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Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Amazon has enabled a new feature in its Kindle store: e-book gift giving. Amazon's customers will now be able to give Kindle books to anybody with an e-mail address, whether they are existing Kindle users or not. According to Amazon, the Kindle store is "the first major bookstore to offer eBook gifting," though as we reported yesterday, the Kobo store now also allows its users to purchase e-books as gifts.

A few weeks ago we brought you a brief list of social networks for meeting and conversing with entrepreneurs, and in the comments section we received lots of suggestions that could have made the list as well. One such suggestion was Sprouter, which is, for lack of a better description and despite having a few unique features, a Twitter clone for entrepreneurs.

Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm, a status update service that allows users to update posts on over 50 social networks through SMS, mobile apps, IM services and 3rd party apps that support the service. Seesmic plans to integrate Ping.fm into all of its applications in the near future. In addition, Seesmic's users will be able to send updates to their favorite social networks through Ping.fm's email, SMS and IM gateways. Ping.fm's founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough will join Seesmic as full-time employees and continue to work on Ping.fm.

For once the Bay Area Rapid Transit service has more to brag about than its endless supply of used under-the-seat bubble gum and noxious mystery smells. According to its site, Bay Area Rapid Transit will be the first transit agency to partner with location-based game sensation Foursquare.

Facebook just launched status tagging for friends, pages, events and groups. The company has torn a page out of the Twitter playbook and plans to increase search functionality via the @ tag. Over the next few weeks Facebook users will be able to tag their friends, pages and groups in status messages. Similar to photo tagging, all those indicated in the tag will receive a notification. Said Facebook product manager Andrew Huang to Inside Facebook, "People use status updates to tell stories about real world experiences. This is about making the site more engaging."

Facebook just announced that administrators of Facebook Pages will be able to publish their updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. Administrators will decide which info to share from a Page including status updates, photos, notes and events. A number of well-known groups and celebrities are already using the feature including Dane Cook, Livestrong and the World Wildlife Fund.