What do you get when you buy 900 million user experiences, mostly from smart devices? Facebook’s float has been dogged with controversy: on Monday, its shares plummeted 11% and dropped another 8.9% to…

As reported late last week, Facebook is encouraging hackers to try hacking its security systems to find weaknesses. Those who succeed will receive a reward of US$500 or more and have their name added…

Facebook has introduced a new tool allowing users in Australia to display their organ donation status to their friends, following the introduction of the initiative in the United States and the United…

In the brave new world of contemporary sport-watching, the goalposts have moved. Watching the big game (once a simple matter of grabbing a beer and some chips and settling down in front of the television…

Facebook announced overnight that it’s going to sell US$5 billion of shares in its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO). Company executives filed the official paperwork to get the IPO process underway…

According to the Wall Street Journal, camera manufacturer Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a long struggle to maintain any sort of viable business. The announcement has…

As Christmas party season approaches, many will begin turning their attention to the office party. While some may focus on concerns about the venue and cost-cutting measures (in the current economic climate…

Battle lines have been drawn in the US between proponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently being debated, and those who oppose any regulation of the internet. On one side are organisations…

Pretty soon, not being involved in social media will be just as implausible as not having a telephone. If my 80-year-old dad is on Facebook and women over 55 are the fastest growing demographic on the…

Social media provokes some of the most voluminous and heated responses in two key areas of contemporary society – democracy and privacy. Promoting the first and threatening the second, social media is…

The major social network sites have recently been touting improved privacy settings to allow users to customise post audiences. Google+ Circles, Facebook lists, and now Unthink’s branches are engineering…

On October 25, Unthink invited public beta users to put aside their YASNS (Yet Another Social Network Site) fatigue. Since then, it claims to have attracted more than 100,000 registered users. The site…

Features are not friends. That’s the simple message to Google+ from 40 University of Queensland students after using the system since its invite-only launch in July. To say the service’s fortunes to date…

The increasing spread of information and communication technology has changed just about every aspect of Australian society – except democracy. The opportunities to engage citizens in the democratic process…

The occupation of Wall Street began in the deserts of Western Sahara and on October 15th it will spread to our Australian cities. In El-Ayoun, Moroccan controlled Western Sahara, in the Gdeim Izik refugee…

The world is currently embroiled in on- and offline discussions about changes that are affecting the lives of millions. The subject is not climate change, the global financial crisis, political upheaval…

This week, the American National Labour Review Board ruled to reinstate five workers fired for complaining about a co-worker on Facebook. The board decided writing about work on Facebook was equivalent…

The latest salvo in the internet attention wars has come in the form of figures from StatCounter. A relatively small content driving service called StumbleUpon drove more than 50% of all social media…

There’s a colourful and evocative term among regular users of social media: “headdesking”. It’s what you do when somebody says or does something so stupid that your instant reaction is to smack your head…

Last week, Facebook introduced one-to-one video calling. With a claimed userbase of 750 million accounts, the potential for ubiquitous video calling seems obvious. But, will it work? Of all post-industrial…

Smokers who quit with the assistance of a text messaging service are nearly twice as likely to be smoke-free six months later than smokers with no support, according to a study published this week in The…

Google is hoping that the saying “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again” will work out for them with Google+. Launched as a private beta version on Tuesday, Google+ is the search giant’s latest…

Around 2 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook each day. As of this week, every new image will be processed by automatic face recognition software, designed to identify the people in the photographs…

Facebook, with more than 500 million members, has now reached superpower status. If Facebook were a country, its supporters often say, its population would rank behind only China and India. But there…

Unless you’ve been chained to a fax machine for the past seven years, you’ll have noticed that Facebook is immensely popular. Users numbered 641 million by February of this year. Making and maintaining…