The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites . The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) . The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. It also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file. Sponsor Highlights from the deck include: On “getting info from Facebook” – options include photos, contact info, group contact info and IP logs. “HOWEVER, Facebook has other data available.” The deck notes that Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests.” MySpace and Twitter, on the other hand, are described differently

What do you do when you first fire up your browser? Most probably, you log into various sites that require a username and password – Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like. For me, personally, it’s quite a chore, as I need to log into over 10 different services before I start doing anything. Now, Mozilla sets out to alleviate this issue with a new Firefox plugin called Account Manager.

The Facebook page “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” is giving new credence to the lyrics “Thank you for being a friend” today, as People has confirmed that the Golden Girls star will be appearing on Saturday Night Live in the near future. When asked at Elton John’s Oscar-viewing party last night whether she would be appearing on Saturday Night Live , the actress answered in the affirmative. We’re not sure in what capacity the comedienne will be taking the SNL stage — whether as host or as part of the “ Women of Comedy ” special we reported on a few weeks ago, but we’re certain that her nearly 500,000 fans will be pleased to hear the good news. The page was started by ardent fan David Mathews back on December 30, 2009, and has since garnered its share of media attention. White was launched back into the public eye after appearing in a popular Super Bowl Snickers commercial and in the romantic comedy The Proposal , also starring Oscar-winner Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Twilight star Robert Pattinson even called her sexy – breaking the hearts of thousands of teen girls across the nation. It certainly has been a banner year for White so far.

The music video below is pure viral marketing, but we’ll bite ’cause it’s got a catchy tune. ”Entrepreneur State of Mind” is a remake of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” , but with references to Facebook, YouTube, and (ahem) TechCrunch. Instead of singing “Now, you’re in New York,” the chorus goes “Now you’re the New Dork.” But they mean that in a good way. Tech startups really need their own anthem. Until then, we’ve got remakes and parodies. The video was made by Pantless Knights , the same people behind the Apple Fanboy rap . It was sponsored by Grasshopper , a virtual phone startup in Needham, Massachusetts.

As a result of failed contract negotiations, Disney pulled New York affiliate ABC7 off of cable company Cablevision’s channel lineup early this morning, leaving over 3 million people without a channel to watch the Oscars on tonight unless they tune in over the air. We’d like to offer those 3 million people the following online viewing alternatives. These options will also be good extra material for folks who do have the ability to watch on their TVs. For the Ceremony: Liveblogs The live video options on this list won’t cover the Oscars ceremonies; they’ll just plug you in to what’s going on on the red carpet and backstage. If you want to follow the awards show itself without turning on the TV, liveblogs are your best option.

Filed under: iPad Our English-speaking friends across the pond have been anxiously awaiting pricing and availability dates for the iPad. Macworld UK’s Nick Spence notes that both the Wi-Fi and 3G models will be available in late April, meaning that developers in the UK who want to get their hands on an iPad earlier may have to consider flying to the US on April 3rd. Spence reported that Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland will also see the iPad shipping in late April. Based on the exchange rate for both the US Dollar and UK Pound Sterling, Macworld UK estimated the following prices for the iPad models: iPad Wi-Fi:

Wow! It’s March already? 2010 is chugging along and as we head into the second week of March its time to look back on the highlights from this week on ReadWriteStart. In this installment of the Weekly Wrapup we talk about how startups make use of crowdsourcing, how outsiders see startup culture, and we even glean some useful lessons from one man and his dancing. And finally we take a look at South by Southwest for startups as the even draws nearer. Sponsor Are Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups?

