Two years ago, Google came in 4th.

“The Internet juggernaut takes the Best Companies crown for the fourth time, and not just for the 100,000 hours of subsidized massages it doled out in 2012. New this year are three wellness centers and a seven-acre sports complex, which includes a roller hockey rink; courts for basketball, bocce, and shuffle ball; and horseshoe pits,” says Fortune in their justification.

Last year, Fortune raved about the bowling alley, free eyebrow shaping, and 25 employee cafes.

So there are a lot of cool things to do at Google between work sessions, and that’s apparently what Fortune values when making this list.

The rest of the top five is as follows: SAS, CHG Healthcare Services, The Boston Consulting Group, and Wegmans Food Markets.

When it comes to just tech companies, we find some more as we move down the list. Qualcomm comes in at #11, for instance. Salesforce ranks #19 and Rackspace Hosting ranks #34. Microsoft comes in at #75 – but you wont see any of the other ‘big four’ on there. That’s right, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are not ranked in Fortune’s top 100.

The option to create lists and therefore filter your friends has been around for a while. Facebook has been subtly creating lists for people, such as a list for family or acquaintances or people who attended the same school as you. Additionally, users can also create their own lists if those generic groupings are simply too unsatisfying.

Last night, though, I noticed a new box appearing at the top of my newsfeed:

The notice to create a list of starred/close friends isn’t appearing for everybody just yet; at least, I was the only one in my office this morning who was seeing the above notification. Essentially, it’s a simple notice that Facebook is prompting users to utilize so as to remind them that they can control who sees their updates and whose updates they see. As you may have noticed, too, Facebook directly says that your friends won’t know if you’ve starred them. But then again, your friends never know when they’ve been added to any of your lists.

Once you’ve added some people to your list of stars, Facebook will prompt you with a welcome message.

From there, if you’re feeling so bold and curious, you can click the ‘Learn More’ link to open up another pop-up box that will explain to you the difference between the series of lists that you can currently use for your friends.

And of course, once you’ve established your list of the brightest stars in your Facebook sky, the list will appear as an audience option when you’re making an update to your Timeline.

Choosing the Close Friends option, only the friends you’ve chosen to include in that list will see your update.

The list feature is an easy way to winnow down the list of Facebook friends you don’t really care to hear from by limiting the updates you see in your news feed to only display your personal all-stars (or family members or coworkers or whatever the function of your list is). While that can be simply irksome, the greater value of using lists is how it gives you control over who sees your own updates.

Again, this isn’t really a new feature by any means but it does indicate that Facebook wants its users to become more proactive with protecting their own privacy. Well, what little you’ve got left, anyways.

This caps off a busy week for Facebook upgrades. Yesterday, the site started rolling out promoted posts for Pages and will soon be permitting advertisers to purchase ads directly from the site’s power editor. A counter-productive update, though: Facebook still hasn’t resolved the issue of businesses not being able to post links, although that probably isn’t intentional.

Amazon compiled sales of books, magazines, and newspaper sales in both print and electronic format to come up with their annual list which tracks the most book-happy cities with a population over 100,000. Of course, their data doesn’t include many of those off-the-radar book sales happening at your local used bookstores and other independent outlets – but their list does give us a good snapshot of which American towns can find time away from the TV and Xbox to enjoy one of the world’s simplest pleasures.

Without further ado, check out the top 20 most well-read cities in the United States (in order):

1. Alexandria, Virginia
2. Cambridge, Massachusetts
3. Berkeley, California
4. Ann Arbor, Michigan
5. Boulder, Colorado
6. Miami, Florida
7. Arlington, Virginia
8. Gainesville, Florida
9. Washington D.C.
10. Salt Lake City, Utah
11. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
12. Knoxville, Tennessee
13. Seattle, Washington
14. Orlando, Florida
15. Columbia, South Carolina
16. Bellevue, Washington
17. Cincinnati, Ohio
18. St. Louis, Missouri
19. Atlanta, Georgia
20. Richmond, Virginia

As you can see, Virginia really showed up this year with three different cities on the list. Amazon tells us that Virginia is indeed for lovers, as Arlington was tops in the romance book category.

Other specifics? Berkeley readers love travel books and Boulder readers are concerned with staying in shape with the most books per capita purchased in the health & fitness category.

In the last year, we’ve seen a changeup at the top. Cambridge, MA and Alexandria, VA have flip flopped since 2011.

