Those with access to Facebook’s  Questions feature are seeing a new design of the home page publisher used to share status updates and other sorts of content. Users must now decide whether they want to publish a simple status update, a question, upload a photo, or post a link and website preview. While displaying the different things you can do with the publisher, the design change hides the status update prompt “What’s on your mind?” and the rest of the publisher behind an additional click, which could reduce sharing

Every big publisher on the Web wants to be able to serve up ad-friendly videos, but creating them can be a pain.

If you had told developers during the time of the earliest generation of social games on the Facebook Platform – games like Vampires and Zombies, circa mid 2007 – that The Walt Disney Company would be acquiring an app developer for somewhere between $550 – $750 million three years later, most would have been very skeptical, if not incredulous. But Disney’s acquisition of large social game developer and publisher Playdom yesterday marks another symbolic moment in the evolution of social gaming on Facebook (and MySpace, where Playdom invested early and has had success). Following EA’s acquisition of Playfish last November, Disney is the first media giant to pull the social gaming acquisition trigger in a big way

For some time now, Twitter has been working on a new API: the Twitter Streaming API. The idea behind it is to allow third-party Twitter clients to receive continuous tweet updates in realtime

It seems that all Kindle orders have been frozen and, it seems, that Jeff Bezos is hanging around New York right now and will speak on Charlie Rose tonight. While I seriously doubt that Bezos will whip out the Kindle 3 on the Charlie Rose show (he’ll probably talk about ebooks outselling hardbacks) it seems there is definitely something afoot.

We broke the news yesterday on Facebook’s most recent acquisition – social activity service Hot Potato. Like most of Facebook’s acquisitions, this deal looks to be mostly about getting a great team of engineers on board, not about the product

Knol, Google’s platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment

Unless someone at Research In Motion is taking the time to screw with all of us, it looks like we might have an official name for their long-rumored BlackBerry tablet project : BlackPad. Word of the name comes not from a disgruntled employee, nor from a prototype left at a bar; this one’s straight out of a good ol’ fashion WHOIS lookup on a domain. According to registration records, RIM purchased BlackPad.com just days ago.

If we’re hearing any one thing from developers that is scaring’em away from Android, it’s that Android apps are just way, way too easy to pirate.

Today, Facebook launches a new in-house application called Questions which aims to make it easy for users to get recommendations, advice, and opinions on any subject.