Mark Zuckerberg's hacking of email accounts and user profiles in 2004 could be felonies under Federal and state law, according to privacy lawyers. As we described last week, Mark used login data of early Facebook members to break in to the private email accounts of two Harvard Crimson editors. He also broke into the systems of competitor ConnectU and changed user profiles, also according to IMs. Read the rest of this story » See Also: Mark Zuckerberg's Early Misdeeds Gain Mainstream Media At..   show all text

A new study from security firm Barracuda Labs provides some interesting insights into the state of the Twitterverse. Unfortunately for the microblogging startup, the stats say that most of its users aren’t very active. The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using Twitter. It started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. By tha..   show all text

Today Get Satisfaction is bringing its popular social CRM tool inside Facebook Pages with Social Engagement Hub. The new app, created by Involver using the Get Satisfaction API, gives brands and businesses the ability to integrate the entire support experience into Facebook. That means the Ask A Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem and Give Praise functionalities are all present and commingling with the service’s intelligent question database so both customers and brand representative..   show all text

A 40 year-old unsolved murder mystery. Strange cryptic codes in a bible. Sweden, sandwiches, and many, many cigarettes. The badass-est female protagonist since . . . forever. And an author who has, posthumously, caused quite a ruckus in the book world and in the minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Yes, I’m talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven’t heard of it, the rest of us are inviting you to come out from under your rock. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The G..   show all text

SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth. Dailybooth, the runner up in the “best social app” and winner of the “time sink” categories at this year’s Crunchies Awards, is “your life in pictures.” Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. “It’s a community for self expression,” says Pokorny. A typi..   show all text

Back in October we wrote about Appboy, a social network for mobile app developers and users. Since launching, Appboy has continued to evolve into a community for both developers and users to find and rate apps, as well as submit ideas for new mobile applications. Appboy has just rolled out a big update to its site which improves the design, adds stronger integration with Facebook and Twitter, and makes it easy to keep up with what your favorite app developers are doing. The site has also l..   show all text

The social networking site plans to roll out features next month that will give its 400 million users the option of sharing their location with friends as part of their news feeds.

Foursquare, a location-based social network, is rolling out new tools that will give businesses more information about their customers and allow them to target special offers.

Foursquare is battling for your SXSW check-ins with a musical scavenger hunt. Rival Gowalla is going to go after them with free gadgets – specifically free Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus devices as part of a promotion the location-based social networking service is unveiling in conjunction with their just-launched app for webOS. The app should hit the Palm App Catalog on Tuesday, and like the company’s applications for other platforms (including its recently launched Android app) it dete..   show all text

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..   show all text

Chief marketing officers at US companies are planning significant hiring and budget increases over the next two years as they remain optimistic about prospects for their companies and the economy, according to a survey conducted by Duke University and the American Marketing Association. Overall, CMOs expect marketing budgets to increase, ...

Remember the Pantless Knights of “I’m on a Mac” fame? Well, they’re back today with a new vid titled “The New Dork,” a parody of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind” that pays tribute to social media adherents and hipsters alike. With shoutouts to Zuckerberg, Mashable, Valleywag, Gizmodo, LinkedIn, Twitter and tech nerds camped out in their mothers’ basements, this video is all about using your social media cache to attain new levels of irony-spun hipness. According to these tech..   show all text

BBC News has a very cool interactive chart up, showing how Internet had grown from 1998 to 2008 in various parts of the world. In 1998., the only countries with significant Internet usage were USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. Of course, I remember using the Internet in Croatia every day back then, but it’s true: for most people, it was “this new thing” and it didn’t play a very important part of our everyday lives. Moving the slide..   show all text

According to The New York Times, the United States Treasury Department will tomorrow give Internet services license to export consumer-aimed services like instant messaging and photo sharing to countries with which trade has previously been restricted, including Iran, Cuba and Sudan. The United States defines these nations as “closed societies” because their governments sometimes try to restrict the free flow of information between citizens, however in many cases trade is restricted by the..   show all text

The iPad is breaking out in a very mainstream fashion: an ad for the Apple device just aired during the Oscars. The ad explains why Apple CEO Steve Jobs was spotted on the red carpet earlier. We’ve got a screenshot and we’ll post video as soon as it comes in (update: video added below). Apple iPad Commercial During the Oscars [img credit: TheFullM0nty] Steve Jobs on the Oscars Red Carpet [img credit: Wayne Sutton] Tags: Apple iPad, Commercial, ipad, jobs, Oscars, steve jobs, tre..   show all text

It seems hundreds of Twitter accounts have started to Tweet out “weight loss” product spam today. Specifically, users who have had their accounts hijacked are Tweeting the message “I lost 20 lbs in 2 weeks!” and links to diet sites. Our source counts over 200 rogue tweets so far tonight. It’s not just new users getting caught out: famous tech pundit John C. Dvorak (@therealdvorak) got caught up in the attack, and was none too pleased. At this point we’re unsure of the cause: Access coul..   show all text

The battle for social geolocation domination has expanded to Google’s Android platform, as Gowalla, the primary competitor to Foursquare, has just made its debut on Google’s Android app store. The new Gowalla 1.0 app isn’t some secondhand version of its iPhone counterpart — it’s completely packed with an array of features that allow you to check into locations, view friends, access details about specific locations, and check out your progress completion for trips (a Gowalla feature that le..   show all text

A new version of Foursquare for the iPhone is on the way and it will feature a revamped interface, a brand new user tab, and a new checkin history view. This version of the app – v1.6 – should be heading to the App Store soon. Nick Starr shared screenshots of it with us and we’ve included a few below so that you can see some of the new features. Looking at the images from Foursquare 1.6, the first thing you’ll notice is that the interface has been totally revamped. The colors, icons and me..   show all text