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Capping a year of spectacular growth and celebrating the milestone, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg published a special post on the site's blog. In it he revealed the company this week has surged to 400 million users. It was only five months ago that Facebook had 300 million.

Good technology has value, but leading social networks require "network effects." Facebook is infinitely more valuable because all your friends are on it. Facebook has leveraged this "critical mass" of users to stay ahead of new rivals, too. Why visit Twitter, you may ask, when Facebook has continually extended its feature set to keep up with its less popular competitor? The story of social networks is in fact a story about network effects: How can a service reach a point at which there are enough users and content to be useful?

The Pentagon made an announcement that it is authorizing the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other sites classified as "Web 2.0" across the U.S. military, according to a report by Reuters. The article mentioned that the Pentagon said that "the benefits of social media outweighed security concerns."

Facebook is denying it illegally breached the privacy of its users in a proposed $9.5 million settlement to a class action challenging its program that monitored and published what users of the social-networking site were buying or renting from Blockbuster, Overstock and other locations.

Facebook changes policy on privacy settings. Wants to be more open like Twitter. Raises privacy concerns.

"Facebook's news feed from its 400 million users has helped the social network far surpass its competitors, which also supply similar digital streams of consciousness. But now, Facebook owns the patent on news feeds."

Facebook has a patent on "news-feed" style social networking. Uh oh.

Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone are TV's only hope, according to Elisabeth Murdoch, CEO of Shine Limited, a British television production and distribution company. According to Broadcasting & Cable, Ms. Murdoch told TV producers and distributors at the annual National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) convention: "We in the TV business have to catch up with \nwhat our audience is doing. We can no longer afford to be one-screen business."

Google's entry into the social networking space will face similar privacy challenges as Facebook and other social networking sites. Here are some facts about Buzz privacy for users to keep in mind.

Help wanted. Must tweet. If you're "passionate about engaging millions" in advancing President Obama's \nagenda, the commander in chief has a job for you. The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America -- the successor organization to Obama for America -- are seeking a "social networks manager" to oversee Obama's accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The ideal new hire, according to the official job description, will possess "strong, sharp and personable" writing skills, as well as the ability to craft messages that "move people to act" and managing multiple "complex" projects."

" The Associated Press has activated a Facebook page and added a Twitter account as part of its extensive coverage of the Haiti earthquake. http://www.facebook.com/APNews http://twitter.com/ap"

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that while one in 10 adults blogs, only 14 percent of teens do, down from nearly 30 percent in 2006. Surprisingly, they don't seem too partial to Twitter either: The Pew survey found that only 8 percent of teenage Internet users tweet.

An experiment about news information flows on Twitter and Facebook.

Gmail users will soon have more ways to keep up with their friends via a widget that shows quick status updates like Facebook and Twitter do, The Wall Street Journal reports.

"When Google unveiled Buzz, its answer to Facebook and Twitter, on Tuesday, it hoped to get its service off to a fast start by scanning the contact lists of Gmail users and automatically adding the most frequent correspondents as online friends. But what the company viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics.

While the technosphere was busy Tuesday pitting Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) new Buzz service against Facebook and Twitter in some kind of social media steel-cage deathmatch, the search giant's executives were hinting at what they see as the real winning uses for Buzz -- within the enterprise and out and about in the mobile arena.