Last night was a very sad night for micro blogging as its chief star Twitter was hijacked by Iranian government hackers who gained access to Twitter’s DNS servers and were able to temporarily redirect traffic elsewhere.

While it’s obvious that this was a pathetic attempt to silence those opposed to the Iranian theocracy (as Twitter has become a favorite venting place against the Mullahcracy), this latest attack may thwart Twitter’s attempt to become the “pulse of the planet.” read more

Facebook is near ubiquitous now. Gone are the days when you had to be sat at your desktop or notebook PC in order to access it. It’s now on mobile devices and gaming consoles too.

Microsoft recently added the ability to tweet and Facebook from the Xbox 360, and now it seems that the PlayStation 3 console will get the social network treatment, too.

There hasn’t been an official announcement from Sony, but this is based on a leaked screenshot of the latest firmware update.

Seems there’s nowhere you can go to get away from the Book.

Via

In a ruling that’s more about a point of principle than money, a California judge has ordered “Spam King” Sanford Wallace to pay Facebook $711m in damages for the reams of spam messages sent via the service.

What made these messages particularly insidious is that they were sent from hacked accounts, attaching a superficial level of trust because they appeared to come from friends.

Wallace and his associates were also banned from accessing Facebook, though given how devious spammers and hackers can be, this would seem to be a difficult ruling to enforce. read more

What does French First Lady  Carla Bruni, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah, Michelle Obama, Queen Rania, wife of Jordan’s Head of State, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife Maria Shriver have in common? They use social media tools and services to communicate and perhaps reach out to their husbands’ constituents. read more

I’ve already written today about Facebook’s new feature that shows you which of your friends might need a helping hand to gain more contacts or keep their profiles updated with photos or content, but apparently there are more disconcerting recommendations going on.

Think of it as the social network equivalent of receiving mail in the post for someone who has died (the exact reason for the problem is a bit different, but the distress is comparable).

The fact is, the algorithms that are supposed to help Facebook provide useful recommendations can only look at previous and current links between people, with no understanding of context.

That’s why Facebook has recommended that some users reconnect with ex-partners, or even with people who have died (presumably the deceased simply have dormant accounts on Facebook now).

Emotionally unsettling to say the least. read more

The latest Pew Internet survey shows  some interesting points pertaining to U.S.  Internet users and the way they are using Twitter and mobile devices. According to the study, around 19% of the overall U.S. internet users are sharing updates about themselves through Twitter and other social networking sites. This represents more 50% increase from the same data in 2008. read more

The online calendar service Flogs.com has announced the launch of its free iPhone and Facebook applications which make it easier to sync calendars on these platforms.

Although you could already sync an iCal calendar on your iPhone, the app adds a range of functionality including the ability to search for local events based on GPS location and then add them to a calendar.

For Facebook users, it’s now easier to share Flogs and events with friends.

These two additions increase the wide number of services and platforms that Flogs.com calendars can be synced with.

Twitter and Facebook have seen a deluge of hoax messages about an abducted child, according to security firm Sophos.

You’ve probably lost count of the number of times a friend or colleague has sent you an email about a supposed virus that will destroy your computer, or some other urban legend that’s about five years old yet is still doing the rounds.

You may even have tried to educate people about checking out the facts before simply forwarding emails, with varying success rates.

Now, Twitter and Facebook are fuelling the fake AMBER alert about a missing child. read more

Facebook now analyzes the status updates from Americans to see how collectively happy the nation is. They call it the Gross National Happiness Index and it builds on positive and negative words in the updates. In other words, it might not the most exact way to see if Americans are happy or not, but it is something. It is also interesting to see how people reacted to world events. The day Michael Jackson died was a sad one in the nation’s mind, for example.

Sometimes it is good to get a reminder about how things relate to each other. The way we all buzz about Twitter obviously means that it is not only a huge service, but also a rewarding one to be using and talking about. However, as pointed out in the Royal Pingdom blog, you shouldn’t forget about Facebook. Why? The numbers:

On July 15, Facebook announced that it had 250 million active users, and on September 15, two months later, it had reached 300 million users. Facebook grew by 50 million users, roughly the equivalent of an entire Twitter, in just two months.

So yeah. Twitter is huge and great and dandy, soon to be worth even more money, but Facebook is still the juggernaut that just plays on a different level. In the midst of the Techmeme buzz and the millions of blog posts talking about the brilliance of Twitter, it is easy to forget about that.