The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech company, and all but one remains independent.It's an interesting phenomenon, when you think about it. Large tech companies have had limited to no success creating their own social ...

The Facebook page “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” is giving new credence to the lyrics Thank you for being a friend today, as People has confirmed that the Golden Girls star will be appearing on Saturday Night Live in the near future.When asked at Elton John's Oscar-viewing party last night whether she would be appearing on Saturday Night Live, the actress answered in the affirmative. We're not sure in what capacity the comedienne will be taking the SNL stage ...

I received a email request from my reader that asked to me how to implement Facebook like expanding textbox with Jquery. So I had developed a simple tutorial. Take a look at this live demo Download Script     Live Demo Javascript Code It works with Jquery latest version 1.4.2. $('#content').focus(function(){} - content is the ID of the textbox. Using $(this).animate() expanding textbox height

With the Friday release of Mafia Wars Bangkok looming, we were pleased when Zynga extended a few early-access passes to preview the game.  Mafia Wars, one of the most popular applications for Facebook at 25,000,000 MAU, has been a success for Zynga ever since it's release.  The mafia genre as a whole was one of [...]

Only months after new privacy settings were implemented as a result of a new privacy agreement with Canada, the Canada Privacy Commissioner has once again launched a Facebook probe. The new investigation revolves around the privacy transition tool that defaulted a number of users' privacy settings to public in many instances. Last time [...]

While testing out Google Reader's new feature for following changes to any website, I realized that many Facebook Pages were already accessible in an RSS format. While the feeds were previously accessible via any web browser, it appears that access has now been restricted just to feed readers. If you want to make [...]

Joe Wilson, a Congressman from South Carolina, has decided to deliver a live response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Wednesday via Facebook. The Republican has opted for Facebook over Youtube – which was the video messaging platform of choice for campaign marketing during the 2008 Presidential elections. Joe Wilson, became infamous [...]

F-Secure has suggested that Facebook's new reply-by-email feature may be exploitable.  The press release explains that malicious users can respond to any thread on Facebook as long as they have the proper thread email address.  The full explanation is this as follows. When there is a posted item or status update available on Facebook, and a [...]

In Part 1, we looked at the history of Facebook Credits and the varying degrees of the many phases of the rollout. Here, in Part 2, we look at what's available today and what we can expect soon.

According to Opera's State of the Mobile Web report, that analyzes mobile web usage from Opera Mini, Opera’s mobile web browser, Facebook is the most popular social network globally among Opera Mini users, growing 619 percent in 2009. Not only has the site surpassed VKontakte and Friendster in usage in Russia and Southeast Asia, [...]