Facebook. It’s in our cell phones, it’s mentioned in our television shows, it’s featured in our Hollywood movies, and it’s all over the Web. It’s everywhere! In fact, Facebook could be considered one of the great, if not greatest, social innovations since the creation of the Internet. However, would you believe it if I said that this was Mark Zuckerberg’s plan all along? “We’re going to change the world,” said Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Thefacebook. He had just begun to believe that Thefacebook could be more than just another side project. But this is not where the story began. It began…

My parents don’t know jack about the internet. We’re talking nothing more complicated than basic email. We’re talking, like… you know those real long, embarrassing parental messages they tend to leave on Facebook, because they don’t ‘get’ the unwritten laws of social networking? Actually, my mother doesn’t even know what Facebook is for. Bad example. Whatever, you get what I’m talking about. The 50+ crowd aren’t typically the most social-savvy folk. So it only adds insult to injury that a 100-year-old tree in Belgium is Facebooking with the best of them. The best of them, of course, being…

If you’re at all a social network enthusiast, you’re probably interested in – or at least peripherally familiar with – Diaspora, the would-be Facebook killer that’s been the belle of the social networking debutante ball since its Kickstarter account went nuclear. Last evening, Diaspora’s source code was released to developers (well, everyone, but I for one am a little coding-dumb), and the public at large was finally given a glimpse of the (possible) future of social networking. For the moment, it looks a hell of a lot like Facebook. Honestly, that’s not a bad thing. Facebook’s got the right…

What do you do while watching TV? People watch TV still, right? I guess I mean it in the classic sense. Like, in your living room, on an actual television. Do you multitask? If and when I find myself in front of the tube, I’m generally on Facebook. That I’m on Facebook all the time anyway is besides the point. Apparently, I’m not alone – a study by YouGov of over 2000 people has found that folks tend to do the social network dance while watching TV. A lot of folks. YouGov calls the phenomenon ‘media stacking’, and revealed that 86% of those asked in the 18-24 demographic have combined their two vices, watching…

This first paragraph was going to be a joke about how nobody uses or knows about MySpace anymore – you know, like, “this ancient thing called MySpace lolol”. But honestly, I think you’ve heard that joke enough. So instead, this paragraph is about that joke, which I’m not going to tell. Yeah. But seriously, though. It’s beating a dead horse to say that MySpace hasn’t exactly been the belle of the social networking ball in the last few years. And until now, it seemed the ailing …er, ‘giant’ was content to do more or less nothing about it. So let’s fastforward to the aforementioned now and take a peek at…

Eric Schmidt (guy who runs Google, if you’re new to this ‘inter-net’ thing) was quoted this week as saying that Google was, in fact, not developing a service to rival Facebook. “The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing,” he said. Oh really, Eric? Because be your inescapable charisma and otherworldly good looks as they may, that’s not what I heard. I heard you’re doing exactly the opposite of not creating a Facebook-like service. I heard it’s called Google Me. I heard it’s coming soon. So while you’re for sure the slickest, most hunkalicious snake charmer I’ve ever seen, I gotta go with…

A study by the Center for the Digital Future at USC has done us a great service. Polling a selection of 1981 internet users, the study found that 49% use micro-blogging services such as Twitter. And 0% would be willing to pay for it. No, I didn’t forget a digit. Zero percent, as in nobody, would be cool with paying for social networking. Considering the average Joe’s Twitter account has five tweets four months apart, most of which are about how stupid Twitter is, I think I’m feeling that. “Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to…

Could we witness a retelling of David versus Goliath with an epic battle between the two largest social networking networking competitors? You have Facebook, which continually grows amidst its privacy woes. Then you have Twitter, which faces scalability issues with increasing usage. As big as they both are, Twitter is tiny compared to Facebook’s massive user base, but maybe not for long. These two services were, at a time, very different from each other. They both had separate methods to their madness: one focusing on a tight-knit network of close friends and the other offering massive community…

As internet folk, we probably all have at least one friend who’s incurably addicted to Foursquare. I definitely do. Steve, this one’s for you. Y’know those people in your social networks, who you’re only kind of friends with, and you wouldn’t really hang out with those people, but it would be awkward to delete them, so you keep them around hoping they’ll go away, but they just so happen to be the ones who stalk you and comment on everything you say and do online? Y’know, those people? Don’t lie, you’ve got some of those people. Enter Avoidr. Assuming you use Foursquare (and are friends with those people…

If you’re one of the millions who downloaded and used the notorious I Am T-Pain iPhone app then hit your upgrade buttons today, as you’ve got an upgrade you just might like. The latest version is wrapped up in lovely iOS4 improvements, but also offers a fab feature for the iPhone 4 — you can use that front-facing video camera to film yourself singing along to something or other while using the Auto-tune feature. Then, assuming friends, family or concerned neighbors haven’t made some kind of intervention to save you from future workplace embarrassment. You can even send those clips right…