advantage of other computer based programs that the Intel Core i5 process is very capable of running at breakneck speeds with multiple processes running at once.

Featured  in the film is iTunes, Gmail Chat, an Intel created video game, YouTube, Flickr and even Google Maps. I particularly like the “Trash Bin” feature towards the end of the film and the part of the clip in which the main female character actually jumps inside a car ad and steals the car in an attempt to evade the men that are chasing her.

Here’s the video: read more

PostUp (who was formally known as TweetUp before changing their name) has announced that they have acquired Echofon by nannstudio.

Although nannstudio has yet to make an official statement upon their blog or Twitter account (@echofon), PostUp did send a press release confirming the deal.

PostUp, Inc., today announced its acquisition of Echofon, the suite of Twitter applications developed by naanstudio, and previously known as “TwitterFon” and “TwitterFox.” Widely regarded for its ease of use and simple, elegant design, Echofon is currently used by more than 3 million people internationally, across multiple platforms. (Business Wire) read more

While it’s not surprising to hear about WordPress being insecure from users of rival platforms (as a few of my Movable Type friends will tell me), it’s odd to hear the statement from a company using it to power their blog.

Trend Micro (an anti-virus company) put out a list of risky software or sites which included Mac OS X, Facebook, Google and yes, even WordPress.

The riskiest software used by websites in 2010 was the popular blogging platform WordPress. Tens of thousands of unpatched WordPress blogs were used by cybercriminals for various schemes, primarily as part of redirection chains that led to various malware attacks or other blackhat search engine optimization (SEO)-related schemes. (Trend Micro Blog)

Note: Emphasis in bold is mine. read more

For those of you hoping that Weebly (a blog/website service similar to Squarespace) would be releasing an iPhone app soon, you’ll be dissappointed that the company has no immediate plans to embrace iOS as recently revealed by a tweet.

@weebly Is it possible to post directly to Weebly web site from iphone? Is there an app like Blog press for Weebly (via @loisath)

@loisath Building a website is significantly more complicated than posting to a blog, so we don’t yet have a mobile app. Sorry for that!! (via @Weebly)

Note: Emphasis mine.

While an iPhone app would easily compliment Weebly’s mobile layout, the company surprisingly doesn’t see iOS as a priority despite the fact that rivals like Squarespace have heavily embraced Apple’s mobile OS.

Although much smaller than rivals like WP.com, according to Compete.com Weebly is receiving far more traffic than Squarespace (at least as far as unique visitors go), and actually showed signs of strong growth in 2010.

While Weebly’s isn’t entirely shooting down the idea of developing an iPhone app in the future (which is a good thing), hopefully the company will consider building one before Steve Jobs launches the next iPhone this summer.

While we watched Digg stumble from their perch in 2010 upon the release of their new interface, another popular social link sharing website Reddit, saw traffic numbers increase by more than 230% from January through December.

Reddit announced January 2010 pageviews of 250 million, while December pageviews brought in 829 million views. If you’re doing the math, that’s a 231.6% increase in just 12 months.

Adding insult to Digg injury, Reddit execs also announced that the average “time spent on site” stats have vastly improved, from 12 minutes and 41 seconds in January to 15 minutes and 21 seconds in December.

To put Reddit’s meteoric rise into perspective, Digg in July received 200 million pageviews with many indicators pointing to a shrinking user base that appears to be working in Reddit’s favor.

It also appears that Reddit growth has no plans of slowing, the company recently increased the number of servers they are running from 50 to 119, while memory capacity was bumped from 16TB to 48TB and delivery capacity was pushed form 10.1 trillion bytes to 44.4 trillion. read more

Sure most of us stick to Facebook these days, but for the truly social network savvy users out there we present you with Dropico, a service which allows users to drag and drop their photos for sharing across various social networks including Facebook, Flickr, .Mobi and others.

Users take advantage of the network by placing all their photos (via drag and drop) into one central location and then dragging and dropping them from the Dropico platform into their social network accounts which are easily setup from the platform.

Using the platform users can also choose to edit photos, including adding tags and editing photo names. New albums can also be created so your photos don’t end up as one big mess, while several photo effect edits can also be performed using the program. read more