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After an enterprising hacker discovered a privacy problem in beloved new social app Path yesterday, its creators have issued an update and an apology. "We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you our users, first," CEO Dave Morin writes.

Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.

Last week, I got a kind of tweet I hadn't seen before. It was an audio-tweet from TinyVox, an app for iOS and Android that lets users send voice messages to anyone on the Web or just keep them as memos. That doesn't sound like a new idea, but that's the point. As you can see from the interface, TinyVox is all about recovering an old, beloved medium we've lost: the heartfelt mixtape.

My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.

Path is a lovely app. It pushes all the right buttons. It's mobile, it's tactile, it's personal, it's full of people we love and moments that matter to us. It makes us feel good. It's got all the greatest hits a post-Facebook social app should have. It's also free.

"Facebook will always be free," it tells us, so free is now the standard. Free apps are expensive, though; we pay with our data. Whenever Facebook or Google messes with our privacy, this is the cost of doing business for free. Path is no different. It's already using our personal data in ways we didn't expect. Arun Thampi discovered today that it uploads the entire iPhone address book to its servers. Surprised? Don't be.

Let's be grown up about this. Pinterest is an app for sharing lists of scrumptious-looking stuff. It's not for girls or guys, it's for people who like looking at things. The story I've heard is that it was designed for architects and designers and "then brides found it." This is why, my sources explain, it tends toward the jewelry-and-table-settings end of the spectrum.

But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you're following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google's efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it's better for users.

Last week was the first time I'd ever been called for jury duty. I put it on the RWW team calendar weeks in advance. I figured I'd miss one day at my desk. I'd spend it sitting in a waiting room, voraciously reading Twitter and shouting from the sidelines. I was wrong. I was chosen for a jury trial that lasted all week. I sat in the voir dire session, answered questions honestly, and before I knew it, I was in the booth.

Before long, I could tell why I was chosen. It was a civil case, and practically all the character evidence was in the form of email, Facebook and Myspace posts. That's all we had to juxtapose with the in-person testimony and figure out who was telling the truth. It was a bit embarrassing at first. What did this have to do with justice? But that became clear. There are lots of new lessons to learn about being civil in an online society, and judges and juries are how we common-law countries work that stuff out.

This was the year social networks became normal. Next time you're in a crowded restaurant, close your eyes and listen to the chatter around you. Count how many times you hear the word "Facebook" in an hour. This year, the number of people on Facebook reached 800 million. Remember when it was for college students only?

Google+ also launched this year. It's not just a new social network; it's what Google+ chief Vic Gundotra called "the + part" of the new Google. Every part of the Google experience, especially search, involves social connections now. And Twitter was no also-ran in 2011. It became a system-level part of every iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on Apple's new iOS 5. In the ongoing war of the social networks, this year's pivotal battles were over three key territories: identity, location and sharing. How did it play out?

What do you get when you combine gamification, social and beer? No, the answer isn't just "a really geeky party." You get Untappd a social network with the motto, drink socially. Greg Avola, one of the founders for Untappd, was one of the first speakers today at Monktoberfest. Avola shared insights into what people drink, how to motivate trying new beers and Web development for mobile.

If you're not familiar with Untappd, Avola might describe it as "the Foursquare for beer," but with one difference – there's a point to Untappd. That is, instead of just checking into a location, you're checking into a beer and sharing that information with your friends.

Google just announced that its social search results will now include public Google Plus posts. Since the expiration of Google's realtime search agreement with Twitter last month, it hasn't been clear how Google will continue to integrate posts from social networks into search results. Now that Google's in-house social network will provide a stream of content, Google can try to build out its social search out from there.

For users logged into their Google Accounts, searches will now display public Google Plus posts from people in their circles as search results, right alongside web pages. If it's a link, for example, that link will show up like any other Web result would, but the person who posted it will be displayed underneath it, along with the date of the post.

BetterWorks, a young Los Angeles-based employee rewards company, is announcing a $8 million Series A round of financing from Redpoint Ventures. BetterWorks' total funding, after an early round of financing from angel investors, now stands at $10 million. Paige Craig, CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks, says the company plans to use the financing to scale out to into the top 20 U.S. markets, and add social features to the platform by the end of August.

Forget Guitar Hero. Much more is possible in the world of musical gaming. Audiosurf has created what Alec Meer from PC Gamer UK calls "A near-religious musical gaming experience." It's a racing game that uses audio files of your choice to generate 3-D courses. The whole mood, even the speed of the ride, is determined by the songs you choose. You collect colored blocks that appear along the course as you go, and you compete online for the highest scores on the same songs.

Audiosurf employs user-generated content and both friendly and competitive online social layers. It's not just for racing; you can discover and share new music along the way.