SAN FRANCISCO–Twitter’s roadmap will include locations, user streams, and annotations, Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter’s platform development, said Thursday at the Chirp conference here.

The company did not announce a formal roadmap, choosing instead to disclose a few additions that the company will be building in the next few months. One of the first was the addition of “places,” a more fine-grained version of location that was announced earlier by Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive.

Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

You should read the full story, but basically, he built a simple crawler for public Facebook info, initially for his own purposes. He made sure that Facebook’s robots.txt didn’t block such crawlers — and he also emailed someone at Facebook (who he had dealt with before), but didn’t hear back from anyone. As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

After playing with some of the data himself, he started making some interesting maps and charts with the data, and did a simple analysis of geographic locations of Facebook friend connections to show people what you could do with the data. He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped). The chart he released got picked up by a variety of sites and quickly got passed around.

AOL Inc plans to find a buyer for its social networking site Bebo, for which it paid $850 million in 2008, or shut it down.

The level of competition in social networking makes it difficult for the company to fight larger players such as Facebook and News Corp’s MySpace, AOL said.

The company plans to decide whether to close Bebo or sell it by the end of May, it told staff on Tuesday.

“Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space,” the company said in a memo sent to staff.

AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc in December, said it is not in a position to “further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.”

The company said it is committed to finding interested potential buyers for Bebo. Bebo has about 40 employees, mostly in the United States.

Bebo, founded in San Francisco, is one of the most popular social networking sites in the UK, but never gained traction in the United States.

AOL paid $850 million for the company in March 2008 as the Internet company, then part of Time Warner, tried to latch on to the coattails of the social networking craze.

A virtual farm attracting up to 83 million aspiring farmers monthly has video game developers scrambling to find ways to plough the booming popularity of games on social networks.

Sites like Facebook, which has an estimated 400 million users, and MySpace, with about 100 million users, are driving a social gaming craze that was in the spotlight at this month’s 2010 Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Heiko Hubertz, CEO of browser-based games portal Bigpoint.com which is home to over 100 million gamers, said online game experiences were very solitary in the past.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon announced on Friday it has authorized the use Twitter, Facebook and other so-called “Web 2.0″ sites across the U.S. military, saying the benefits of social media outweighed security concerns.

The decision, which comes at a time of growing concern over cyber-security, applies only to the military’s non-classified network.

But it could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network.

As more organizations allow employees to use social media like Facebook and Twitter at work, cybercrime attacks on these networks have exploded, according to a report released Monday by IT security firm Sophos. Reports of malware and spam rose 70 percent on social networks in the last 12 months, the security survey reveals.

Or at least it should be.

Facebook Lite claims to be horsepowers faster than the regular site. But regardless of the hundreds of kilobytes saved when browsing FB Lite, the design keeps changing; and getting better than “regular Facebook”.

First off, everything important to you is at the top, like a section with upcoming events you’re attending:

(News.softpedia.com) In a field as new and as fast moving as social networking it’s hard to have actual real data and not just speculation and hype. Twitter may be growing exponentially and it looks like everyone is getting on the wagon these days but according to new research conducted by the Harvard Business Review most users don’t really use the service, with just 10 percent of them posting 90 percent of all tweets.

The study took place in May 2009 and used about 300,000 random Twitter users for data. The findings were somewhat surprising as it turns out that 25 percent of Twitter users don’t tweet at all, with 50 percent tweeting less than once every 74 days. However, 10 percent are the most prolific, accounting for 90 percent of the tweets.

This is very different from other social networks, where the top 10 percent make only 30 percent of the content. The researchers point instead to Wikipedia as comparison, noting that 15 percent of editors account for 90 percent of the edits. This would seem to indicate what was already somewhat apparent, that Twitter is more about broadcasting a message than it is about chatting with your friends.

Another interesting fact was the gender distribution and the way they interacted. According to the study men make up for 45 percent of Twitter’s users while women account for 55 percent. But unlike other social networks men have 15 percent more followers than women and also tend to follow another man rather than a woman. In fact, 65 percent of the users a man follows are other men while only 35 percent are women.

This is in stark contrast with most social networks where women follow other women they already know while men follow women they either know or don’t. The difference can’t be accounted for by men creating more content on Twitter as both genders tweet at the same rate.

Original Story

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