social networking

Facebook marked its sixth birthday by simplifying its home page and holding an all-night ‘hackathon’ to create new software for the social networking website.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, says that the online community is reaching another milestone with membership climbing to 400 million.

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most – building and launching products for people," says Zuckerberg.

Facebook has modified its news feed feature to let members of the world's leading social-networking service catch up on tidbits they may have missed while away from the website.

Facebook engineer, Raylene Yung, points out that the social networking site now lets members switch between getting real time streams of news or activities taking place and highlights of what friends have shared online in the preceding 24 hours.

Social networking upstart, Twitter has made the jump to academia's hallowed halls, with 'tweets' made compulsory writing for will-be journalists at an Australian university.

Jacqui Ewart, a senior lecturer at Griffith University, points out that, “Some students' tweets are not as in depth as you might like. But I don't know if getting them to write an essay is any more beneficial,"

Cellphone text-chat service MXit has furiously rejected suggestions that it could have been responsible for the disappearance of a Parktown schoolgirl last week.

MXit spokesperson, Juan du Toit, branded reports as sensation-seeking, misleading and inaccurate, and warned that legal advice is being sought with a view to possibly suing newspaper publishers.

Du Toit states that, “Even if it does emerge that she [Nabeela Omar] accepted a friendly request from a stranger, it is not fair to condemn a technology for bad choices made by one user.

Social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, suffered service problems on 6 August 2009, raising speculation that they have come under a pre-planned coordinated attack by hackers.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he was forced to give up on the social networking phenomenon Facebook after too many people wanted to be his friend.

Gates, the billionaire computer geek-turned-philanthropist who was honoured by India for his charity work, says he tried out Facebook but ended up with 10 000 people wanting to be his friend.

Gates, who remains Microsoft chairman, says he has trouble figuring out whether he "knew this person, did I not know this person".

Correspondents say the main mobile telephone network in Iran’s capital Tehran was cut while popular Internet websites Facebook and YouTube also appeared to be blocked.

They say the communication cuts came after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a landslide re-election victory, sparking rioting in the streets by opposition supporters who claimed the result had been rigged.

British researchers say user photographs can still be found on many social networking sites including Facebook after people have deleted them.

The findings by a team from Cambridge University raise questions about the ability of users of these sites to permanently delete potentially embarrassing photographs.

Researchers say that although the images appeared to have gone, they were still able to find them 30 days later on seven sites, including Facebook, by using the direct web addresses.

Hackers have launched an attack on Facebook's 200-million users, successfully gathering passwords from some of them in the latest campaign to prey on members of the popular social networking site.

Hackers launched what is known as a phishing attack to break into accounts of some Facebook members, sending emails to friends and urging them to click on links to fake websites.

Social networking site, Facebook, was expecting to welcome its 200 millionth user on 8 April 2009.

Site co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, points out that, “We are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organisation working for change."