With Google rolling out its Google + service recently in an attempt to take some of Facebook’s social media dominance away, what’s Facebook to do to stay on top? Well, fear not, they’ve got something up their virtual sleeves. What is it? Read on.

Today, the social media giant unveiled a major addition to its service : video chat. Through a partnership with Skype, Facebook users will now be able to video chat with each other through the company’s new service.

The best part, it’s all free. The service works just like Skype’s normal video calling with video calls initiated from right in your Facebook profile with a simple click.

“A few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook,” said the company on its blog. “We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.”

Facebook will bring video chat to its users over the next few weeks. Or, if you can’t wait, click here to get it now.

How the once mighty have fallen. Remember when MySpace was the place to go for everything “social”? Well, those days are long over and now the site has been sold for quite a bargain price.

According to AllThingsD, Specific Media has acquired Myspace from News Corp. for $35 million. Which, as I said, is a real bargain considering NewsCorp paid $580 Million for it in 2005. I would call that a pretty big loss for NewsCorp. Myspace’s CEO, Mike Jones, will remain for “an interim period,” and the social network will lay off about 50% of its staff, which is around 200 people. Sorry to hear that.

MySpace’s decline in recent years is not really all that surprising considering how horrible the site is to navigate and, of course, due to the popularity of Facebook and Twitter. By comparison, Facebook looks like the most clean and easy to use UI ever invented, which we know isn’t really the case as it still has its share of problems as well.

Who knows, maybe MySpace will rebound and climb back out of the pit it finds itself in? Anything is possible and people do love an underdog. However, first order of business: a complete re-design. Then, we can talk.

As the E3 Expo gets closer expect a slew of new announcements to start coming out of the gaming sector. One of the first is Activision’s announcement this week of Call of Duty Elite, a new social network-style experience that will allow Call of Duty players to interact with each another in an entirely different way.

The new social network will have three parts: connect, compete, and improve. “Connect” will allow users to compete against friends, join groups, find players with similar interests and enter tournaments. Activision will provide both web and mobile interfaces for managing your Call of Duty information from multiple devices.

“Compete” will allow players to enter events and competitions with other players that have similar abilities. Activision promises real world and in-game prizes for this as well. “Improve” will provide users with a strategy guide to help them improve their gaming skills by following their performance and managing ongoing statistics.

“The average Call of Duty player spends 58 minutes per day playing multiplayer,” Activision Publishing CEO, Eric Hirshberg, said. “That is more than the average Facebook user spends per day on Facebook. And yet, right now, there are very few tools to unite and super charge that social community. Whether it’s allowing you to connect with your friends, or people of a similar skill level, people who live in your city, people who share your favorite passions, join competitive clans or social groups, or upload, view and comment on the incredible mass of player-generated content, or watch and comment on exclusive created content, Call of Duty Elite will give people more ways to connect with fellow players than ever before.”

According to Activision, most features of this upcoming service will be free. A premium package (details pending on that) will also be available. The service will enter public beta with Call of Duty: Black Ops this summer and will launch on November 8th with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Click through for the full press release and a video demo of the new service.

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I was surprised at how much trouble I had narrowing down my top ten movies this year.  My top 20 were all very close, but here are the movies that I ultimately enjoyed the most. I readily admit that I did not see near as many foreign films as I would have liked, but by the time I cover most of the mainstream fare, there is simply no time left.

Honorable Mentions: Fair Game, Tiny Furniture, Greenberg, Cyrus, The Tillman Story, The American, Mother and Child, Scott Pilgrim.

10. Waiting for Superman
This Documentary was equal parts frustrating, inspirational, and heartbreaking. Director Davis Guggenheim (No End in Sight) sheds light on the dismal state of our public school system. He follows the plight of several children who live in various geographic regions who are placing all of their hope for an decent education into lottery systems for charter or private schools. Guggenheim relies on their compelling stories for a narrative, while interspersing lots of graphics and cartoons illuminating some pretty harrowing statistics.

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Late yesterday, everyone’s favorite social media website Facebook announced an update for their Android version of the Facebook app. This update brings the application to version 1.5, for those of you who keep track of that sort of thing.

Some of the main features of this update include support for Facebook chat (In both background and foreground) as well as the much requested Push notifications. Unfortunately, Push notifications will only work on devices running Android 2.2 or higher.

The update also includes the requisite other “bug fixes” which are, let’s face it, nice to have. Sadly, still no photo tagging in this update. But I guess you can’t have everything. . . yet.

As usual, the update is available in the Android Market. If you do update, let us know your experiences, good or bad, in the comments. Now to start updating our Android phones here at the office.

For those who made the switch over to Facebook years ago, you more than likely abandoned your Myspace account either immediately or shortly thereafter. After that, the social networking site has gone through tons of facelifts and revamps in order to retain what little followers the site has. Those were all thanks to the site’s owner, News Corp, who purchased the Facebook competitor back in 2005.

Now, it seems that the media corporation may be pulling the plug on the site by the end of next years, says president Chase Carey. From THR.

