The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission.

Facebook has confirmed to us this morning that it did indeed acquire the Baltmore-based software firm WhoGlue earlier this month. WhoGlue builds social networking software for membership organizations (like college alumni networks, for example) and apparently had the fortuity to file a patent on something called  “Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods”  in 2001, three years before Facebook existed. The two went to court over the patent in 2009 and the case ended in a “very positive way “ for WhoGlue in March 2010

SlideShare , the content sharing platform for business documents, videos, and presentations, has grown into a sizable platform.

When Cyber Monday rolls around, everyone’s eyes dart to the big boys like Amazon and Newegg for cheap goods, but niche retailers have their own deals too. Case in point: the DIY repair nuts at iFixit have whipped together a nifty bundle for aspiring iPhone modders who would like to see the fruits of Apple’s design savvy instead of an opaque black panel. For $29, you get one of iFixit’s transparent rear plates for either the GSM iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S , along with the necessary tools to do the job

The European Commission is going after web companies over their failures to explain how their ad targeting systems work. But it’s not hitting the bulls-eye, because it’s confusing targeting with data protection, which are not quite the same issue.

When 90% of people discover an event they might want to buy tickets for, they leave the purchase funnel as they try to convince friends to join them. This group decision process is clumsy, and poor retention reduces sales for promoters

Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day brought record mobile engagement for PayPal, with 511 percent and a 538 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2010, respectively. It looks like Cyber Monday is also bringing record sales for the payments giant. The company is reporting that as of 11 a.m

Online commerce giant eBay this morning ran a Cyber Monday deal for a white Apple iPad 2 WiFi 16GB, selling the popular tablet for $449 or exactly $50 off the MSRP (+ free shipping). Turns out a lot of people figured that was a great deal. And they were right, too.

Facebook’s Thanksgiving weekend platform updates include alphabetical app sorting, a new layout for fixed width apps on the Canvas Page, and secure video embedding support and a tweak to the Dev App requests flow that makes it easier for developers to find apps to which they’ve recently been added. As detailed on the developers blog , apps that appear in the Canvas Bookmark module are now sorted alphabetically instead of arranged by frequency of visits. This is an improvement for discovery, as thumbnail visual bookmarks above the text bookmarks already displayed the apps a user accessed most often

To paraphrase Cracker, I suspect what the world needs now is another method to assess the social metrics of various museums around the world like I need a hole in the head, but presumably this information is important to someone out there, so here goes. Museum-Analytics.org is a site with a simple mission: to calculate the social reach of various museums.