23/06/2008 – Monday

• YouTube announced a new personalized homepage and improved email notifications based on user feedback.

• Facebook announced that it opened 55 new languages this week for translation by the community. Facebook is available in 20 languages today. They five months ago, we launched the first translated version of Facebook in Spanish

• According to Reuters, the world's top cellphone maker Nokia agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services. Plazes provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities.

24/06/2008 – Tuesday

• According to Reuters, Nokia will pay USD 410 million for the remaining shares in UK-based Symbian and make its software royalty-free to boost phone sales and respond to new rivals such as Google. Symbian's software is used in two-thirds of smartphones -- handsets with computer-like capabilities -- and 6 percent of all cellphones, but new platforms such as Google's Android and Apple's iPhone could challenge its dominance.

• BBC wrote that Visa, the world's largest credit card network, is paying $2m (£1m) to promote its small business service on popular social networking site Facebook. The company is giving $100 (£51) advertising credits to the first 20,000 US business start-ups that download its service via Facebook.

• ZDNet Blog: The Social Web - Twitter, has confirmed its much rumored third round of funding, which includes two new investors: Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions.

• Animoto, the web application that allows users to quickly and easily create personalized, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music, is announcing their first commercial-use service called Animoto for Business, according to TechCrunch.

25/06/2008 – Wednesday

• According to Mashable, Live radio social network BlogTalkRadio has just closed on a $4.6 million Series A round of financing, led by Scott Sipprelle and The Kraft Group. Having launched nearly two years ago, BlogTalkRadio simplifies the act of self-broadcasting by providing individual radio stations where users can have a live show using just their phones.

• ReadWriteWeb wrote that Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon. With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.

• TechCrunch reported that Digg competitor Mixx launched an extension to its groups feature that founder Chris McGill describes as “Ning for social media”. Users can now set up Mixx community sites on their own subdomains. Administrators have the power to brand them visually, post editorial content, and even make some revenue off advertisements. Others can join as members and begin submitting items as they would regularly on Mixx. All submissions (stories, images, and videos) can be made just to a particular community, or to the Mixx site as a whole as well.

26/06/2008 – Thursday

• According to Ars Technica, MySpace announced to let users take their data with them to other websites and even competing social networks. The social network will offer a rich set of tools for third-party developers and enforce strict standards to protect users' data and privacy.

• Mashable wrote that the latest update to iGoogle’s sandbox promised more social capabilities for developers, with the biggest enhancement being the support for Open Social applications in activity streams. This version of iGoogle is now available for limited testing, pushing the social capabilities of the start page even further.

• Mashable also reported that the much-hyped natural language search engine Powerset has been acquired by Microsoft for north of $100 million according to VentureBeat. The search engine, which presently only lets you search Wikipedia articles, works by allowing users to enter in queries the way they would speak them, for example, searching for “what is the numeric value of pi?” as opposed to typing “pi numeric value” on Google or Yahoo. Hence, the name “natural search.”

• Reuters: Microsoft has agreed to buy Portuguese mobile software company MobiComp in the U.S. software giant's biggest-ever investment in Portugal, Microsoft's chief in Portugal said on Thursday. Microsoft's head in Portugal, Nuno Duarte, said Microsoft intends to turn MobiComp into a research and development unit in Portugal after the acquisition.

27/06/2008 – Friday

• The chairman of Microsoft and one of the world's richest men, Bill Gates, is stepping down from his job running the world's largest software company, BBC reported.

• According to last100, Google today made its own contribution to solving the PC to TV problem with the release of Google Media Server. The Windows-only software works in conjunction with Google’s desktop search application - Google Desktop - to locate various media (photos, music and video) stored on your PC and make it available for streaming over a home network to any UPnP compatible or DLNA ‘certified’ device, such as a PlayStation 3.

• Wired reported that a Turkish hacking group calling itself NetDevilz temporarily took control of the websites of two of the world's leading internet regulatory bodies, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

29/06/2008 – Sunday

• TechCrunch: Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning and the former CTO of AOL, has joined the board of directors of Facebook.