The LinkedIn social network, popular among business people and professionals, has reportedly reached the 50 million member mark.

LinkedIn grew from 45 million registered people in August to 50 million by mid October.

According to recent traffic statistics from comScore , LinkedIn continues to grow consistently in unique visitors.

In September, LinkedIn attracted 9 million unique visitors in the U.S., up from 8.7 million unique visits in August.

However, LinkedIn’s growth is mostly due to increasing international users. LinkedIn grew from 18 million unique visits in July to 20 million unique visits in August – Worldwide.

Half of LinkedIn’s registered users are now international, including 11 million registered users in Europe and 3 million registered users in India. India is now the fastest growing user base for the LinkedIn social network.

Source: LinkedIn.com.

Another criminal caught on Facebook.

Maxi Sopo was a fugitive on the run until he updated his Facebook profile and notified his social network of friends, including a former Justice Department official, that he was hiding out in Cancun, Mexico.

Maxi Sopo went on bragging to his Facebook friends about what a good time he was having living in paradise, ironically, one of his Facebook buddies happened to be a former Justice Department employee.

Sopo had been on the run from charges of bank fraud in Seattle, Washington, when he unknowingly gave himself up through updates on his Facebook profile.

Sopo came to the US around 2003 from Cameroon and initially made his living selling roses in Seattle bars and nightclubs before allegedly moving on to bank fraud. Sopo drove a rented car to Mexico in early 2009, after discovering that federal law enforcement agents were investigating his bank fraud scheme.

Investigators searched social networks like MySpace and Facebook couldn’t find Sopo were unable to locate his whereabouts in Mexico.

A few months later, a secret service agent searched Facebook again and found a profile listing for MaxiSopo. His profile picture showed him partying in front of logos of BMW and Courvoisier cognac, while wearing a black jacket decorated with a distinct white lion emblem.

Sopo’s profile was set to private, but his list of friends were not. The US agent then searched Sopo’s friend list only to find out that one of Sopo’s friends had listed an affiliation with the US Department of Justice. The agent then sent a message to the friend requesting a phone call.

The former Justice Department official said he had met Sopo in some Cancun’s nightclubs, but did not know Sopo well and had no idea that Sopo was a wanted fugitive.

The former Justice official later found out where Sopo was staying in Mexico gave that information to the US agent. As a result, Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September and Sopo is waiting to be extradited to the US.

Source: Guardian UK.

Recent changes to the Whitepages.com people search will bring directory assistance listings into the Web 2.0 era.

WhitePages.com is now the first major online 411 people search in the United States to let people edit their own residential phone, business phone and street address listings.

These custom directory assistance listing options allow people to have more control over their directory assistance information by letting them determine what information is public or private, as well as decide how they would like people to contact them — cell phone number, email address, text messaging, land phone line or physical mail.

WhitePages.com has been one of the top people search and 411 directory assistance searches for over 10 years with their up-to-date public records, including: telephone numbers, public record data and web information.

By letting people edit and change their personal contact information on Whitepages.com, they are improving the accuracy of their people search records and the ability of people to find each other and connect online.

WhitePages directory assistance has information on over 200 million people in the US.

In July 2009 Whitepages launched their “Add Your Listing” tool that lets people create their own contact listings with their cell phone numbers and email addresses along with privacy features.

Currently over one million people have added their own listing information with this service, making it easier to find friends, family members, military buddies, co-workers, and neighbors using the new Whitepages people search.

This new personal listing tool is the most recent effort by WhitePages.com to remain competitive in the people search area by creating a go-to people search with current and accurate contact listings.

Later this Whitepages.com will give people the ability to add their social network profiles to their WhitePages listings.

People and business professionals can take use these new personal listing tools at Whitepages.com.

To edit an existing listing, you simply search for your name and address and click on the “Is this you? Edit” option next to your listing. To create a new residential or business listing, you can select the “Add Your Listing” option. You will be asked to sign in or join WhitePages.com, if you are not already a member.

Bloomberg News recently interviewed Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable.com, on social media, web 2.0 and the rising success and profitability of the Mashable brand.

Some facts about Pete Cashmore and Mashable:

- Cashmore founded Mashable.com in 2005 at the age of 19.

- The Mashable blog is focused almost exclusively on Social Networks, Social Media and Web 2.0 news.

- Mashable.com gets over 10 million monthly pageviews.

- Pete Cashmore was named one of the Web’s top 25 celebrities by Forbes in 2009.

- Mashable.com is listed by Technorati as one of the top 10 blogs in the world.

- Mashable was ranked as one of the world’s most profitable blogs by BusinessWeek.

You can view the Pete Cashmore interview by Bloomberg News below:

Google Earth is being used with CCTV video to view people and vehicles in real time by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The potential and possible use of this new search technology will be viewed with excitement by some people and fear by others.

Right now the technology makes the people and vehicles anonymous and virtual; but the future of this technology along with the proliferation of CCTV cameras and RFID tagging technology could make for an advanced people search and car tracking system.

You can watch a video of this new search and tracking technology below:

Source: Gizmodo.com

A Tennessee woman has been arrested for “poking” someone on the Facebook social network.

Shannon D. Jackson was arrested on September 25th for allegedly violating a court order of protection.

Jackson is accused of using a virtual Facebook “poke” to communicate with a Hendersonville woman, which violates a court order of protection, that states “no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.”

Poking is a social networking feature that is unique to Facebook that allows one user to virtually “poke” another user on the popular social network.

Hendersonville, TN police have copies of the page that shows the alleged victim was “poked,” according to a filed affidavit.

If convicted, Shannon D. Jackson could get up to 11 months, 29 days in prison and fined up to $2,500.

Source: Tennessean.com

Online dating site Gelato is fast becoming the Facebook & Twitter of singles sites.

