ReadWriteWeb

In a moment of passionate texting, they decided it was time...to share their passwords.

A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. They leave virtual residue on each others' Facebook walls, they send Facebook messages, they text each other and video chat. And they even share their passwords with each other.

One of the unexpected perks of starting work at ReadWriteWeb in December? No more Yammer.

This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.

Where were you on the Internet in 2010? What about in 2011? The folks over at Royal Pingdom have compiled a nice set of data for the Internet, by the Internet. That is, an entire list of data about email, websites, web servers, domain names by their .dot web addresses, Internet users by country, types of social media, web browser usage, mobile users, videos and images. We decided to take a look at the data points that tell us the most about the read/write web: websites and domain names, Facebook, Twitter and Internet users by continent. More importantly, we'll look at how the Internet of 2011 compares to the Internet of 2010.

No matter how many times I tell Facebook I want it to display the most recent updates from my friends first, it keeps reverting to highlighted stories. You can (attempt to) influence Facebook's sorting by manually tagging stories, but if Facebook really wants to separate the wheat from the chaff I can think of a few ways to do it.

Some say there are only seven basic literary plots in all the stories in the world. Likewise, you can boil down most Facebook updates into a handful of types – and I think many users would love to be able to filter out at least five of those types.

Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.

Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users' messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook's data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.

The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.

Facebook has already changed the way we communicate, creating virtual extensions of our real lives. Social networks are a microcosm of users' social worlds and a continuation of offline behaviors. But that's just for the regular folk - what about artists? How do artists use Facebook to augment their existing work, discuss ideas related to the work and think about the idea of online community?

To find out, I asked three artists who are rather active on Facebook: BRAVO art-reality TV star Young-Sun Han, San Francisco-based artist and GAP Storyteller Jason Hanasik and international artist Martha Rosler.

Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook's so-called frictionless sharing concept isn't going away anytime soon. From songs played on Spotify to articles read on the Washington Post, everything your friends consume via participating sites is broadcast to the news ticker in real time.

Today, the social TV and streaming media center service Boxee became the latest to join in on the trend when it announced a new partnership with Facebook. Users who opt in can automatically update Facebook about TV shows and other videos they watch through Boxee's interface.

If you think you're different on Facebook than you are in real life, you've got some explaining to do.

A 2011 study from the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Psychology called "Manifestations of Personality in Online Social Networks: Self-Reported Facebook-Related Behaviors and Observable Profile Information" published in the academic journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that Facebook users are no different online than they are offline. The study also revealed strong connections between real personality and Facebook-related behavior. Social and personality processes, the study says, accurately mirror non-virtual environments.

Old-line media companies are scrambling to partner with Web companies in their efforts to cover the 2012 election.

In Iowa, Fox News unveiled an exclusive partnership with Google. NBC News and Facebook have expanded a partnership to cover political polling. The Daily Beast is also working in cahoots with NBC.

Partnerships between media companies are nothing new: print publications have a long history of partnering with broadcast outlets on political polls and other news coverage. The question for these new media partnerships is who benefits? Viewers and readers, to an an extent, will always benefit from broader coverage, but in this case it may be the Web companies that are getting a bigger boost.