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WASHINGTON (AP) Big Bird is endangered. Jim Lehrer lost control. And Mitt Romney crushed President Barack Obama.

Those were the judgments rendered across Twitter and Facebook Wednesday during the first debate of the 2012 presidential contest. While millions turned on their televisions to watch the 90-minute showdown, a smaller but highly engaged subset took to social networks to discuss and score the debate as it unspooled in real time.

Until recently, debate watchers would have waited through the entire broadcast to hear analysis and reaction from a small cadre of television pundits. Social media has democratized the commentary, giving voice to a far wider range of participants who can shape the narrative long before the candidates reach their closing statements.

"People still use old media to watch the debates, but they use social networks and other new media to have influence, voice opinions and be involved," said Scott Talan, an assistant professor of communication at American University who studies social media and politics. "Old media is not dead; it's growing. But now we have more people involved and engaged because of digital means."

The political conversation plays out across a range of social platforms, especially on the industry giant Facebook and on Twitter, the social networking hub where opinions are shared through 140-character comments known as tweets. Reflecting the changing times, many television analysts now monitor Twitter and Facebook feeds and use information gleaned from those platforms to inform their punditry.

Twitter announced shortly after Wednesday's debate that it had been the most tweeted event in U.S. political history, topping this year's Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

With 11.1 million comments, Wednesday's debate was the fourth most-tweeted telecast of any kind, coming in just behind the most recent Grammy awards, MTV's Video Music Awards and the Super Bowl, according to William Powers, director of The Crowdwire, an election project of Bluefin Labs, a social analytics firm. It was far higher than the previous political record holder: the third night of the Democratic National Convention in September, which drew 2.5 million comments.

A significant spike in social media commentary came from women, The Crowdwire found. Some 55 percent of comments about the debate were made by women, compared to just 39 percent during the Republican primary debates.

Unlike the wider viewing audience, debate watchers who comment on social media "are politically engaged in the strongest possible way," Powers said. But, he added, "it's a bit of a hothouse population. It does skew younger, and I'm not sure how much middle America is represented."

Twitter scored Romney the debate's clear winner according to Peoplebrowsr, a Web analytics firm. The group found 47,141 tweets mentioning Romney and "win or winner" compared to just 29,677 mentioning Obama and "win or winner."

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Social media renders rapid judgment on debate

Daniel Ionescu, TechHive

Daniel has been writing about smartphones, tablets and apps since 2008, and he enjoys pitting gadgets against each other. More by Daniel Ionescu

Facebook on Thursday announced that it now has more than 1 billion monthly active users, more than any other social network in the world. The social network also said that more than 600 million users are now accessing Facebook from their mobile devices.

In comparison, Twitters latest official update pegs it at 140 million active users (some estimate there are some 500 million total users), while would-be Facebook rival Google+ has 100 million monthly active users and 400 million signups.

Mark Zuckerberg celebrates Facebooks latest milestone.

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone on his Facebook profile on Thursday morning, saying: This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

In a fact sheet released to mark the occasion, Facebook detailed that it reached 1 billion monthly active users on September 14 at 12:45 p.m. PT. The top five countries where people connected from at the time the milestone was reached were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.

Facebook was launched in 2004, and by 2006, it had 23 million users. That number doubled by 2007, and again in 2008, when it reached 100 million users. By 2010, Facebook hit 500 million users, doubling that number two years later. Currently, Facebook says the average age of its users is around 22 years old, down from 26 in 2008.

Facebook says that more than 219 billion photos were uploaded on the social network, with some 140 billion friend connections. With people putting so much of their personal life on the social network, Facebooks growth has not been without privacy blunders, and legislators in Europe are still investigating Facebooks data mining techniques.

Facebook still has challenges ahead, though. Local social networks in China and Russia have a foothold on their market and Facebook has been slow to make forays in those countries. Then there is the financial aspect: Facebook had a shaky initial public offering earlier this year, and it is still looking at ways to make display advertisements for the mobile users who represent 60 percent of the social networks monthly traffic.

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Facebook rules the social networking world with 1 billion users

I saw Jesse Eisenberg on 114th the other day. I dont bring this up to brag, since as a New Yorker, I obviously dont give special attention to celebrities, but only because I was with my friend, who apparently confused Eisenberg with his Social Network counterpart Mark Zuckerberg (thus making it a far more interesting story to the people she told).

The faux Zuckerberg sighting got me thinking, mostly about how crazy it is that he was in our shoesan undergraduate at an elite universityas recently as 2004, which really doesnt seem like that long ago. The year is still vivid in my memory, mostly because the Sox broke the Curse, and its insane to consider that in that short time, the social world has completely changed.

It wasnt all him, either. Zuckerberg was a kind of Hegelian world-historical individualhe was just an agent of the world (networking) spirit (bam). In fact, one of Facebooks early rivals was created by a SEAS class president who was trying to invigorate Columbias school spiritso I suppose it was doomed from the start. The social revolution was inevitable.

Its hard to gain perspective on a revolution while its still happening, especially since we came of age right at the advent of social networking. Its pretty difficult for me to imagine the social world even pre-Myspace, although admittedly Ive mostly blocked 2003 out of my memory (Aaron fucking Boone).

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, recently deceased but once powerful sites such as Livejournal, Digg, and Flickr, even texting to some extent and smartphones to a large extentthese are all part of the social networking revolution. They control our lives more than we realize, or at least more than we would like to admit. Ive probably checked Facebook 10 times in the course of writing this, and my iPhone has buzzed with just as many notifications (to which I always have an intense Pavlovian reaction).