The original ReviveLite would work fine for most people, but the down side of it is that it was pretty bulky. Not only did it keep an outlet covered, but it also had a dock off to the side of the outlet. With this 2nd edition ReviveLite it looks a whole lot more sleek and won’t be quite as much in the way. This new design makes a whole lot more sense than the old one did. Just like the old one it offers a night light to make wandering around in the dark much easier. The smaller version has one other nice change, it has been designed to include a USB port. That USB port can charge all sorts of other gadgets, all the while you can be powering up your iPod or iPhone on the dock

The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones . Some of China’s Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter’s chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China. However all three – plus Twitter itself – were blocked by the Chinese government in July 2009, due to their usage during the uprisings in Ürümqi . Sponsor According to an AFP article , Chinese authorities blamed online agitators for helping to stoke violence in that region. Prior to being shut down, Fanfou had been dubbed “China’s Twitter” and had almost reached 1 million registered users by the end of June 2009. An October 2009 report by China Daily noted that Fanfou was founded in July 2007 by Wang Xing, a young entrepreneur who also founded China’s current most popular social network Renren (formally known as Xiaonei).

Ever spiced up Internet poker by busting out a webcam and turning it into a strip game? Yeah? Well, have you ever done it while using a Rock Band drum kit to control the game? Here’s how. Poker Listings’ Sean Lind figured out a fairly simple way of turning your Rock Band drum kit into a set of controls for poker. The results are above, but the instructions on setting this up yourself are right here: Great. Now I can blame my poker losses on my miserable drumming skills.

Companies now have a novel instrument at their discarding to keep consumers coming back: MixMobi. MixMobi allows businesses to generate graphical tickets and send them to their consumer’s mobile handsets, according to Mashable. Tickets can be communal via SMS text messages, Facebook or Twitter and users don’t have to install special software on their handsets to

Facebook appears to have made a third acquisition — this one smaller than its two previous buys. What’s more, Facebook has shut down the company’s service immediately. Octazen is a Malaysian company comprising two employees. It provides scripts to import a user’s contacts into a website upon sign up, reports Gigaom . Why would Facebook acquire the makers of an address book importer? It appears to be a talent buy, with Facebook employing the team and shutting down their service (aka acq-hire-sition). Liz Gannes quotes Facebook’s Larry Yu explaining: This is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent to help drive the company forward in its efforts to be the central way for people to connect and share information. A statement on the Octazen site reads: The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction.

Filed under: Gaming , Hardware , Software We’re cleaning out the video files from the chaos of Macworld last week, and while we’ve already shared with you an interview that we did with Dan Connors of Telltale Games (who just recently announced that they’re bringing their whole catalog over to the Mac), his co-founder Kevin Bruner also stopped by our booth live on the show floor to chat about gaming on the Mac and why Telltale has made the leap to our side. You can watch the interview in two parts after the link below. In addition to telling us about his company and their big Mac Revolution, Bruner also shared with us his own passion for Apple’s machines, including how he went into hock to buy a Newton on day one, and what he thinks of the iPad as a gaming device. Click on to see our chat, won’t you? TUAW Macworld 2010: Telltale Games live in our booth originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:00:00 EST

There’s an interesting post today at Facebook’s engineering blog , detailing how Facebook’s engineers managed to make the site two times faster in a six months period, from June of 2009 till the beginning of 2010. It’s an interesting (albeit somewhat technical) read. In short, their primary concerns were shortening network time (the time it takes for data to be transmitted between the user’s computer and Facebook) and render time (the time it takes the user’s web browser to process a response from Facebook and display the page). They managed to speed up the site primarily by reducing the number of cookies and cutting back on JavaScript. Finally, they divided a typical Facebook page into parts (which they call pagelets) which can be loaded one after another (instead of waiting for the entire page to load.

One thing we love around here at TechCrunch is data. And since we’re busy looking up our own traffic stats for 2009, we thought we might as well share those stats with everyone. Total unique visitors across all TechCrunch sites in 2009, according to Google Analytics, were 69,482,978, up 55% from 2008’s 45 million unique visitors. Those vistors racked up 228,202,753 page views in 2009, up 90% from 2008’s 120 million page views. TechCrunch is the largest site in our network, followed by CrunchGear , CrunchBase , MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT , in that order. Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008)