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Pope Benedict XVI delivered a message on social media and online communications today, telling Catholic Internet users to be respectful of others online and to not focus too much on their online popularity. The message was part of the church's annual World Day of Social Communications.

During his speech last year, Benedict had urged church leaders to embrace digital tools in order to communicate their message to laypeople. This year's message calls for those online to adopt a "Christian style presence" and to be "respectful and sensitive."

When Facebook recently added Clicker - the TV guide for Internet video - to its Instant Personalization program, we wrote that it was a "smart next step for the program" because now you could find out what your friends were watching and, in Facebook's words, "spend less time channel surfing and more time socializing."

According to SideReel, an online service similar to Clicker that helps you find content and TV shows online, that isn't necessarily what users want. The company surveyed 1,800 users and found that TV wasn't as social an experience for its users as it used to be, among interesting findings.

Location based social network Foursquare and MTV have partnered to launch a new badge themed after train-wreck TV show Jersey Shore. It's called the Gym/Tan/Laundry (GTL), awarded to users who check in at one of each type of venue in a seven day period. I don't know what to say about this, but I notice that one of my friends has already been awarded one.

Foursquare has always said that it aimed to change peoples' behavior in the offline world. Though it's not clear exactly what kinds of venues fit the bill (do dry cleaners count?), this badge appears to be like Jersey Shore itself: a celebration of being fit (if not sober), tanned all year and working class. May we all find things in life that fulfill us. And may there be a badge for that.

Business social network LinkedIn is planning on an initial public offering of stock in 2011, hoping to beat Facebook to the punch and maximize the attention its offering can draw, according to a report tonight by Reuters reporter Nadia Damouni. Damouni cites multiple unnamed sources stating that LinkedIn has already chosen financial underwriters, a precursor to making an offering, though filing financial paperwork could still take months.

LinkedIn may not have all the mass consumer glamour of Facebook or Twitter, but many of its 85 million members pay for premium accounts with extra business networking features and the company pitches advertisers with user demographics skewing heavily toward the upper-middle class and above. Those two revenue streams have helped the company grow substantially since it launched in 2003, 1 year ahead of Facebook and 3 years ahead of Twitter.

The man who ran that obnoxious avatar social network Meez for four years, Sean Ryan, has taken a position as the head of Facebook's gaming platform, according to a report this afternoon by Kara Swisher.

Ryan has held a number of positions throughout the last 15 years, including running Listen.com, which acquired the company that became Rhapsody and then sold to Real Networks. He was an outspoken critic of Microsoft's Zune, its licensing arrangements with major labels and the impact they had on the rest of the music industry. "I understand that in a capitalist society the labels are just maximizing returns wherever they can," he wrote in 2006, "but this deal is the slippery slope to Hell for all other players in the category." Sounds like a fun guy to be in charge of games at Facebook.

The link sharing service AddThis, which said this month that it's now tracking the interests of more than 1 billion people across the web, has published an infographic breaking down the most popular destinations for content shared through its little widget. Sites with an AddThis widget (like ours, above) allow readers to send pages of interest to friends through 300 different methods. What's the most popular way people share?

Facebook. Now more than ever, AddThis reports that Facebook's share of sharing grew from 33% last year to 44%. The company says that email, the second most popular method of sharing through its service, is 38% bigger than sharing on Twitter! And MySpace, though in sharp decline (down 27%), remains very popular. There are of course many different ways to share content, but these numbers from AddThis are quite interesting none the less. If you're not making it easy for website visitors to share your content by email, for example, you're probably making a big mistake.

News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by Betaworks in conjunction with The New York Times, has just started accepting invite requests. As part of the partnership deal, The New York Times took an equity stake in Bit.ly, a URL-shortening service from Betaworks, the technology incubator behind several notable social Web companies, including Twitter dashboard TweetDeck, real-time analytics service Chartbeat and audience engagement platform SocialFlow.

How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.

Facebook's data team proved once again today that when you analyze a large set of anonymous user data from the world's biggest social network, you can learn some very interesting things about the state of humanity.

In a blog post titled What's on your mind?, the company disclosed the results of its text analysis of 1 million anonymized messages. Among the findings: Young people swear more than older people and older people talk about other people more than just themselves. Popular people are more likely to talk about other people, TV and movies, to swear and use religious words. Less popular people are more likely to talk about work, sleeping, eating and thinking. These are but a few of the many observations made by the in-house data team. The biggest question about the data remains unanswered, though: what could a world of independent researchers discover in this data?

IPhone photo sharing application Instagram announced today that it has hit 1 million registered users, a mere 10 weeks after the app launched to the public. The company had all kinds of odds against it, yet here it is - fast growing and widely loved. As M.G. Siegler wrote in a good profile of Instagram today, it took Foursquare a year to hit 1 million users and Twitter, two years.

Only time will tell how well this relatively simple app holds up its market share in the crowded world of mobile photo sharing. Its users like the filters it offers, the community they find there and the ease of cross-posting Instagrammed photos out to other networks like Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare. It's really as simple as that; and look at all the reasons that logic would imply that it shouldn't have worked.

One of the great promises of Internet TV is the ability to facilitate real-time conversations about what we're watching right alongside the show itself. Social media apps help connect TV viewers with a larger audience, well beyond the living room, so to speak. By checking in and talking to other viewers and fans, particularly right as we're watching, we're able to share our reviews and recommendations - not to mention, our banter and commentary - in ways that help increase our enjoyment and engagement with what we watch.

Here are some of our recommendations for apps to make your TV viewing more social.