Every sport has its fans, and the Phoenix Suns basketball team is finding that use of social networking has become one of the main ways to keep in touch with its fan base -- though it can get dicey when basketball fans across the NBA go a little wild before big games.

Depending on your taste in music and tolerance for others’ tastes, President Barack Obama’s latest social media move – sharing his 2012 campaign playlist via streaming music website Spotify – might be a case of over-sharing: Ricky Martin, REO Speedwagon and James Taylor all made the cut.

Although Facebook (FB - to be traded on NASDAQ or NYSE) is by far the most high-profile dot-com company to go public over the past year, it is actually one of several companies that have led to a revival of web company IPOs. And while many dot-com IPOs have been long on hype, they haven't yet paid off in terms of shareholder value.

Social networkers resorted to Twitter during and following a brief Facebook outage on Thursday, a day after the company filed for its initial public offering.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have issued a list of 9 tips for better tweeting based on a study of Twitter usefulness (see "Most tweets are useless, Twitter users say").

Twitter has been celebrated for its ubiquity and impact on world events from natural disaster recovery to political uprisings. But researchers from a group of big time universities have found that useful tweets are few and far between.

Software engineers from major social networking companies have apparently grown tired of Google's relentless drive to push its own Google+ social network at the expense of other sites.

Say this for Google+: It no longer has fewer total users than MySpace.

Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors. Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CTO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.

Much has changed since we examined the ongoing war between Facebook and Twitter in the autumn of 2010. The stakes are higher, the competition has increased, and we see LinkedIn and Google roaring into the social networking arena like never before.

Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."

For years, IT and business have heard the sexy promise of "IP convergence," which would allow all sorts of voice- and video-enabled applications to appear in business. However, for most organizations, this Jetsons-like vision has yet to occur.

Buyers of IP PBXs need to look beyond simple voice capabilities to unified communications and make sure the gear they buy will be compatible with applications they will want in the future, experts say.

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Driving better operational efficiency within an organisation is a top priority and unified communications is helping to make it happen.

Integrating enterprise communication tools -- from telephony to e-mail, conferencing and instant messaging -- is the key to delivering a richer collaboration environment that increases productivity. But deployment and management of unified communications systems can be daunting.