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Facebook will soon be making it possible for members to leave comments on each others' "mini-feeds" of activity, according to an announcement Wednesday from the social network. The development is slated to go live later on Wednesday. In other words, it's a very meta turn. Facebook members will now be able to comment on the announcement of a posted item in addition to the posted item itself.

Currently, Facebook allows members to comment on one another's "walls," as well as on individual photos, posted items, videos, and other pieces of media that they share … Read more

Nokia announced today that it will buy Symbian for about $410 million and form a consortium of hardware and software makers to push the development of open-source mobile software. CNET News.com reporter Tom Krazit joins me in the podcast studio to talk about what the new foundation will mean for competing operating systems and for customers.

Also, ICANN is considering a new system of domain names Thursday; Virgin Mobile targets the U.S. market with a new, flat-rate calling plan; and a judge has kicked the public out of a hearing between Facebook and ConnectU, overruling objections from three … Read more

Tuesday morning software company Memeo launched a new product called Share. Aimed at people who don't use photo- or video-sharing sites, Share lets you take what you've captured on your digital camera and beam it to friends and family members without clogging up their e-mail in-boxes with full-resolution shots.

The product is not aimed at the Flickr crowd, but instead at people who want to create small circles of people to share their shots with. That's not to say there's not a social element, since it can be configured to automatically upload your shots to Facebook. … Read more

Throughout the years, I've received countless invitations to join MySpace. Somehow, I never wanted to join. I have nothing against social network sites as I even have an account on Facebook. However, there's this bad feeling about MySpace when I look at the site. Call me a weirdo if you want, but what happened yesterday is my tangible explanation to all the rejections I've made.

At least since last Friday (possible earlier), MySpace put up a Web page to invite people to a "BlackCurtain" screening of the upcoming movie Wanted at AMC Metreon in downtown … Read more

Kicking the public out of a courtroom is an option that should be used rarely, and extremely judiciously, which is what makes U.S. District Judge James Ware's decision Monday disappointing.

Ware shuttered the doors to a San Jose, Calif., hearing pitting Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, probably the world's youngest self-made billionaire, against Harvard University classmates who claim Zuckerberg stole ideas and source code from a similar venture called ConnectU. Ware took this extraordinary step without notice, without a formal request from either side, and without even specifying why it was necessary.

This is at odds with the … Read more

In this video interview, Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with about managing Facebook's hypergrowth. Heiliger is a rock star infrastructure geek. He was the CTO of Global Crossing at age 23, worked at Marc Andreessen's Loudcloud and spent time as the head of Web engineering at Walmart.com.

During the interview, Heiliger said that Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. "It's almost a new challenge every day," Heiliger said regarding the challenges of keeping up … Read more

Updated 1:12 p.m. PDT to reflect that the hearing session has ended.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--A hearing in a dispute between Facebook and ConnectU wrapped up early Monday afternoon with no ruling, after the federal judge overseeing the matter had closed the proceedings to the public and the press.

U.S. District Judge James Ware plans to issue a ruling before too much time has elapsed, attorneys involved in the matter said as they left the courthouse here following the hearing, which lasted somewhat less than two hours.

Reporters from CNET News.com, the San Jose Mercury News, … Read more

comScore has done a wonderful job. Of marketing comScore results.

If the Internet abacus company sees its readings suggest a significant conclusion, it releases the information in an interesting and digestible form.

However, I understand that both comScore and its frats-in-stats at Nielsen Online are having their audits audited by the Interactive Advertising Bureau after mlb.com declared that Nielsen Online's score for its site of 6 million was a "conScore." The real figure, according to mlb.com, was actually 19 million. (the results of the audit's audit are due at the end of this year.)… Read more

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace's 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace's 45.4 billion. It's been a slow but steady upward climb … Read more