Facebook & Co. are more than a procrastination tool, though. Social networking has truly changed the way humans interact with each other. It has led to developments which have undoubtedly improved the worlds ability to connect with and organize larger groups of people, and the ability to share information.

Still, I wouldnt necessarily call social networking a net positive. Its no coincidence that Facebook was created by a man described by more reputable sources than Aaron Sorkin as socially awkward, overprogrammed, and robotic. Social networking truly seems like it was created by someone who hates human interaction, who reduced it to an algorithm and completely removed the human aspect. Popularity is measured in likes and followers, our moods are determined from our status updates, and every social action is methodically recorded and made public, to be judged by our friends.

Most of us have a core group of friends and family, and the way we interact with them will (hopefully) never change, but social networking has changed how we interact with everyone else. Its become immensely easier to maintain superficial friendships. In the past, you had to make an effort to maintain a relationship with someone you didnt see regularly. Now, we can decide who to consider a friend by noting who writes on our walls for our birthday or who has a cursory conversation with us on chat every other month.

Dunbars numberwhich says we can handle knowing and keeping contact with at most 150 peopleis seemingly being shattered, but our cognitive ability to maintain stable relationships with larger groups of people isnt necessarily improving. Were just having increasingly superficial and uniform relationships with larger groups of people.

Social networking goes deeper, though, since it appeals to our natural impulse to share. We crave validation, and nothing is more powerful than shared experiences. In the past, when we shared experiences with each other, it was much more personal and meaningfulmostly occurring face-to-face, or at least in the much more meaningful medium of letters or even phone calls.

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The social network

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --ICAP Patent Brokerage announces for auction one granted US patent and four pending applications covering social networking and internet privacy techniques. This lot will be included in the 17th ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction on November 29, 2012, at The Ritz Carlton in San Francisco, California.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100614/CG20517LOGO)

"We are excited to be offering an IP portfolio that combines the popularity of social media with the importance of internet privacy to our global base of buyers," says Dean Becker, CEO of ICAP Patent Brokerage. "This offering is relevant to social networking sites and virtual communities interested in protecting the privacy of their users."

Key Characteristics & BenefitsThe portfolio discloses techniques for protecting the personal information of a user on a website, and for encouraging users to securely share their personal information with a service provider in order to reduce the risk of unwanted offline encounters. Social networking website users want to maintain control over the information in their social profiles, but also want to communicate via instant message, blogs, and forums with other users. The techniques available for sale provide improved protection of a user's personal information to the precise extent desired over social networking websites.

Utilizing this technology, users and service providers can reach a mutually agreeable balance between complete anonymity and full online disclosure of users' offline identities. In some cases, a user's personal information is securely shared with a service provider but not with other users so the service provider can help the user avoid contact with specified groups online and/or offline, such as online advertisers. In other cases, a proposed online identifier, either an avatar or username, of a user is compared with personal information and is accepted only if it does not pose an excessive risk of revealing the offline identity of the user. Therefore, security of a user's personal information is increased, allowing the users to securely and beneficially disclose their offline activities, such as planned travel, interests, pictures, postings, or contact details, to providers of social networking websites.

For a technical description of this IP sales offering, click here.

To learn more about the assets available for sale in this portfolio: Contact Dean Becker of ICAP Patent Brokerage at (561) 309-0011 or via email at Dean.Becker@us.icap.com.

To register for the upcoming event or submit IP for consideration for the auction, click here.

Follow us on Twitter (@ICAP_Auction_IP) and join our LinkedIn group.

About ICAP Patent BrokerageICAP Patent Brokerage is a division of ICAP plc and the world's largest intellectual property brokerage and patent auction firm.

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ICAP Patent Brokerage Announces Social Networking and Internet Privacy Package for Auction

The release of Joomla 3.0 on September 27 not only marks a new milestone for the seven-year-old open-source (and free) content management system, it also establishes a new goal for Joomla: the mobile platform.

It would be unfair to characterize Joomla 3.0's changes as being solely geared towards mobile-friendly websites, but there's no denying that delivering content for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones influenced many of the changes for this update -- an influence that can be felt throughout the design and implementation of this version.

[Related story: Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress]

Bootstrapping it

Under the hood, many of the features behind Joomla's new look and feel come from the project's adoption of Twitter Bootstrap, a framework of CSS and HTML design templates that works to unify typography, forms, buttons and other components.

The opening screen of a Joomla-based website, with content.

The reliance on Bootstrap was not done just to make the back-end interface look pretty on mobile (though it helps). A more important reason for the move was to help wrangle the 10,000-plus extensions that are available within the Joomla ecosystem. The Bootstrap model within Joomla 3.0 is pervasive throughout the back and front ends of the CMS, and any extension developer who is putting together an add-on for Joomla will be able to use the same components as all other extension developers.

Unification is critical to how the new Joomla performs on any platform, not just mobile, according to Paul Orwig, president of Open Source Matters, a support organization for the Joomla project, and former member of Joomla's leadership team.

In the past, that was not always a given, Orwig explains, particularly for extensions that did work outside of the core Joomla functionality, such as e-commerce. Since Joomla's core software had no e-commerce tools, any given developer of an e-commerce extension would feel free to approach the administrative and front ends of their tool in whatever way they wanted. This led to quite a bit of confusion for admins trying to evaluate the features of each extension.

"Bootstrap is a standard that's adopted a huge variety of components, which will make developers' lives a lot easier," Orwig says.

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Joomla 3.0 review: Making way for mobile