Discussing online social network MySpace, Carey said he is happy with a just-launched redesign, but said that “current losses are not accceptable or sustainable.” He said the redesigned MySpace has the “potential to be an exciting business, but needs to show real progress in the coming quarters, not years, mainly by growing traffic and revenue and “a clear path to profitability.” \

Observers took this as a signal that News Corp. could look for a buyer if MySpace shows no real progress. The networking site’s revenue declined by $70 million in the latest quarter compared to the same period a year earlier.

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From their corporate headquarters in Palo Alto on Wednesday, Facebook hosted a special media event to showcase some of their latest updates and changes to the popular social networking site.

While some of these site-enhancements, specifically the ability to upload hi-res images to Facebook  and an improved chat feature have leaked out prior to the event, a long list of new features were announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The event focused on three major new features including the ability to download your information from Facebook, a revamped application privacy dashboard, and finally the ability to create tightly-controlled groups.

Facebook’s new ‘Download Your Information’ tool allows users to port their data from Facebook in a .zip file format and essentially allows users to take their entire profile from Facebook and do with it what they please.

“People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them,” Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday.

A one-click process will download everything from your profile, including your list of friends, events, all of your messages, notes, wall posts and all of your photo albums and videos. An intriguing idea, and one that lends credence to Facebook’s claims that they are an open platform concerned about your privacy and user’s ownership of their own personal data.

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Catfish is an odd name for a film and even odder for one about three men’s journey to get to the bottom of a mystery surrounding an 8-year-old painter, her beautiful mother, and even-more-beautiful sister. The men are Nev Schulman, his brother Ariel, and their friend, Henry Joost.

The three live together in New York where Nev makes his living as a photographer. One day a package arrives for Nev from Ishpeming, Michigan. In it is a painting of one of his photos, done by the 8-year-old Abby Pierce. Several other paintings follow while Nev and Abby strike up an acquaintance on Facebook.

Soon after he becomes friends with Abby’s mother Angela and her half-sister Megan. Nev eventually speaks to Angela and the oddly-deep-voiced Megan on the phone, but every time he calls, Abby always seems to be out.

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Every year, one film likes to stand out as the tiny indie flick that comes out of left field and turns heads everywhere. Last year’s is most memorable, as Paranormal Activity blew up in the box office and kept people awake for weeks. Now it looks like Rogue Pictures’ Catfish may do the same.

For those not in the loop, here’s the official synopsis:

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel’s brother, Nev.  They had no idea that their project would lead to the most exhilarating and unsettling months of their lives.  A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times, Catfish is a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.

The film plays itself like a classic tale of romance, with a modern social networking twist, and then turns into something completely different. We’ve got four new clips to prove that point, served up just for you.

Take a look at the clips after the jump, and catch Catfish in limited theaters on September 17th.

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Over the years, Google has had some pretty amazing ideas. Google Maps has revolutionized the way we travel, Gmail has changed the way we communicate, and Android has taken the smartphone world by storm. One thing that really never caught on, though, was the Google Wave service.

At first it sounded cool: on AIM or Google Talk, you’d always be able to see that whoever was chatting with you was in the middle of typing something. Instead, Google Wave allowed conversations to exist in real-time, with no more waiting in anticipation as the person on the other end typed away. This, theoretically, would speed up conversations, leading to more productivity and less time just staring at the screen, waiting for a reply.

Unfortunately, Google Wave is no more. Google had this to say today on their blog on the subject:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

We wave goodbye to Google Wave, those of us who used it. Those who didn’t shall carry on emailing, IMing, Tweeting, Facebooking and  texting as usual.

As an Android powered smartphone user, I’m aware that the best and/or most polished version of most applications usually exist for Apple’s iPhone first. Even though Android is gaining market share among smartphones (and may even eclipse the iPhone), developers concentrate a great deal of time and effort on making apps for Apple’s devices.

However, that doesn’t mean Android apps are completely forgotten. They do get made, made well and many are frequently updated. Case in point is the Facebook app for Android. Last night the app was updated to bring it more inline with its iPhone counterpart.

The update offers quite a few minor fixes as well as several major ones to the app’s homescreen. Some of the changes and improvements include:

• Post a status update or search for friends with just one click.

• New photo reel that enables easy viewing of photos and videos from friends in your News Feed.

• Draggable Notifications drawer where you can easily see if a friend posted a note on your wall, commented or liked a post or tagged you in a photo.

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There are plenty of genre films flooding Hollywood today. What was once a niche market has now become quite a popular section of the box office on a week-to-week basis. With remakes, reboots, and sequels taking over, it’s nice to see a truly original film sneak by and surprise us all.

Catfish first popped up during the Sundance Film Festival, surprising nearly everyone in attendance, and confusing the rest. At that time, the film was declared “ready to blow away the public” but now we’re finally getting our first trailer for the film.

We don’t want to give too much away, but the title doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the film itself, so we’ll let the synopsis do the heavy lifting.

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel’s brother, Nev. They had no idea that their project would lead to the most exhilarating and unsettling months of their lives. A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times, Catfish is a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.

Interest piqued? Well, check out the trailer after the jump, and make sure to sit through the first half so that you get to the good stuff. Catfish hits theaters on September 17th.

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