ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday, Facebook rolled out an update to its "Groups" feature, offering a completely revamped experience which now offers collaboration capabilities, email subscriptions, group chat and more. You can create a group of your own, as always, but you can't necessarily join any group out there on Facebook - unless the group is set to "open," you have to be invited by a current group member.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the Groups feature was designed to allow the 5% of people who actually use features like this to do the job of building the groups for the rest of Facebook's user base. Are you among the 5% who wants to create and manage groups of your own? If so, here's how.

This week, Skype finally released a version of its mobile application for Android phones. Unfortunately, the fine print revealed the new app was crippled, restricting U.S. users to Wi-Fi only calls, just as it had when the iPhone version was first launched.

But now, only days after the official Android app's debut, an ingenious developer has hacked the app to work over 3G. Here's how to use it on your own Android phone now.

Twitter has come out several times now and said straight up - it is not a social network. Rather, it is a medium for discussing politics, entertainment and, more importantly, disseminating news.

It appears that Google News has caught on to this (not that Google is slow on the draw) and has begun testing a Twitter integration that shows news from your Twitter "friends" on your Google News page.

Lucid Imagination launched LucidWorks Enterprise today, a search technology with an API as part of its core.

The move is testament to the new world of the enterprise, where platforms are an attractive option for building applications that leverage the Web and multiple forms of structured and and unstructured data. It's a world where a search app has to be simple to build and flexible enough to connect people to the right information, be it internal documents or social data from the distributed Web.

At its core, LucidWork Enterprise is built on the Apache Solr/Lucene platform. Layered into the thinking it is a realization that content is changing in multiple dimensions. In terms of volume, content is coming in at a new pace. Twitter is testament to the speed in which data is now flowing.

Puppet Labs, the commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announces today its acquisition of an open source project called The Marionette Collective. The Marionette Collective, also known as MCollective, is a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.

Puppet Labs' open-source software helps system administrators configure and automate server management, rather than relying on manually built scripts with little portability or reusability. The addition of MCollective's real-time network discovery capabilities will improve the way in which users can schedule activities. MCollective enables server orchestration or parallel job execution systems. It enables real-time discovery of network resources and can select which resources to affect based on configuration data.

Facebook announced some great changes yesterday - users finally have a way to download all their information and photos, there's a dashboard to handle applications and privacy settings, and even a nifty new way to handle all of your social connections in their numerous and varied stratifications. It did, however, forget its much-needed mantra - opt-in, not opt-out.

If your friends have caught wind of the groups feature already, then hang on to your inbox, because things are about to get messy unless you tweak some settings...and fast.

Have you ever wondered about the resources and platforms used by the brain trusts and engineering teams behind products like QuickBooks, TurboTax, Quicken, or the extremely popular consumer web success story Mint.com? The company behind all of these products is Intuit.

Let's take a look at the native and federated platforms available today that allow any developer to reach a potential market of 25 million users within 4 million small businesses.

At this week's CTIA Enterprise and Applications conference in San Francisco, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced a new project called "Sprint ID," aimed at mobile phone customization. The Sprint ID service lets users create separate mobile profiles for work and play, each with their own application packs, wallpapers, widgets and ringtones. Initially, Sprint ID will only be offered on new Android handsets including the Samsung Transform, LG Optimus S and Sanyo Zio, but the plan is to roll out the service to all Sprint devices in the future.

The advent of the iPad has triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. And few startups have utilized the iPad's touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.

As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. We discuss how he came up with the idea, before the iPad had even been announced, then rapidly developed and launched Flipboard. We also talk about how people are using Flipboard (hint: it's more than just for reading magazines) and its future plans to expand beyond the iPad - including to smartphones.

FriendShuffle is a delightfully simple service just launched tonight. Log in with Facebook Connect and it will create a web-framed slideshow of the pages "Liked" by your friends on Facebook. Shuffle through, discover new content recommended by trusted sources with similar interests (your friends) and Like some of it yourself.

It's a great example of how simply putting a new interface on top of an established API can lead to hours of fun. This is the best interface I've seen yet for enjoying the links your Facebook friends have shared. It's like StumbleUpon but the algorithm is social, not behavioral.