Although we failed to make Amazon’s most well-read list, my hometown of Lexington, KY still holds the title of “most e-literate” city, according to a recent survey.

To help get you ready for all overload of college basketball, Darren Rovell of MSNBC put together a top ten list of the best-selling jerseys in college basketball. As Rovell points out, the players don’t get a dime from these jersey sales–wait until you’re a pro, fellas–and the player’s last name does not appear on the back of these college jerseys, but:

…every year, schools give manufacturers specific numbers that correlate to the best players on their team. So we went to the folks at Fanatics, the leading retailer of college merchandise online, and asked them what schools with what numbers sold best this season.

With that in mind, here’s the list, starting from 10 to 1.

10. Mason Plumlee, Duke Blue Devils:

9. Kenny Boynton, Florida Gators:

8. Kendall Marshall, North Carolina Tar Heels:

7. Tyler Zeller, North Carolina Tar Heels:

6. Scoop Jardine, Syracuse Orange:

5. Draymond Green, Michigan State Spartans:

4. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Kentucky Wildcats:

3. Seth Curry, Duke Blue Devils

2. Anthony Davis, Kentucky Wildcats:

1. Harrison Barnes, North Carolina:

Interest Lists work like giant subscription packets, based on topics ranging from Art, Photographers, and Design to Food, Games, Pop Music, World Leaders, and more. Facebook hopes that they will turn the service into something like a newspaper with unique sections:

Interest lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you. You can find traditional news sections like Business, Sports and Style or get much more personalized—like Tech News, NBA Players, and Art Critics.

Here’s how it works: First, you visit the “Add interests” page, where you’ll see tons of user-generated lists on all sorts of topics. From that page, you can subscribe to as many as you want. Each list can include pages and people – so for instance a list on food could include food critics, celebrity chefs, as well as pages for sites like CHOW and Food Network.

If you don’t see the list that you’re looking for or you think you could make a better, more inclusive list on a topic, feel free. Click “Create List” at the top and you’ll be able to take from a pool that includes your friends, your pages, and all the other pages our there (grouped by topic):

Once you subscribe to a list, they will appear on the left-hand side of the screen by your subscriptions, groups, apps, etc.

You can click on each of your Interest Lists to see a unique News Feed for each. It will show you all the updates made from every member of the list. Each list can only been edited by the creator but each list-maker has the ability to make their list public or private.

Although you can click on the Interest Lists to open up a separate News Feed, that doesn’t mean that you won’t see update from people in your Interest Lists in your main News Feed. “The top stories from each interest appear in your news feed so you can scan interesting headlines or click through to read more posts,” says Facebook.

As Facebook rolls this out over the next few weeks, an “Add Interest” button will appear in that left-hand bookmark section.

So, everyone: What does this sound like? Twitter lists? Google+ circles? You’d be right on both accounts. Although Facebook has allowed users to groups their friends and pages into Lists for awhile now, Interest Lists marks the beginning of shared lists on Facebook. Having user-generated subject lists that other can “follow” or subscribe to might be huge for Facebook.

But then again, back in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg said “In reality, almost no one wants to make lists.” So, there’s that.

What do you think? Can you see yourself using Interest Lists? Do you think that they pose a threat to Twitter and even Google+? Let us know in the comments.

Now you can categorize your favorite places into convenient, sharable lists that you can use to document travel experiences, plan future trips, suggest restaurants to friends and much more.

For instance, you could make a list of all the best places for Indian food in your town or all the best bars that you visited on your spring break trip to Palm Springs. If you’re doing research for a trip to Los Angeles, you could compile a list of all the museums and celebrity hotspots you want to hit while you’re there.

Users who go to their profile page will now see a large box called “Lists.” In that box, Foursquare has provided the user with suggested lists to get them started. These pull from recent and popular check-in locations, for instance, Foursquare suggested that I take my various check-ins at bars and beer stores and turn them into a “popular nightlife” list. You can create that list automatically if you want to.

If you choose to create a list from scratch, here’s what it’ll look like:

You can title the list any which way you like, and from there you can add a description, photos, and create tips for each location added to the list. Foursquare Lists seem to be a good way to make use of the “Tips” and “To-Do” functions that have never gained as much popularity as the default check-ins have.

Once you’ve made a list, you can choose to make it open for editing. This way, friends can keep a collaborative list going between as many people as desired.

