Getting off the grid just isn’t what it used to be, The Onion reports. Which is good, because I was planning on dropping off the map for a bit sometime soon. Just as long as it’s to somewhere I can check in from. [The Onion] More&nbsp…

AshleyMadison.com, the largest online “dating” site made for adulterers, has their advertising actively blocked by Facebook, Google and Microsoft. They’re not letting the site buy keywords and ads, even though they let competing sites do…

Research firm eMarketer estimates that more than half of adult internet users in the US were logging on to Facebook at least once per month at the end of last year. In 2011, the company forecasts that 132.5 million US web users will use the site monthly. Twitter, it adds, will enjoy faster growth rates in the near future but continue to attract ‘relatively few’ online Americans.

An increase of 13.4 percent in the number of users would mean Facebook will reach almost 9 in 10 social network users and 57.1 percent of Internet users this year.

Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook, is unveiling the first virtual shopping mall on the social network. Comprised of all the stores that use Payvment’s retail app for Facebook, the Mall offers over one million products from 50,000 retailers in a centralized place.

Payvment’s Facebook App, which launched in November of 2009, lets anyone create a retail store on the social network. The app lets you set up products, categories of products (i.e. shoes, T-shirts, sweaters), import photos, list terms of service and shipping options and more. Once you set up your online shop on Facebook, it will show up in a separate tab on your profile or page under “storefront”.

Here’s another one for the “dumb crims” section of Gizmodo: Rodney Knight, who took a photo posing with his stolen loot whilst at his victim’s house. He then posted it on the homeowner’s son’s Facebook…

I’m not sure exactly how easy (or difficult) it is to come by stuff like this, but I for one thought it was pretty cool.

Eli Feldblum and Mayer Reich, co-founders of RankAbove, emailed me a number of documents this morning that Facebook used to send potential advertisers back when they were just getting started (and when the fledgling company was still called TheFacebook).

The docs were originally sent to Feldblum by Kevin Colleran – the longest employee at Facebook other than founder Mark Zuckerberg – who still works there as Global Sales Lead, after they had met at a digital marketing conference. The date: Thursday, May 19, 2005.

The BMW Connected app has been available for a few months now, following in the footsteps of Mini Connected as it sits there, and taunting you from the App Store. We knew cars supporting the feature would be coming in March, and now we know which ones…

As part of today’s roll-out of Gingerbread updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, Google also took an aggressive jab at Facebook: it has removed the ability of Facebook users to merge their ‘Facebook phone directory’ with the Contacts application on the Nexus S. In doing so Google has rekindled the battle over contacts that it initiated last November, in which Google has argued that Facebook is locking up user data. But before we get into the implications, it’s prudent to explain how things have worked until this point.

Right now when you fire up the Android Facebook application on the Nexus S for the first time, you’re given the option to ‘Sync friends with Contacts’. Enable the feature, and the next time you open your Android address book you’ll see your Facebook contacts — including their phone numbers, assuming they’ve added them to their Facebook profiles — listed alongside the contacts stored in your Google address book. In short, your Facebook and Google contacts are all seamlessly listed in the same place. It’s pretty nice.

But now Google has decided to turn off the feature on the grounds that users can’t export any of their Facebook contact data — they can see it in their address book, but the data isn’t actually stored as part of the phone’s contacts database.

You know that Android 2.3.3 update that’s trickling out to Nexus S smartphones right now? Google’s decided to take this opportunity to push its data portability agenda with regards to Android. Simply put, the feature of the Facebook for Android app to …

Back in 2005, Chris Putnam needed a hobby. The one he settled on, a series of Facebook hacks and pranks—including one that made your profile page look like MySpace—ended up scoring him a jo…