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Yesterday Facebook began rolling out sponsored stories in the main news feed. At the end of 2011, when this announcement first broke, a Facebook spokesperson told us that these ads would be clearly marked "sponsored" so as not to confuse them with other stories. But it looks like - surprise! - Facebook changed its mind somewhere between the announcement and the rollout, and decided to call the ads "featured" instead of "sponsored." This is confusing for the user but rather advantageous to the advertiser.

A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn't counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.

Several of the largest Interent firms - including Google, Facebook and Twitter - are backing alternate legislation being proposed to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

In 2008, the same year that Facebook launched its big redesign, Researcher Nick Burcher started collating Facebook usage statistics by country. The 2011 winner for fastest growing user base is Brazil, which grew 300% over the past year. Japan is in a close second, with 254% growth over the past year. But a recent Forrester report notes that the Japanese prefer to stay anonymous online, prefer not to use Facebook because it requires users to sign up with their real names. This high rate of growth in Japan goes in direct opposition from a January 2011 NYTimes story about the country's complete lack of interest in Facebook.

Last night, I pulled out my phone, snapped a photo and began cycling through Instagram filters looking for the best one. Nothing unusual there. I chose to share this particular image on Twitter and Facebook as well (something many Instagrammers do somewhat judiciously, lest we be spammy), and a few moments later noticed something a little different. Suddenly, I was getting an uptick in Facebook notifications telling me that people liked my photo. Not my post but my photo. Wait, what photo?

For as long as Instagram has been around, it has published photos at unique, Instagram-hosted URLs, which were then linked to on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The link to the image could be retweeted or "liked" on Facebook, but the image itself remained off on a cold, lonely island on Instagram's servers. The only people that could interact with the photo itself were your Instagram followers who, of course, could only do so using the photo-sharing service's iOS app. Well, that just changed.

We're written about the Facebook Timeline extensively here at ReadWriteWeb, but we've never come out and asked you whether or not you will spend time editing yours. Facebook has attempted to catalog your life automatically, but if we want our Timeline to reflect all of our important life events, that means editing it. We wondered if you were prepared to do so.

Will You Update Your Facebook Timeline with Past Life Events?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks' need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks - by implication, Facebook - would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

"Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers' financial services strategies," reads Weiss' conclusions, "and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users."

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won last night's Iowa Caucus by eight votes, and the consensus on what role Twitter and social media played in the contest may be just as evenly split.

Jenn Deering Davis of TweetReach, a social media analytics service by San Francisco-based Appozite that tracks Twitter mentions and reach on a wide range of subjects, said Tuesday afternoon that volume about the Iowa caucus was "pretty low."

"We track more tweets in an hour about a single TV show than we have in five days about all nine candidates," she said.

Yet if you only paid attention to the social media scorecards leading up to Tuesday's race, Ron Paul would have been your clear-cut pick to win. While Paul finished a respectable third, his finish did not live up to the pre-caucus hype on Twitter and in the tech press.

One of the reasons why social media once again failed to predict election results is that it is still, by-and-large, a way for voters to connect and follow their favored candidates. Undecided voters may still be turning to mainstream and traditionally objective media sources, and may be less likely to post comments about a candidate on Facebook or retweet a campaign update.

Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.

Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

We all know that cyberspace can be a nasty place, but a new study from Bitdefender shows exactly how easy it is to compromise personal information across social media. The study found 100 people at random that fit into two categories - professional IT security workers and hackers - and used a phony social media account to gain each individual's trust over a period of weeks. Sadly, both groups gave out all sorts of information, including their password strategies, mother's maiden names, family details and address.