Just like everything we do at foursquare, Lists are all about sharing with your friends. Want to plan a trip to Paris? Create a blank list and share it with your friends who know the city best. They can load it up with all their best suggestions. Think your buddy will love your list of best food trucks in Los Angeles? It’s simple to share it with him. And, best of all: the lists are alive. If friends later add more places to a list you follow (like the Hipster Coffee Shop Explosion list), you’ll see everything they drop in.

Once you choose to “follow” a particular list, you can share it with other Foursquare friends or share it to Facebook and Twitter.

Collaborative lists look like another push toward a “more social” feel to Foursquare. Back in July they added a new notification system that alerts users whenever friends comments on check-ins, people perform one of your tips, the location you’re checked-in at starts swarming, and much more.

Update: On the Twitter Status Blog, the company announced that it has expanded the availability of the "Lists" feature to 5% of its users. The company also says it will work its way up to a full rollout in the coming weeks.

Original Article: Twitter is testing a new feature, called Lists, with a small subset of users. The feature is designed to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. In other words, you will be able to group together certain accounts you follow, making Twitter much more useful.

"For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense," says Nick Kallen, who is the project lead on the feature.

Twitter says lists are public by default, but they can be made private. The lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. That means you can find interesting lists that others have created. This should prove to be a good way to find new people of interest. You can subscribe to other people’s lists and others can subscribe to yours.

"We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter," says Kallen.

Twitter will make the feature available not only on Twitter.com, but will include a lists API. The company says more information about this will come out in a few days. It should be noted that some third-party apps already have the capability of grouping Twitter accounts. The public user-subscription feature is an interesting twist though.

The feature should go a long way for reducing the "noise" that is commonly associated with Twitter use. When you can break tweets down into separate categories, Twitter is much easier to enjoy.

There has been no date given for when the feature will launch for all accounts. Twitter just says it will be available once they’ve finished testing.

1. Google’s Countdown of Tips

2. Jaw droppers of 2008 – what they’d rather you forgot

3. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

4. 9 Reasons You Need Social Media Marketing in 2009

5. 12 Cool Twitter Add-Ons for the 2008 Holiday Season

6. Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

7. Top 10 from the Inside AdWords Blog

8. Gadget Picks for ’08

9. The Ten Most Popular Viral Videos of 2008

10. The Year 2008 in Google Earth

Of course, I’ve been working on a few year-end lists of my own. You may have come across my look at the year in online video or online music. I looked at the most commented on articles and WebProNews, and the year in Search and Social Media (those coming soon).

Enjoy the lists, and get ready for a whole new year with plenty of great stuff to come.

Ask.com says they didn’t “sanitize” the list—as evidenced by including #3:

1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies

And when they say they don’t sanitize it, they mean they didn’t take out porn terms, either. Odd . . . I could’ve sworn that the premise behind their big ad push this year was that Ask was a good way to find porn. . . .

Does it seem a little strange to anyone else how extremely generic these searches are? Other than MySpace and Google, what are these people looking for? “Themes”? The weather all over the entire world? Every movie ever made? Come on.

A few other interesting gems from their many lists: Ron Paul is the seventh most popular presidential candidate after Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and John McCain—but don’t worry, Paulites. He’s still beating Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.

Also interesting? No mention of Britney Spears anywhere. For once.

Comment

Classified Intelligence cited the announcement, which was posted on the Craigslist forums:

Over the last 6 months we have received a lot of feedback in this forum and by email, the consensus of which is that a $25 fee for posting jobs in these four cities would be beneficial, with many recent comments to the effect that we may have waited too long to implement such a fee.

Though some have balked at the new fee, many Craigslist devotees welcomed the announcement. Classified Intelligence noted the impact of adding job posting fees in markets previously by the site:

Job ads are a cash-cow for Craigslist; the number of job listings in New York and Los Angeles dropped substantially when the fee began, “but the volume quickly rebounded and by 2007 had more than tripled in each city,” the company said.

“After an initial drop-off in ad volume (in Boston, San Diego, Seattle and Washington) similar to that experienced in NYC and LA, the volume of legitimate job ads in these four cities has more than doubled.”

In addition to the job fees, Craigslist charges $10 for brokered apartment listings in New York City. Classified Intelligence believes the site’s job listings perform better, as fees drive out the junk postings.