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There was something very much in the vein of Utopian science-fiction fantasies to Facebook's announcement of "Places," its location-based "check-in" product that it launched on Wednesday night. (CNET was the first to report its impending debut last week.) In short, Facebook not only wants to be the digital sovereignty toward which all other geolocation apps direct their figurative roads, it also wants to be the Web's own omniscient historian.

"Too many of our human stories are still collecting dust on the shelves of our collections at home," Facebook vice president of product … Read more

Not too long ago, the golden rules for high school and college students turning to the Web as a research tool were simple: treat digital content that's never been in print with suspicion. Be careful what you Google. And thou shalt not touch Wikipedia.

But the Web has grown up a bit in the past few years, and the presence of digital research journals, fact-finding social media tools, textbook exchanges, and e-readers have made it a much more complicated landscape for anyone who encounters the education world's slow march beyond the traditional textbook. When things have shaken out, … Read more

When rumor broke that Twitter would be launching official "tweet" buttons for third-party sites, the first question for many was: How will they deal with TweetMeme, the third-party company that already operated Twitter sharing buttons and a Digg-like aggregation page?

To be sure, official Twitter "tweet this" buttons just had to be on the way--Facebook's "like" button continues to proliferate--in order for Twitter to avoid being completely eclipsed as the hub of choice for social-media sharing. But the lack of a formal Twitter tweet button had led to TweetMeme's filling … Read more

Once upon a time, a weird news story was just a weird news story. Now, thanks to the Web, it's an international sensation and everyone can be a part of it: a reality-show-hungry couple claiming their kid flew away in a balloon; a strange, dead animal washing ashore; an oddball clan of Alaskans getting improbably close to the White House.

This week, it was the ridiculous story of Steven Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant who cursed out an uncooperative passenger over the intercom, activated the plane's emergency slide, and escaped with a beer in hand. Not only is … Read more

There's a requisite chaos to the "hacker culture" that has been central to the rise of both Google and Facebook: cobble something together, fueled by Red Bull and pizza, until it works; keep changing it and improving it, lest a competitor jump in and create something better; and if for some reason it doesn't work, just do away with it altogether. From both the inside and the outside, it can look quite messy.

Take, for example, the fact that Google has been known to tweak its search algorithm hundreds of times per year, or that the … Read more

There's a silly but enduring bit of apocrypha about the alleged rural pastime of "cow tipping"--in which, supposedly, there are so few ways for mischievous young people in the boondocks to amuse themselves that they resort to knocking over cows standing in slumber. (Actually, cows don't sleep upright. Should you try to "tip" a standing cow, be forewarned: it isn't asleep.)

Fittingly, a recently launched Facebook-based game designed to make a statement about the supposed inanity of other Facebook games--like the now-antiquated "sheep throwing" of Slide's SuperPoke and the … Read more

The second-quarter earnings that Amazon.com announced Thursday weren't quite up to par with what Wall Street had been hoping. But Wall Street had been hoping for good things, and the results were still pretty decent. One of the areas of growth worth highlighting the most for Amazon was all things Kindle--the e-reader device, and the huge marketplace of digital books available for it as well as for apps on third-party devices like Apple's iPhone and iPad and the Android mobile operating system.

In the earnings announcement Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos characterized the Kindle system as an … Read more

Let's be honest: none of us was expecting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's landmark ABC World News interview with Diane Sawyer on Wednesday night--coincided with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking giant's announcement of 500 million active users around the world--to drop any serious bombs.

Not only is Zuckerberg notoriously, even proudly noncolorful, he's also proven remarkably astute in his ability to stay quite stoic in the face of press interrogation. He's not one of those over-the-top CEOs who likes to throw wild claims around and talk big about himself publicly. When he was grilled … Read more

Social-sharing crazes, it seems, have no end. We tweet our grocery lists, share our charitable donations on Facebook, and use Foursquare to chronicle our journeys from home to Starbucks to the office. Now, it seems, it's all about broadcasting your well-being.

So when I decided to step up my recreational distance-running habit into actual race training a few months ago, of course I started exploring the outstanding array of mobile apps, fitness-tracking gadgets, and community sites out there and the experiences of people who have been using the social Web as an outlet for their training goals. What I … Read more