Bill Gates

With little fanfare, Bill Gates joined the ranks of celebrities on Twitter this week. But if 140-character tweets aren’t enough for you, the software-mogul-turned-philanthropist Wednesday started sharing his more complete thoughts on a Web site dubbed “The Gates Notes.” (more…)

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.

At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates. (more…)

Twitter’s new malware filter is a sign the social media site is stepping up efforts to stem attacks, but the measure has its shortcomings, say security experts. (more…)

They’re here–sort of. Twitter has launched the early beta phase of its “verified accounts” program, a background-check for celebrities and other prominent users of the service to weed out impersonators and fake accounts. If they pass the test, they get a graphic “badge” much like a PayPal verified account’s. (more…)

Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting his followers know that he was, “Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited!” Dorsey is getting ready to launch his next startup, he’s confirmed to us. As the guy who actually invented Twitter, this is notable. (more…)

David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online

Oprah embarrassed herself on it with a stuck caps lock. That guy from Punk’d competed with “the most trusted name in news” for audience. A befuddled Jon Stewart shook his fist at it in anger. Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure. People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest. (more…)

As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API. (more…)

Facebook plans to announce at a developer event Monday that it will open up user-contributed information to third-party developers, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal. (more…)

Twitter has been given the all clear after a worm infected “tens of thousands of users”. But experts say the attack could have been much worse. (more…)

Yesterday, Twitter was hit by another worm, currently being referred to as the “StalkDaily” worm. Unlike the last worm we saw, this one didn’t require a user to click anything. Merely hitting an infected profile page was enough to infect you as well. It appears “all” the worm did is to commandeer your Twitter account and use it spam Tweets promoting StalkDaily.com, with no lingering maliciousness. If you were infected, your Twitter account sent out Tweets saying something like Join StalkDaily.com everyone or Woooo, StalkDaily.com , but infection apparently came not from that site, but by visiting an infected profile page. Using a 3rd party client protected you from the whole mess. (more…)