Penthouse Buys Swinger Social Network Sites

Unvarnished welcomes negative reviews of professionals

(NEWSER) - A new website intended to cut through the universal positivity of networks like LinkedIn with some real information on the job performance of potential employees or former managers has bloggers talking apocalypse. Unvarnished , which is now in beta testing, allows users to claim their profiles and comment on other comments, but they can’t remove negative reviews. “The idea is to create a place, not where people only give F-minuses,” the founder tells the Chicago Tribune . More»

Average users has 130 friends, spends 55 minutes a day

(NEWSER) - Facebook's runaway growth is well documented, but some details still wow, and some are quite odd. Website Monitoring takes a look at the salient facts.

• Popularity: The US has the most active users, but 70% of Facebookers are international. Sure, the UK comes in at No. 2, but No. 3 is...Indonesia? Turkey grabs the No. 4 spot, just ahead of France.

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»

failin.gs is the latest truth-seeking social networking site

(NEWSER) - If you really want to know what people think of you, the Web can help. A flurry of new sites—basically intense versions of Truth or Dare—offer constructive criticism or, in the case of the latest, just plain truth. Sites like Formspring.me allow people to ask users anonymous questions, and a new site called failin.gs goes further, prompting users to dish on exactly what is wrong with you. More»

Pages are easier to read and faster to load, but that may not survive advertising

(NEWSER) - As far as Facebook is concerned, the “liter” the better, writes Rafe Needleman for CNET. The site’s scaled-down “Lite” version is now available in the US and India, and the "new layout feels simpler and faster, almost Twitter-like.” Gone is “most of the navigation and info page that was on the left,” leaving users undistracted by the “mostly superfluous details that resided there.” More»