C.G. Lynch

Although it got its start by enabling people to throw virtual pies at each other and turn themselves into vampires and werewolves, the Facebook ecosystem is growing up before our very eyes.

Last week, at Facebook's old offices in downtown Palo Alto, investors, media and bloggers saw what innovative startups have been building this summer on top of the Facebook platform, the main piece of technology that allows developers to program applications that work in tandem with the social network. These apps, sites and services signal a departure from the things that have typified the Facebook platform's early iteration.

On Facebook, the struggle to figure out who owns and accesses our data remains years away from any resolution -- if we ever reach one. Last week, Facebook announced that it will act to shore up some privacy concerns that were voiced a month ago by Jennifer Stoddart, the privacy commissioner of Canada.

At the time, Stoddart noted that Facebook's current privacy settings were unclear to users. Among her complaints: The fact that Facebook stores information even after users delete an account, a criticism privacy advocates had also leveled at the social network in the past.

On Twitter, URL shorteners have become vastly important. With the 140 character constraints for each tweet, we wouldn't have the freedom to share a link and explain its significance without them. It turns out, not URL shorteners are created equal, either.

A new report from Pingdom assessed the nine most popular URL shorteners on the Web. These services exist as their own websites where you can shorten a URL manually (such as TinyURL), or are embedded in other applications, like TweetDeck. Overall, Pingdom crowned Bit.ly and Ow.ly as the most reliable in terms of uptime.

Manage Your Corporate Tweets

If you have been using Twitter for more than a few months, you probably don't visit the site's welcome page very much. That's because you either stay logged in all the time, or you access Twitter via TweetDeck or another third-party app that bypasses it.

But if you visit Twitter.com, you'll find a new welcome page that places greater emphasis on searching the service for topics and discussion trends.

Although many companies have been shedding jobs, some employers and recruiters have turned to Twitter to post positions and find new talent.

But using Twitter to find new work isn't a straightforward process. Because people publish so frequently, it's easy to miss a lead in the process. Also, Twitter's search tool, while serviceable, sometimes makes it hard to narrow your job inquiries down to something specific.

After you join Twitter, who do you follow? Deciding this can be an overwhelming task, especially if your goal is to avoid the noise on Twitter and trade messages with trusted colleagues and thought leaders in your industry.

Millions of people tweet everyday. Consequently, it's hard to find the best experts or luminaries. What are their Twitter handles? Are they even on Twitter?

In the next few weeks, Facebook will be rolling out significant privacy changes to the site that will make it easier to share information with people outside your immediate network - making the site more public in nature, like Twitter.

In addition, Facebook's new changes will allow you to decide who you share information with on a post-by-post basis, alleviating the need to tamper with the site's privacy controls as frequently.

Since Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, users have quickly come to depend on "URL shorteners." These free services take the long URLs for links that we find on the Web and shrink them to a manageable, eye-friendly size. Some shortening tools even allow you track the performance (i.e. number of clicks) that a URL receives from Twitter and other social networking services. But all shorteners aren't alike; as I'll show you, some offer more advanced features.

Even if you don't use URL shorteners yet, you've no doubt seen them on Twitter. For instance, last week, the link to my explanation of the new Google Wave app appeared like this on CIO.com:

Google Wave, an upcoming Web application that mixes old technologies like e-mail, IM and online documents in a unified, socially-oriented view, could break down the traditional ways in which we compartmentalize and separate information - both as consumers and businesspeople.

As Google unveiled Wave at its annual developer conference here in San Francisco, the company revealed it had a small team of engineers working on the Wave project for a couple years. Google opened Wave to developers, who can build tools and apps to run with it (it's essentially open source). The public will not have access to the application until later this year, Google says.

Since Google's Chrome web browser launched last September, it has garnered a small market share (roughly one percent, depending on the study you read). Chrome has embraced a lot of principles that has made the Mozilla Firefox browser so popular: It's fast and open to web developers to improve it.

More on CIO.com Google Chrome: A Hit with Online Software Vendors FAQ: The Vitals on Google's New Browser, Chrome Google Brings Out Big Guns in Support of Chrome

Artwork: Chip TaylorOne of the most fundamental rules of social networking etiquette: You must carefully consider who you "friend" or "connect" with on services like Facebook and LinkedIn. According to career experts, the people with whom you associate, in many ways, reflect upon you.

More on CIO.com LinkedIn's Most Unusual Members: Meet The Super-Connected When a Colleague is a "Friend": Facebook Users Get a Crash Course in Reputation Management LinkedIn Tips: How Many Connections Is Too Many?