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The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."

Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...

Patent-holding company Lodsys has been going after small-time iOS developers, sending them "notice" letters which claim the developers are infringing on one of Lodsys' patents for in-app purchasing technology. Lodsys is demanding that developers license the patent from them for 0.575% of the U.S. revenue generated using in-app purchases. Although Apple has licensed the patent itself, Lodsys explains via blog post that "the scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide 'pixie dust' to bless another third-party business applications [sic]."

Apple's lawyers are said to be looking into the matter.

While the developer community waits to hear from Apple, there is much confusion about what's really going on here, and what should be done now. Below are a few sources that can help you better understand the Lodsys situation.

The free iPhone app for TechDygest has hit the iTunes app store and could be a good way for you to quickly catch up on technology news on the go. The app is similar to web aggregator Techmeme but with some additional features that really add to the user experience.

For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.

Technology news aggregator Techmeme sent an email today to a select group of readers it has put on a whitelist of Twitter users whose short commentary about news of the day will appear automatically on the site. Techmeme has been a trailblazer in news technology for years and today's experiment is something other media outlets would likely love to implement in the future as well.

Site founder Gabe Rivera downplayed the news in a conversation with me, but I think it's a big deal. The leading technology industry news aggregator continues to move from nearly 100% automated link analysis at its birth five years ago, to half-human assisted with the hiring first of Megan McCarthy two years ago and later a team of editors and now this - a direct line to add smart quips to clusters of highlighted, long-form coverage of news events.

Tech news aggregator site Techmeme got its start in 2005 as an automated, algorithmic collection of blog posts organized according to inbound links and blogosphere conversations. When we first reviewed the site, we noted that "the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won't do." Today, that's all changed.

Techmeme editor and founder Gabe Rivera announced this morning, appropriately by Tweet, that the site would now be including Tweets among the up-to-the-moment headlines.

This week, leading tech news aggregator Techmeme turned 5 years old. The service launched in September 2005, under the name tech.memeorandum, and ReadWriteWeb was one of the first media publications to review it.

In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs. In 2010, Techmeme tracks all types of media web sites. Everything from news wires, newspapers, professional blogs, corporate blogs and personal blogs. That's been a natural evolution, as blogs have become more like newspapers and magazines - and vice versa. What's been more surprising is Techmeme's shift from full automation to a mix of algorithms and human curation. In this interview with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, we talk about these and other changes over the past 5 years.

You may feel like all the tech press has talked about this week is Apple's new iPhone 4. If you thought that was literally the case, though, you'd be wrong. We did some counting and dividing and looked at the number of headlines containing the words Apple or iPhone across a number of online news outlets this week: Techmeme, Google News, Digg and the finest tech blog in the land, ReadWriteWeb.

Our conclusion? The media is talking about plenty of other things! There were also some surprises in the numbers. We also spoke with Gabe Rivera, founder of tech news blog aggregator Techmeme, whom we caught red-handed being more Apple-centric than any of these other sources. Even his site talks less about Apple than we expected, though.

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.

It's been nearly 4 years since news aggregation site Techmeme (or tech.memeorandum, as it was called back then) launched to the world. Since then it's grown to be the leading aggregator of tech news in the blogosphere. There have been no shortage of pretenders to the throne over the years, particularly from startups hoping to crack the elusive "personalization" nut. What could be better than a personalized, automatically filtered page of news for you to peruse over your coffee each day? However Techmeme founder, Gabe Rivera, has been consistently skeptical of personalized news over the years, claiming that it's too hard a problem.

Love it or hate it, but there's no arguing that the go-to aggregator for finding the top tech news of the day all on one page is none other than the news portal Techmeme. It's the site that catches you up when you get behind, lets you know what happened while you slept, and tracks the buzz (and yes, the echoes, too) of the tech blogosphere. Other competitors exist, but no one - not even Google - seems to be able to compete.

So why even bother covering yet another Techmeme wannabe? Because competition is important. Techmeme may do a great job, but innovation can still be found elsewhere.