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The Bebo party case. A ball of confusion.

Here's the controversy in a single sentence.

A woman in the UK, who has a rather nice $8million house in Spain, is suing several newspapers because they printed information that they found on Bebo about a party held at the house, information that turned out to be false, even though it was put there by the woman's daughter, Jodie.

As far as I can twig it, Amanda Hudson is claiming that the information her daughter freely placed on Bebo, describing the party as seven shades of raucous, was intended for private use only and was not for rebroadcast … Read more

Bebo party story is fake--lawsuit is not

Don't believe everything you read on Bebo.

That's the message an angry mother is sending by suing six U.K. newspapers that lifted a story off social-networking site Bebo about her daughter's supposed wild party.

The Bebo invite promised the "party of the year," for the teenager's 16th birthday. Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration.

Several newspapers ran the story, along with pictures lifted from Jodie Hudson's Bebo account, alleging that 400 partying teens responded to the Bebo … Read more

ShoZu shares iPhone photos in one swell swoop

There are several media-pushing services represented at the opening of the iTunes App Store, each with their own combination of supported sites. ShoZu (covered here) remains the whopper of them all with support for roughly 30 popular social sites and services. There are the major players, of course--Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Blogger, Picasa, LiveJournal--but ShoZu isn't too high and mighty to upload text and images to some of the more niche guys, like Box.Net qipit, Snapfish, and SmugMug.

With so many services ready to cram into an app interface, things could get tangled up fast. But they don'… Read more

Facebook gunning for Twitter

Will the new Facebook iPhone application be the death of Twitter?

If Facebook offers a "communication utility" consistently, as part of their platform, it has way more users than Twitter and should be able to push it aside pretty quickly.

Twitter is interesting and sorta fun but it's annoying that I can't interact with it the way I want to--at least not consistently. Any limitation or change that forces people to change their behavior is a negative. SMS is bit annoying too in that you can't mass communicate, at least not for free.

As VentureBeat … Read more

Form follows function with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace

One of the problems with social networking sites is that they tend to be ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Seriously ugly.

MySpace has upgraded its UI, but it's still noisy, long (you have to scroll way down on some pages to get where you want to go), and cluttered. Facebook? It looks like a dingy and, like MySpace, is overly noisy (It's also shockingly slow. I've been trying to change my account settings and it keeps hanging on me). Not only that, but my home page on Facebook doesn't seem to want to let … Read more

Hands on: Facebook's iPhone app

Along with over five hundred other applications, Facebook's iPhone app made its debut today. The application gives you easy access to your friend's updates and profiles, along with Facebook Chat and your inbox. Facebook's app also lets you take and upload photos directly to Facebook.

Viewing Facebook photos is really great in this app. They have implemented the same "flick" style of navigation that the iPhone uses and photos flip over to reveal comments. Overall, the UI is pretty intuitive and uses a lot of the same conventions that Apple does. Taking photos and uploading … Read more

iPhone apps: Bad for Facebook, OpenSocial?

What does the iPhone 3G have to do with the future of social platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial? A lot, actually.

It's because of the iPhone App Store, the add-on to the iTunes Store that opened its doors on Thursday in anticipation of the new device and its iPhone 2.0 software.

With more than 550 third-party applications available at launch, Apple's new mini marketplace means that for the first time since the social-application craze started more than a year ago, the hottest new trend has nothing to do with Web-based networks.

"(The iPhone is) a device … Read more

With Lively, Google tries its own 'Second Life'

Update 8:17 p.m. PDT: Google amended one Lively detail: the application for MySpace is under development but not yet ready. Also, I corrected a name misspelling.

Google on Tuesday plans to unveil an online 3D social arena called Lively, the Internet giant's take on Second Life. But Google wants it to be part of your first life.

Second Life requires users to download and install a separate "client" software package that taps into the online world. Lively also requires a download and installation--Windows only for now--but then people can use Internet Explorer or Firefox to … Read more

Mild outages poking Facebook?

A number of us at CNET News noticed that Facebook was having some outage issues on Monday afternoon, delivering "connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" messages to members of our editorial staff in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

The off-and-on outages would make the social network available to some while inaccessible to others, and sometimes lasted for a few minutes before coming back. Facebook has not yet confirmed the presence of outages, but a company spokeswoman said via e-mail that she was looking into it. Meanwhile, connections appear to have been restored … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 760: 100 penny challenge

We've offered more than 99 pennies in reward money as a challenge to the first person who can make some e-salt that will stop the snail robots from taking over our planet. Of course, running would probably also work as they are snails. Also Microsoft and Yahoo are fighting and we children don't like it. But Time Warner might. We also talk a little bit about some phone that's coming out this week. From Apple. I think it's called the over-hyped phone. Or iPhone. Or something.

Listen now: Download today's podcast Episode 760

Microsoft letter … Read more