Last week, Twitter announced that it had broken a record for tweets per second (3,085), courtesy of the Lakers beating the Celtics in the NBA Championship. Now they have already topped this a week later.

Today, Twitter announced the new record of 3,283 tweets per second, this time coming as a result of Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark in the World Cup. These tweets came in as the final whistle was blown in the game.

Twitter has updated its "Find Friends" feature, which could go a long way in getting users who are still skeptical about how Twitter can be useful to them, to have more of a reason to keep using the service.

Back in January, Twitter launched Hope140.org, a site dedicated to showing the ways that Twitter is helping the world. Now, they’ve launched a Twitter account for it. Today, co-founder Biz Stone tweeted about it:

LinkedIn has released some updates to its Groups feature. This is the first major update to Groups since the company launched discussions last summer.

For starters, LinkedIn has eliminated the wall between onsite comments and off-site content like shared news articles.  A new design makes it easier to look at the latest updates of a discussion and comment.

A new study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Experian’s ProtectMyID.com found that people are doing little to protect their personal information on social networks, opening them up to increased vulnerability for ID theft. While about 80% of those surveyed expressed concern about security around social media, over half of them aren’t doing anything about it.

Twitter users know that the service goes down fairly often, but that doesn’t seem to alienate them. While Twitter has certainly had its issues with user retention in the past, it continues to grow. Last month, the site grew by nearly 10% (over the previous month) by our estimates, with total registered users estimated at 122 million.

Facebook is rolling out a feature that lets you "like" comments on posts just as you can the post itself. It’s a simple feature that has surprisingly been absent until now, but now it’s here.

Yes!

Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to connect with people, build your credibility and ultimately generate leads and grow your business. The problem is most people are making one BIG mistake when it comes to their pages, keep reading to find out what that mistake is. But first…

What Are Facebook Fan/Business Pages And Why Do You Need One?

Facebook is bigger than anyone ever imagined it would be, and it’s not done growing. Businesses are finding more ways to use it to their benefit, and more people seem to be willing to get involved with brands on the social network.

What value would you place on a Facebook fan? Let us know.

Security firm Symantec has announced that during the World Cup it expects social media activity to spike dramatically, and predicts a concurrent rise in fraudulent activity on the web in general, and social networks in particular.

Last week, a new open protocol called OExchange was released with the aim of simplifying sharing. Right out of the door, it had names like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn signed on. WebProNews spoke with Google’s Open Web advocate, Chris Messina about how the protocol could benefit businesses and site owners.

At this point, most businesses have probably come to the realization that they are missing out on some serious opportunities if they do not have a Facebook presence.

MySpace announced today that it has struck a deal with Ad.ly, an ad service that serves in-stream advertisements, known mostly for its Twitter-related efforts. The deal will let content creators across MySpace (including celebrities, filmmakers, musicians and "social influencers") reach their fans and monetize their activity via the MySpace stream and Ad.ly, MySpace says.

Yesterday was not only Memorial Day, but "Quit Facebook Day" as well – at least according to QuitFacebookDay.com and its highly-publicized initiative to get people to band together and leave the popular social network. That day has come and gone, and while it did manage to get 34,424 to quit (allegedly), it has pretty much been deemed a failure. Despite all the hoopla around Facebook quitting and privacy concerns, it appears that people are just not ready to part with their profiles, as they have become too big a part of their lives.

Google is starting to make some significant moves that may give Google Buzz a significant boost. For example, this week, a "Reshare" button was announced. This is essentially Google’s version of the retweet. If you follow a Buzz user who posts an interesting update, you can hit the "reshare" button (down with the comment, like, and email buttons) to repost that post to your own Buzz stream.

Facebook has introduced its latest changes to privacy settings, to appease disgruntled users who have been somewhere within the range of mildly irritated to outraged over the previous incarnation. The company is getting numerous pats on the back, or at least "that’s more like it" responses from people for the most part (there are some who still aren’t satisfied).

Update: Facebook announced today that it will be rolling out simplified privacy settings starting tomorrow.

Update: Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has a helpful piece up, detailing some of the widespread confusion around this issue, and why things may not be as bad for ad networks as they initially seemed.

Original Article: Twitter announced today that it will not allow any advertising from third parties in its timeline or any service that leverages the Twitter API. The company is updating its terms of service to reflect its new policy.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, MySpace was the top social network in the land. Eventually, Facebook took over that role, and has not looked back since. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had over 400 million users, then at its developer conference, Facebook made what could be considered its biggest announcement ever – the Open Graph.

MySpace let us know that it’s hired marketing industry vet David Donegan as Senior Vice President of Marketing. He will oversee the company’s marketing, entertainment and events teams and strategies.

Donegan will be based in MySpace’s Beverly Hills office and will report to the company’s Co-President, Jason Hirschhorn.
 

Diaspora has been getting a great deal of attention as reports come out about interest in Facebook account deletion. Facebook’s Open Graph initiative, which has been criticized a great deal for being the opposite of open, has had people considering different options, and one of those options is Diaspora.