Broadband Advisor

Facebook now gives its developers the option of submitting their applications for review to obtain a seal of approval, but some developers aren't thrilled with the program.

A recent news story involves a woman filing for divorce from her husband on the grounds that he was having an affair . . . in the virtual world.

The maker of pain reliever Motrin is now feeling the pain of a social media backlash to its recently released online ad that riled a large group of bloggers and Twitter users.

The popular Bloglines RSS feed reader was knocked offline for several hours Thursday due to what its owner, IAC Search & Media, described as a technical glitch.

Google and Microsoft last week traded counter-punches over voice and social networking tools as the two continue to battle each other over emerging technologies.

After an Internet-wide search, here are the 11 blogs that depressed -- er, uh -- impressed us the most with their lameness.

An unsavory connection from your past. An annoying link to your name that's dragging down your career. A spicy quote you tossed off to a reporter that you wish you could take back.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least.

Imagine a business tool that lets you broadcast information about your company, listen in on discussions about how people are using your products and what they think of them, and get involved when one of your customers -- or one of your competitors' customers -- has a problem.

Powerful photo networking services let you share shots to anyone, from anywhere, even while you're still on vacation.

Microblogging on Twitter is great. But sometimes you're just too busy to sit down and type that 140-character tweet. Maybe you're climbing a volcano, sprinting through the airport or running a marathon and just can't stop to type. Here's how to post on Twitter using only a voice phone call.

Leetspeak, Internet shorthand, computer jargon for instant messaging -- whatever you call them, initialisms like BRB, LOL and BTW have now entered the public lexicon. (I know a few teenagers who actually say LOL to each other in person!)

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

Two weeks ago, I shared my belief in this space that mobile social networking will become the most important business technology since e-mail.

Clever social networking-related startups with obscure taglines -- including Causecast ("Change your world, and the world will change"), Qik ("See what happens"), and Joongel ("Internet the easy way -- we have chocolate") -- line the showroom of TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. If you want to find out what these companies do, you'll have to ask the one of the beautiful people manning the tables.

With the recent rise of Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, it's hard to believe that just a few years ago, the tech industry, along with many investors, were taken for a loop when the dot-com bubble burst and many companies went under.

Started in a dorm room four years ago, the social networking site Facebook now claims to be the fourth most-trafficked site in the world. Ninety million active users pound on 10,000 servers every day, uploading millions and millions of pieces of information in a given month. For example, "friends," who socialize in 21 languages, add 500 million photos per month.

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

Facebook will roll out a dramatic redesign of its member profile interface next month and much attention is being paid to the details and to how end users and developers will react.

Almost four months after Google emerged from the background in social networking with its OpenSocial initiative, there is no shortage of skepticism around the project.

These days, you can find a blog for just about anything. Looking for affordable art prints? Weheartprints.com has them. Interested in Craftsman, Mission, and Prairie furniture? Check out Hewn & Hammered.

Howard Schmidt was reluctant to hop on the social networking bandwagon - a byproduct, he says, of the paranoia he internalises as a security professional. Eventually, though, Schmidt - the one-time cybersecurity adviser to President Bush and itinerant CISO turned consultant - decided the positives outweighed the negatives. He joined not just one social network but three: Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.

Transform your network to enhance your personal and professional life

Put the 'you' in YouTube with this hands-on guide to shooting, editing, and uploading your own movies and mashups

True or false, the information people find about you on the Web can have a big impact on your life. Here are five techniques to make sure that what people read about you is good (or at least true).

For the majority of those looking to upgrade to broadband Internet for the business or home, it's all about the extra speed.