Google+ still has a long way to go before the social network catches up to Facebook but recent numbers have proven once again that decent growth potential is being witnessed by the team at Google.

Experian Hitwise reported on Monday that the social network more than doubled it’s traffic in December. On their Twitter account the Experian team added:

“Google+ total US visits reach more than 49 million in Dec-11, biggest month to date & up 55% compared to Nov-11 ow.ly/i/oT3R.” read more

Google Plus is the social media service that Google has recently released and it has been suggested that this service is a direct move against Facebook which is the leading social media website today.

Much praise should be given to the Google team for the constant innovations they seem to bring out; moreover the smooth roll out of Google Plus was also slickly done. Instead of launching it to the entire world, they selected certain countries first of all and then as and when issues arouse they solved them in a timely manner.

Also rather than launching the finished product with all its features, they did the release of Google Plus in a more progressive way so that people could get used to the new social media service without getting confused by to many features. read more

Hootsuite on Thursday announced the integration of LinkedIn Company Pages and Groups to their social media management platform.

The previous version of Hootsuite only offered access to a users main LinkedIn profile.

Using the new Hootsuite feature LinkedIn users can send company status updates and even start group discussions directly from inside the Hootsuite product.  read more

Google+ is trying to make it much easier for their 25+ million users to invite their friends over to the social network and to accomplish that goal they have rolled out a new link sharing system.

The new social network update allows users to create a unique link which can be shared with up to 150 friends, as a user clicks on that link and signs up for Google+ they are automatically added to their friends Google+ account, ensuring a quick connection.

Users still have the option to invite friends by email, however the new link could allow users to also invite Twitter and other social network friends over to their Google+ accounts by simply offering a quick cut and paste solution. read more

Mobile social networking company Path on Monday announced a new feature which helps users auto-sort their photos for easier in-depth browsing.

Known as “Stacks” the new program arranges each users uploaded photos by “people, places and things” using the users own tags as the blueprint for that organization.

Once organized the three most popular tagged topics in each of those three categories are then displayed on the users profile then simply tap on a stack and the photos inside of it are revealed in a standard photo album setup.

As an example, if you take a vacation to Las Vegas one of your “Places” stacks might realize three photos from “Las Vegas” making it one of your more popular tags and therefore creating a “Las Vegas” stack.

The program is self-learning which means you can go back to Las Vegas three or four times and your Vegas stack will continue to update with more photos from Las Vegas as long as you tag those photos with that “Las Vegas” term. read more

The fail whale has been a mainstay on Twitter.com for the last hour (1:30pm Central).

On their status log Twitter acknowledged that they are having system issues:

“We are currently experiencing site stability issues. There may be intermittent issues loading twitter.com. We’re working to fix it as soon as possible.”

While Twitter is valued as a multi-billion dollar business they have a long history of running as if their service was being operated out of someone’s basement on a Commodore 64, recently they promised that a move to their own dedicated data center will solve their issues, hopefully that move arrives soon.

At this time the reason(s) for the system wide shutdown are not known.

Update: It looks like the site is back up and running for the time being.

Social networking now accounts for the largest amount of total time spent online by Australians.

In a report released by comScore on The State of the Internet in Australia, Australians consumed about 22 percent of their time online in December 2010, up by 5.3 percentage points compared to the same month the previous year. This explains why Facebook is the top site by total minutes spent in Australia. Different sources place the total number of Australians using Facebook at 8 to 10 million active users.

Portals came in second at 19.7 percent and Instant Messengers accounted for 11.6 percent. Both shed points to social networking. Entertainment rose to 11.1 percent from 9.1 percent in 2009.

The report also revealed that group-buying continued to gain traction over the past year. Cudo of MSN leads the space with 418,000 unique visitors in December 2010. This landscape is expected to change with the entry of Groupon, known as Stardeals, in Australia.

Facebook is way ahead of the competition. Most of the social networks are now forgotten (though some people will disagree).

So, why would Nick Jaensch and Keith Besette set to develop Shizzlr.com, a site dedicated to college students and 20-somethings. Isn’t it that kind of exclusivity that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, took during its early stage? Is Shzzlr.com just a copycat?

“Facebook is for every person you’ve met or have come across,” Jaensch said. “Shizzlr is for your actual 20 friends and the people you hang out with.” read more

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook experienced karma first-hand as Lovely Faces, a dating website, featured 250,000 profiles of men and women whose photos were scraped without permission from the social network.

Lovely Faces founders Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico used an automated software that scraped the photos and profiles of Facebook users over a period of time. In a site that explains their purpose for Lovely Faces, the duo was very clear about their plan: steal 1 million Facebook profiles, filter them with face-recognition software, and post them on a custom-made dating website sorted by their facial expressions characteristics. Here’s a more detailed explanation on how they did it. They also have a video to go with it. read more

Transparency in reporting of major social network performance recently received a shot in the arm courtesy of WatchMouse. Using their Public Status Pages, WatchMouse now tracks 20 giant social networks’ uptime and other performance metrics at Social.DownorNot.com.

Specifically, users can view the performance speed and uptime of home pages, login pages, and APIs from Classmates, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Friendster, Gowalla, Hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Orkut, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Xanga, Xing, Yelp, and YouTube. If upon automatic checking any site returns errors or takes longer than 8 seconds to respond, it’s marked as error and unavailable. The uptime percentage has its basis in the number of errors reported by such checks. read more