Social networking

Another social network knocked out by Facebook has been forced to sell itself.

Former social network and now social gaming site Hi5 has been acquired by fellow social network Tagged for an undisclosed amount.

Sharing the market with the likes of Facebook and Myspace, Hi5 was once a popular and heavily trafficked social network. But just as Myspace increasingly saw more people jump ship to Facebook, so too did Hi5's users start to abandon the service.

In the face of Facebook's growing dominance, Hi5 transformed itself into a social gaming site a couple of years ago. But despite … Read more

Please imagine, for a brief moment, that you live in New Jersey.

You receive a text and it tells you that, in an hour's time, there mightn't be so much of New Jersey.

Would you be frightened? Would you be secretly relieved because, well, there are parts of New Jersey that give the word "New" a bad rap. Or would you merely think that someone at Verizon has imbibed a little early spiked eggnog?

I ask because yesterday quite a few people in the Garden State received a Verizon text message telling them to "take … Read more

Facebook may finally be ready to get into the mobile ad space.

The social-networking giant plans a version of Sponsored Stories that would appear in mobile users' News Feeds by the end of March, sources "with knowledge of the matter" told Bloomberg.

The company had been expected to roll out a mobile advertising service earlier this year, and this planned foray might still be shelved as well, Bloomberg's sources cautioned.

Facebook representatives declined to comment on the report.

Despite being late to the party, Facebook already has access to data of a large mobile user base that … Read more

Sometimes the pressure gets to us. Sometimes the world seems so much against us that we want to forget it.

And sometimes we just get so blind-drunk that we don't remember why we got so blind-drunk.

This may have been the case with two RIM employees (executives, according to a New York Times report) who recently boarded an Air Canada flight and got so drunk that they had to be handcuffed and restrained, and the flight--heading from Toronto to Beijing--had to be diverted to Vancouver to let them off.

George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38, whose official … Read more

Those of you who use Google Blogger can now share your latest blogs with your Google+ followers.

Linking your blog to your Google+ account will display a Google+ share box after you post your latest content, according to Google's blog. Already prefilled with the necessary details, the box contains a a teaser of your blog that you can then share with your Google+ circles.

To take advantage of this new feature, you'll need to use your public Google+ profile as the identity for your blogs, which you can do on the Google Blogger Web site. You can then … Read more

"Shut your big wormholes."

That's a heartfelt plea from George Takei, aka Lt. Sulu, aimed straight at the squabbling actors who played Captain James T. Kirk and Princess Leia.

You see, Takei has sensed a disturbance in the... wait. No, his long-range scanners have picked up signs of a struggle between William Shatner and Carrie Fisher, each of whom have declared their "Star" vehicle the most quintessential science fiction piece of them all.

What Takei wants is simply some way to bind the galaxy together--to establish a federation, if you will--that would let the warring … Read more

So-called analysts love to muse about which gadgets will be popular at Christmas.

I am sure they use complicated models. I prefer to use a simpler one: theft.

Thursday night saw a grand heist from a San Carlos, Calif., Best Buy that suggests the iPad 2 will be in extreme demand over the next couple weeks.

In this particular incident, as chronicled by CBS San Francisco, thieves broke into Best Buy and took a whole steel rack of iPads containing at least 125 of the precious machines.

You might wonder how they did this.

Well, apparently they just walked straight … Read more

I sometimes wonder how mischievous those who create video games really are.

They toss in unexpected witticisms, facial expressions, and idiosyncratic actions--just for the sheer fun of it. But what could have been going on among EA's FIFA 12 development team to create the stunning action I have, well, embedded here?

For at the end of what seems to be entirely innocent sporting action, pony-tailed Andy Carroll of Liverpool and goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski of Arsenal collide and then start snogging.

Should you not be familiar with that term, it is the colloquial English for kissing. And what happens here--thank … Read more

It would certainly be an interesting development if an app that lets people dress up their Facebook profiles to make them look more like My Space pages somehow led to Facebook's downfall.

That's probably unlikely. But The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel is reporting that profile-modification app PageRage is causing Facebook some angst.

That's because the free version of PageRage includes ads--ads that Facebook makes no money from, and that, in some cases, apparently obscure the ads from which Facebook does profit.

The PageRage advertisements are reportedly big and splashy and push products from major companies … Read more