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The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook's IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the President of the United States hangs out. One name you never hear is one that was all the rage just a few years ago.

MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

We love the NBC cult-hit Parks & Recreation which features Rob Lowe as a hyper-healthy and super-enthusiastic city manager, so we're always a little concerned when we hear rumors that the show may get canceled.

So, against that backdrop we got a little suspicious when Lowe, just ahead of a Thursday appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show and the Saturday premiere of a Lifetime movie he's starring in, tweeted that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was going to retire after missing the entire 2011 season.

Nodejitsu, the original Node.js platform-as-a-service, has open-sourced several of its tools, some of which are used in its own production stack. These could be useful to those running their own Node.js servers or private clouds. Some of the tools are very simple, like forever, which ensures that a script runs continuously. Others are more involved, such as the application server haibu and the cloud deployment tool jitsu.

You can find all sort Node.js goodness at Nodejitsu's GitHub.

New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew, is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer.

Redmond, Washington's Microvision, producers of miniaturized technologies, announced it has made its first big sale of its PicoP laser projection display engine.

The unidentified customer "plans to embed the PicoP engine inside a high-end mobile media player for release in late 2010 and plans to announce its launch at that time." It is worth noting that the company has made technology designed to be used by the iPod and iPhone.

There's a new iPhone application from Favstar.fm which launched late last night in the iTunes App Store. Like the Favstar website, the new Favit app (iTunes link) aggregates the "best" Twitter posts based on the number of stars they receive from other Twitter users. However, while starred tweets should in theory point to interesting and useful content that people want to save for later viewing, the Favstar service tends to favor humorous tweets instead. The new iPhone app does the same, which makes it the perfect addition to your collection of time-wasting apps for curing boredom.

First there were movies, then there was TV, now prepare for the entertainment platform of the future: the "mobile immersive experience." That's actually not it's official name, but is a term that was invented on the spot this week at a dinner gathering of Nokia execs, journalists, and oh yes - Tim Kring, the creator and executive producer of NBC's "Heroes." He was there to talk about what is the first attempt at a new entertainment experience using mobile as the platform. And it's going to be nothing like anything you've ever seen before.

In the introduction to his book, Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, wrote that life is about entertainment. He might seem the last person you'd imagine as focused on entertainment, until you realize that Linux started as a hobby.

Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.