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In social media, as in politics, four years is an eternity.

That's an example of a tweetable thought -- pithy and likely to be shared -- that you find sprinkled throughout social media these days.

The mild pressure to come up with re-tweetable posts is just one of the ways things have changed for me social-media-wise since the 2008 election, the first U.S. presidential election where social media was part of the equation.

Here are eight developments worth noting:

1. Facebook: 2008 was, indeed, a long time ago. At the end of that August, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his service had crossed 100 million users, … Read more

If you get a direct message on Twitter telling you to click a link to watch a video of President Barack Obama punching a guy, don't do it.

Spammers are using the idea of the president retaliating against someone for calling him the n-word to steal Twitter passwords and deliver malware to computers, security company PandaLabs noted today.

It's a scheme that uses the names of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for nefarious purposes, with spammers creating fake pages to dupe unsuspecting Twitter users.

The scam involves sending a Twitter direct message that reads "Check out Obama punch … Read more

First there was e-mail spam clogging up your in-box. Now there's social malware making its way into your Facebook newsfeed.

If you've ever seen a spammy message from a friend promising a "Free iPad" or "Free" airline tickets, chances are it's socware (pronounced "sock ware") -- a phrase coined by engineering professors and graduate students at the University of California, Riverside, in a new study.

Their study analyzed 12,000 users of MyPageKeeper, a free app they developed to identify suspicious posts and help protect Facebook users from them. Of that … Read more

Twitter has hired former Google associate general counsel Nicole Wong, making her the latest in a growing string of ex-Googlers to join the microblogging company.

In a tweet this afternoon, Wong wrote, "New nest. Excited to #jointheflock." Moments later, Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray responded, writing, "So excited to be working with Nicole again!"

Wong's hiring marks the latest by Twitter of a former Googler. Others who have switched from the search giant to the microblogging company include Macgillivray, former Google associate litigation counsel Amy Keating, former corporate counsel Bakari Brock, and several recently hired … Read more

Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has reiterated Twitter's cautious approach to being a public company by saying that a company's initial public offering shouldn't be the end-all for startups.

"You can think of an IPO as an exit or a goal, or you can think of it as more of a milestone. For us, it's a milestone," he told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo in a segment aired today.

When asked about Twitter's plan to become a public company, Dorsey said the company will go public "when we feel the company … Read more

Want more Twitter followers? Have you considered advertising by tattoo?

TechCrunch writer Drew Olanoff is selling some real estate on his body to the biggest giver. Whoever wins will get his or her Twitter handled permanently etched on the 33-year-old.

Olanoff is, until November 14, raising money to help research into children's cancers. He did it before in 2009, when the high bid and donation was $2,112 by Melanie Mitchell, whose handle was inked on Olanoff's arm.

In an astonishing twist, Olanoff himself was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, after that campaign. … Read more

"I didn't think it would be that big of a deal."

These are words so many of us have used, just before someone slapped us across the chops.

So it has proved for Denise Helms, a 22-year-old woman from Turlock, Calif., who used Facebook to express her own miffedness with the re-election of the president.

As Fox 40 in Sacramento records it, she wrote: "Another 4 years of this n*****. Maybe he will get assassinated this term."

Oddly, this post seems to have incurred something of a reaction itself. Not everyone was at one with … Read more

Twitter users are reporting problems receiving tweets in their official Twitter apps this afternoon.

In a post to its official status blog, Twitter acknowledged the issue, saying: "Some users may be experiencing a delay with new tweets in their timelines. Our engineers are currently working on this issue."

A search for "Twitter app" reveals a lot of unhappy people, though people using clients like TweetDeck seem to be having no problems.

In recent days, there's been much talk of the end of the so-called "fail whale" in light of Twitter's performance having … Read more

A decade after his startup Friendster paved the way for online social networks, Jonathan Abrams is back with a new social project. And as of today, he has some high-profile investors supporting his plan.

Nuzzel, a startup that collects all the most-shared links in your Facebook and Twitter feeds and presents them in a clean, easy-to-read format, raised $1.7 million in seed funding from investors including 500 Startups' Dave McClure, "The Lean Startup" author Eric Ries, Slide's Max Levchin, Andreessen Horowitz's Ronny Conway, and the Founders Den's Zachary Bogue, who is also the husband … Read more