When Hot Potato launched at our Realtime Crunchup last November it was already a solid app . Then came a new version in March (just before SXSW), and it was even better . Today brings version 2.0 — and it’s the best yet

Performance advertising, and the offer walls that are familiar pitstops for many social game users, have been central to the discussion on monetization of social platforms since last fall. When criticism of low-quality and less-than-transparent offers came to light in that season’s offers controversy, developers, payments providers and observers wondered if the offers concept could regain not only its public image but also its monetization potential under new policy restrictions.

This morning, a number of major advocacy groups, including the ACLU, EFF, and CDT, sent Facebook an open letter detailing some of the outstanding issues with Facebook privacy.

Users are seeing more faces than ever in their feeds as Facebook complements more stories with multiple profile picture thumbnails. Friendship confirmation stories now display thumbnails of your friend’s new friends, and rows of thumbnails (we’ve seen as many as 17 at once) accompany profile pic change feed items

At the risk of pissing off our new office neighbors , I have a confession to make: I loathed the Yammer iPhone app. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yammer , and find it absolutely vital to our work. But the app was easily the least stable of the dozens of apps I have

This morning, news broke of a spiffy, and very powerful new feature on YouTube: a built-in video editor.

Women’s network Sugar Inc. raised a whopping new $30 million round of financing from Sequoia Capital on June 9, says Goldman Sachs in their quarterly Internet/Digital Media report. That report is based on data they obtained from Dow Jones VentureSource

Mobile search could grow from 9 percent of all queries this year to 20 percent by 2012, estimates RBC analyst Ross Sandler in a new report issued today. There is still a huge gap between mobile’s share of overall search queries and its share of search advertising

If there’s one area that Yahoo has been strong in over the past several years, it’s partnerships in mobile around the world.

Social email startup Xobni is channeling Microsoft today.