Gelato mixes social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others with real-time search into it’s online dating site to give people a new way to find a date.

The idea behind Gelato’s social dating 2.0 site is to give people insights into a potential date by allowing them to search for people based on their Facebook updates, Twitter tweets, Flickr pictures etc.

Gelato users simply sign up for an account and connect it to their Facebook or Twitter profiles, then users answer some typical demographic questions common on dating sites like: relationship status, relationship interests, ethnicity, religion, politics etc.

The interesting mix to this new online dating site is users can then link a number of their other social networking and Web 2.0 accounts to Gelato, including: Netflix, Hulu, Flickr, Amazon, Pandora, and Last.fm.

In addition, people can specify public or restricted access to their network activity and updates on Gelato. All of your profile updates on the linked sites will appear in your Gelato “lifestream”. This personal information and potential date bait is then searchable by other Gelato users – as long as you have approved your feeds for public viewing.

Gelato users can then search Gelato for recent profile updates on any topic from entertainment to politics to find a like-minded mate or ( since opposites attract ) someone with totally different views and interests.

However, the only people you will find through a Gelato search will be other Gelato members who have agreed to open their social network updates and Web 2.0 feeds to the public.

If you are comfortable with allowing Gelato’s online dating site access to your Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Hulu updates and feeds and other profile information, then Gelato may be a good option for finding your next date.

A real-time dating and love search. What will they think of next.

You can visit the Gelato online dating site @ ge.la.to

Source:Yahoo.com

The real-time search wars are getting bigger each day –

Twitter is reportedly in separate negotiations with both Google and Microsoft to supply their social network’s huge amount of real-time tweet data to the two big search engines.

Sources state that the deals would include a license of Twitter’s complete tweet feed and using it for real-time search results in the Bing and Google search engines. The deals could involve millions of dollars in revenue for Twitter.

Twitter has a large and possibly lucrative collection of fresh, user-generated data that is the driving force behind real-time search results. The Twitter social network collects this constant stream of new information from its 54 million monthly users in the form of tweets.

Sources say the deals would be nonexclusive, since Twitter’s management wants to stay independent in the escalating search engine struggle between Google and Bing.

Source: Seattle PI

The New York City Police Department is building a database of cell phone numbers and their owners. NYPD officers have been advised to record the serial numbers on suspects’ cell phones in an effort to track them against past or future criminal activity.

The cell phone database could be a powerful tool for police investigations into drug networks and other crimes, according to police.

An internal NYPD memo states that police officers should record the International Mobile Equipment Identity number on a suspect’s cell phone during or after an arrest.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity number is recorded by cell phone service providers when mobile calls are made.

This cell phone information could allow police to match a cell phone calls made by one suspect to a phone used by other criminals.

Some limitations on the usefulness of this information – Chinese-made cell phones sold in India have the same number and some other foreign sold cell phones are encoded with false numbers.

Civil libertarians are concerned by the cell phone database, since normally a warrant is required to access calls made by a person or phone numbers in a person’s address book.

One civil libertarian said that it looks like New York police officers are “taking phones apart to get information” without the required warrants.

The cell phone data will be joined with another records database of over 20 million 911 calls that the NYPD has been collecting.

The New York Police Department began building the 911 call database for incidents involving a police response in 2003.

Source: NY Daily News

Along with the rise in social networks like Twitter and Facebook has come a constant stream of fresh information from these new social media sites.

As a result, real time search engines have arrived on the search scene to index and organize the latest news buzz from these online social circuits. We review some of the better real time search engines below.

– Twitter Real Time Search – Twitter’s own real time search is somewhat limited to just the freshest tweets on any given subject and trending topics, including any shortened links that appear in the tweets. Twitters own social network search is good if you don’t mind tweet overload in your search topic, but the results are pretty limited as far as real time search goes.

– TweetMeme [ US Alexa Rank: 1,189 ] – One of the first real time search engines and, according to Alexa rankings, the most trafficked real time search engines out of the standalone real time search engines on our list. Users can browse popular links by subject or search on a topic. A great search engine for finding the freshest real-time news, map and video links determined by Tweet popularity.

– Topsy [ US Alexa Rank: 5,126 ] – Topsy is another very busy real-time search engine for finding trending topics and fresh search results based on Tweet popularity. Topsy’s real time search results also include top authors and news sources for a given topic.

– OneRiot [ US Alexa Rank: 6,704 ] – OneRiot is a real rising star in the real-time search space. Topsy allows users to browse trending topics from the real-time web or search for web and video results as ranked by popularity on social media sites like Twitter and Digg. OneRiot is one of the best real-time search engines on the scene.

– CrowdEye [ US Alexa Rank: 22,695 ] – The CrowdEye real-time search results are a bit, shall we say “crowded”, search results pages show graphs of tweet volume; popular links; current tweets; related topics; related searches ( which often do not seem at all related to the original search ) as well as Google display ads, which often times do not seem related to the real-time search or results. This is definitely not one of our favorite real time search engines.

– Collecta [ US Alexa Rank: 34,414 ] – The Collecta real-time search engine seems just like a slow copy of Twitter’s own social network search, filled with Tweet overload. Collecta will need to speed up and innovate to stay in the real-time search engine race.

– Scoopler [ US Alexa Rank: 81,729 ] – The Scoopler real-time search engine has “real” potential. Though, as of yet, not one of our top pics for real-time search. Scoopler’s real-time search results show both popular links, video and image results next to live Tweet and Digg updates side by side.

While we encourage readers to try out all of the real time search engines above and experiment with searching for people, topics and current events on all the search engines, a few of the real time searches stand out above the rest.

Our favorite real time search engines are Tweetmeme, Topsy and OneRiot, due to their speed of service and innovation in delivering real time search results for users.