The world, it seems, can't get enough social check-in service variants based on such services that launch on a regular basis. The latest calls itself Clingle by MyCityWay. Its "Clings" are bits of media (text, audio, photos) that users can leave for friends (other Clingle users) that are unlocked when these friends check-in to the location. It is a bit like a private geo-cache. Information can also be broadcast to friends in real-time. And, of course, like other social-geolocation services, deal [...]

Read More: Clingle Lets You Leave Private Text, Audio and Photo Messages for Friends at Check-in Locations

Text messages has, as many millions of frequent user know, earned is place as a high value tool despite its relatively low-tech nature in a world increasingly filled with smartphones and tablets. It works on nearly every phone regardless of how smart, or not, it is. It is so ubiquitess and useful that one company launched a service that speifically targets a perceived need in the K-12 school space.


Read More: ClassParrot: Secure Private School-related Text Messaging Between Teachers and Students

On Monday Spotify announced that their service is now freely available for anyone who wants to sign up, previously it was available only by invite. At that time Spotify also announced their participation with Facebook's "frictionless sharing" were the songs you listen to automatically appear in your friend's ticker and newsfeed without you needing to do anything. Several users did not like the idea and apparently Spotify has listen to them and has released an update with a private listening mode [...]

Read More: Spotify Update Brings Private Listening Mode

Wish that Spotify's Facebook sharing feature, introduced last week, was a little more selective? Your wish has been granted The comapny's CEO Daniel Ek tweeted that "We're rolling out a...

Read More: Spotify rolls out ‘Private Listening’ mode to counter Facebook sharing complaints

Google has today announced that it is bringing its full search product to Google+, greatly improving your ability to find things that you want to inside its new social network.Google has added the full power of its search engine to Google+, allowing you not just to search for People, but also topics, relevant posts and content from around the web all in one go. It will continue to search for people as well, but will return them as part of results with a much larger scope.When you search for topi [...]

Read More: Google adds search to Google+, letting you find public or private posts

UmeNow.com is positioning itself as the bold new player set to destroy Facebook's lead in the social networking universe. It's the first and only ad-free social communication service in the world that is totally focused on privacy.


Read More: A Mother Decides Facebook Isn’t Private Enough, Starts UmeNow

Soon Twitter and Facebook became popular services that looked and worked much like them emerged to meet the demand for closed private social messaging. Status.net (formerly Laconica), for example, is a Twitter clone while Yammer provides a Facebook-like experience in a private setting. Glassdoor appears to provide a closed audience take on Google+ Circles. The difference is that while Google+'s Circles is one-way (only the Circle creator knows who is in a Circle), members of a Glassdoor "Boards" [...]

Read More: Glassboard for Android & iPhone: Private Group Sharing

Anonymous made some more trouble this week by posting the names, home addresses, email addresses and passwords of 102 police officers who work for San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency.


Read More: Hackers Post BART Police Officers’ Private Information

We previously wrote about an upcoming change from Twitter that allows you to send private messages to larger/celebrity accounts even if they weren’t following you. Now there’s a new app (not from Twitter) that allows you to send a private message to anyone, regardless of whether they’re following you or not. This is done through Twitgram, which you can use to compose your message without a 140 character limit, to send directly to the user you want. It’s all possible through the web interface for [...]

Read More: The Twitgram app lets you send anyone private messages on Twitter