Happy belated birthday, Facebook Jamal Ibrahim! You are a baby girl born last week in Egypt. Your parents named you, in honor of the role the social networking site Facebook played in your country's recent revolution. Your name struck me as strange at first. And I guess it is a bit strange. But the longer I sit with, the more I think it's strange in a good way, the more I like it. It's better than "Twitter," for starters, in that it won't be shortened to "Twit." And I actually think it will be pretty cool as you grow older. People will surely call you "Face." And [...]

Oh, you social media, you! With all that Twittering, messaging and geo-locationing, you do, you must generate some kind of revenue-and, per the big business thinkers of Web 2.0, it has to be ginormous. There are 300 million Facebookers out there, after all, and while Twitter is still in the modest 10-figure range, it operates at a staggering rate of increase; a March study of social media usage found that Twitter users were growing at a monthly clip of 1382%. (I realized that anything was possible in the Twitterverse when I awakened to the news this Sunday that I had acquired Reaganite direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie as a [...]

"The Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir has called on his supporters to use Facebook in order to overcome groups that are opposed to his rule. Bashir made the call during his visit to North Kordofan state on Tuesday where he inaugurated a power plant. Sudan official news agency (SUNA) cited Bashir as instructing authorities to pay more attention towards extending electricity to the countryside so that the younger citizens can use computers and internet to combat opposition through social networking sites such as Facebook." —Man, that's some quick co-opting! Just last month, protesters used social networking sites to organize demonstrations against Al-Hashir. Those demonstrations were quickly shut down by [...]