LinkedIn has introduced some new features for LinkedIn Groups. Groups helps users create an open forum based on a specific subject or profession and allows users to comment and share information. LinkedIn has updated Groups and the changes are considered to be major.  Before you could not find any wall between onsite comments and offsite content like shared news articles. The new design has made it easy to know about the recent updates of a discussion or comment. 

If you’ve been on Twitter at all in the month of June it’s no secret the site has had issue after issue after issue. What was Twitter’s reaction to the series of performance issues? Yesterday, Twitter released a blog post, explaining in detail the exact problem that caused the outages. “We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic. We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.”

Social Media is fast becoming popular and is now commanding 22 percent of our time online. According to a survey conducting by Nielsen, the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. Not only has the traffic to these sites increased 24 percent in last one year, but people are also spending 66% more time on these sites than a year ago. In the month of April 2010, 82% of the world’s internet population visited Google, and each spent 1 hour 21 minutes and 51 seconds on the site, making it the most popular site.

Twitter announced a new feature called Twitter Places. Now Twitter users can tag their tweets along with their location and also add new places to the list. Users can also select a particular location and view all the tweets coming from there. World Cup Fans will love this new addition. This means that you can easily see the live tweets from any stadium in South Africa by selecting their stadium venues.

We’ve been reporting an awful lot about technical issues with Twitter, we even thought it was all figured out a few days ago. Within the last hour Twitter has placed two reports on Twitter Status. The first issue came just over an hour ago with what has become the normal “bursts of elevated errors” message. The second notice, reported just 15 minutes ago, reports of issues with incorrect tweet counts.

Yesterday, we reported about continuous Twitter breakdowns and Twitter’s efforts to contain them. However, it looks like the micro-blogging site was not able to fully gauge the enormity of the problem. The site again experienced ‘availability issues’ early this morning. The problem was finally fixed, but the relief was short-lived as the site started to hiccup again.

Twitter recently reached 2 billion tweets per month milestone, but it seems like heavy traffic has taken its toll on the site’s performance. Today has been the first day in a while with no such problems reported. For the better part of the week, Twitter has experienced several incidences of poor site performance. In its blog, Twitter mentioned that the breakdown was due to one of its internal sub-networks being over-capacity. It also said that their internal network was temporarily misconfigured and was not being properly monitored.

This year’s World Cup, which takes place in South Africa, has already begun. To bring you all the latest updates, Twitter announced the launch of their special site which would exclusively cover all the latest happenings of the World Cup. Twitter.com/worldcup will undoubtedly act as a real time source for World Cup updates by bringing together tweets from players, news, and people at the event.

Following the newest Facebook on Yahoo update, Yahoo-owned Flickr has introduced an interesting new way to link your Flickr photos with your Facebook account. With the help of Facebook News Feed and Yahoo’s updated platform, you can have the thumbnails of your Flickr photos along with title and description appear on your Facebook page.

Twitter seems to be on a roll. The micro-blogging site recently reached its 2 billion tweets a month milestone. The company has now announced its acquisition of Smallthought Systems. The company will integrate with Twitter’s analytics team and will focus on combining ideas from Trendly (web analytics program developed by Smallthought) into Twitter’s current tools. Twitter has long ties with Smallthought. Up until a year ago, Twitter used their Dabble DB, an online database, to track and share information about its projects internally.

Twitter hit 1 billion tweets per month mark in December 2009 (and more recently hit 50 million tweets per day). It took the micro blogging service less than 6 months to add another billion tweets to its monthly traffic. According to Royal Pingdom, Twitter had 64 million tweets a day in May. This roughly translates to 2.7 million tweets per hour or 741 tweets per second. The website had predicted this feat over a month ago in a post that estimated total monthly tweets until Jan 2010

It was no surprise that the web would erupt during the opening day of this year's WWDC. I'm most certainly not the biggest Apple fanboy, but the buzz was most certainly just. I was fortunate enough to follow all of the event via live blog (gdgt and Engadget were certainly best) as it happened. And wow was my notes doc full. There is plenty of great info out there recapping the day, so I figured I would instead account for the impact WWDC made around the web. I saved some screenshots from Google Trends, Twitter, etc. which started in the afternoon and went into the late evening EST. For the most part the results remain the same across the board until they started to die down late last night. Here is a list of 10 (although there were more) words/phrases which trended around the web and some of the screenshots. Enjoy!

Mashable Media Summit 2010 is a one-day conference that focuses on the social media that rules the present day world. The event sheds light on “the intersection of social and digital media and the lifestyle themes” is co-presented by CNN, produced and hosted by Mashable.The event takes place today in TheTimeCenter at the New York Times building.

Yahoo has once again integrated Facebook features for its users. As we have mentioned earlier Yahoo is leaving no stone unturned to further connect to the social web. Initially it allowed web surfers to update Facebook contact information, and then came the announcement of updating Facebook status and viewing friends' profile pictures. The latest addition was further integrated Facebook’s Like action, commenting, and News Feed.

Facebook is working towards easing users’ concerns about information sharing. The social media site has been making update after update. Facebook has mentioned in its blog that “privacy settings themselves have not changed with this update; we've simply added ways to control what you share with fewer steps.”  In other words, users still have to go through the whole rigmarole of opt out instead of opt in. Although in yet another update, Facebook has now launched a new “Facebook and Privacy” Page to complement its existing privacy guide. The new page is interactive in nature and will feature regular updates. Facebook is also planning to post updates about new materials, tips on how to control sharing, and links to relevant news stories and viewpoints.