Facebook, Social Media News & Practices

 The very jumpy Seesmic outfit dumps its enterprise focus and goes hunting in the social space with more work to come on cross-service messaging platform, Seesmic Ping.

For once, I haven't read about Google upsetting someone this week, is the company taking it easy in the run up to Spring Break? Instead, there's useful new features in Android updates, a push on Google Wallet and the company is seeing positive corporate signs in a highly competitive market.

Yesterday we told you about Adobe's new Social Marketing solution -- Adobe Social. Today I had the opportunity to sit in on more detailed session for the new product which carries the tag line "social marketing made simple".

Dropbox has announced on its Facebook page deeper integration with the social media behemoth, which simplifies file sharing among friends, and perhaps portends "deeper" things to come between the cloud-based file sharing service, and the social networking go-to destination.

In the last flailing act of a wounded beast, Yahoo won't do the decent thing and go quietly into the night, but will throw lawsuits at anyone it can claw some money from. The latest target is Facebook and the weapon of choice, some super-simple patents.

Only a few months after buying Gowalla, Facebook shuts down the young location-sharing service.

It showed up in a drop-down menu inside the new Facebook Timeline feature, then like a phantom, disappeared from view, but not before reporters spotted it, armed with a screen shot on Burberry's new Timeline page. Now Facebook has come clean with the official introduction of Interest Lists.

With social measurement companies swarming the trees, HootSuite tries to keep its perch by partnering with Adobe to integrate Digital Marketing Suite for more measurable ROI on those social strategies.

Businesses are increasingly using social media for promotion and engagement. However, there is only so much you can do with a social network's basic feature set. Facebook offers tagging in photo albums, but this is limited by default to persons and pages. Companies that want to promote products or services through photos will need more flexibility than just being able to tag friends. An application called Tangelo Tags solves this problem by letting users add any information to photo tags.

Skype 5.6 for Mac includes automatic updates, an improved user interface, full-screen mode in OS X Lion, the ability to delete conversations and an awesome beta feature that connects Skype users to their Facebook accounts.

Facebook is making quite a few changes to its advertising assets. We reported recently about changes to Facebook ads, now the company has rolled out both Facebook Timelines for brand pages and real-time analytics via Page Insights.

Facebook is getting lots of attention today on news of a pending "Interest List" service touted as the next evolutionary step in the company's efforts at boosting its relevance to businesses and perhaps even displacing Twitter.   

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs for you to browse. Our bi-weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week (and if you're hiring, post your job openings here).

Impressions from a Social Media Week that shook up New York.

You may have heard about how more Facebook users are unfriending each other. While some have decided that this is a very unfriendly action, it may suggest that after five years, users are becoming more savvy about how to create, connect and collaborate socially online. A recent study by Pew Research suggests that people are also becoming more savvy about protecting their privacy online.