Voting has been underway on Facebook’s official sports page, but they’re not wagering on whether the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Green Bay Packers will win Super Bowl XLV. Since Friday, people have been able to vote on commercials scheduled to air on the big day. The ad to get the most “likes” by Thursday, February 10th, will become 2011′s Facebook Replay winner. This is the first year Facebook is trying to be such an active part of the Super Bowl craze, and for good reason: The day the Steelers and the Packers advanced to the Super Bowl, about 4.6 million people shared their thoughts and experiences with their Facebook friends. The two teams each have over a million fans on their respective pages. Currently, all three ads for the TV hit show “Glee” are comfortably leading the vote count. A teen comedy about a group of geeks making waves in the NFL-viewer demographic? Hardly: The new season of “Glee” premieres right after the Super Bowl, and their loyal fans can hardly wait. Apparently, the die-hard football fans have yet to cast their votes.

This Google gaming and social network story is really boiling over. In the last month, Digg's Kevin Rose tweeted that Google has a social network in the works, an assertion backed up Quora's Adam D'Angelo and possibly by this document. In mid-July, TechCrunch said Google had invested $100 million in social gaming platform Zynga and was striking a deal with that sensational startup. Now the Wall Street Journal reports (paywall warning) that Google is in "talks with several makers of popular online games as it seeks to develop a broader social networking service that could compete with Facebook." But isn't this the worst-kept secret in high tech? I could resort to snarky commentary about traditional media outlets merely building off of blogs like TechCrunch, but they do a much better job of trashing mainstream media. Oh, wait, TechCrunch is the new mainstream media. They just don't know it yet. Anyway, the WSJ says Google is also talking with Playdom, which Disney just purchased for as much as $763 million.

With the release of a new album approaching, Kanye (KAHN'-yay) West is making sure he's up to date with the social networking sites. He joined Twitter on Wednesday, one day after going to the offices of Facebook, in Palo Alto, Calif., to preview some of his new material. Videos of him rapping a cappella while standing on a conference table have been posted on YouTube. On his website afterward, West posted a letter to Facebook, thanking the staff for their support: "Your energy was a gift so electric, so genuine, that it really helped me give my best."

Facebook on Wednesday introduced a beta program that lets users pose questions to the community at large. Facebook Questions will let its users ask questions on a variety of topics. Do you need restaurant recommendations? Want to know what the best smartphone is? Use the power of 500 million Facebook users to get your answer. Facebook is currently rolling out the feature to a limited number of users, but when it does launch, there will be an "Ask Question" icon next to a picture of a light bulb on top of your Facebook homepage. Any questions posted via Facebook Questions are public and visible to everyone on the Internet, Facebook said. All your friends and their friends will also be able to see your questions, so this might not be the best forum to make particularly personal queries. Facebook, however, envisioned the feature as a place to ask more innocuous questions. The site also added the option to include a poll or add a photo. Want to know what kind of flower is growing in your backyard? Take a photo and add it to Facebook Questions. Which game console should you buy – Wii or Xbox? Create a poll.

The new, revamped MSN homepage is now live. Updated on Tuesday, November 3rd, this hugely popular internet portal sees 100 hundred million visitors per month who comes to read news, watch videos, and get other local information like events and weather. Yet despite its popularity, the portal has not seen a major overhaul of its design since 2004.

If you’re not a regular visitor to the site, you’ll still be able to tell at a glance that it’s undergone a number of big changes. Nothing has been left untouched – even the butterfly logo has been revamped!The new site opts for a much cleaner look. Gone is the blue background surrounding the white space, replaced by a completely white background instead.

At the top of the site, there’s a Bing search box, followed by topical links underneath taking you to news, entertainment, sports, money, lifestyle, or “more” subsections. On the main page, the lead stories are promoted by large, attention-grabbing images while other news items appear below as links.

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, FriendFeed & Flickr are all pretty common names in the social networking world, but now social and search are about to combine thanks to Google.

At the Web 2.0 expo last week, Google’s Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer surprised everyone with the announcement that Social Search is coming via Google Labs.

This new search feature will allow you to see search query results from people in your social network. By using your Google Profile, (if you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed) Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people if they are relevant to your search query.

At the expo, Mayer demonstrated how a search for ’New Zealand’ produced a list of search results that included relevant content from friends half-way down the search results page. Among the search results were links from different friends, the first to a Gmail message that mentioned New Zealand and the second, a FriendFeed entry.

Nearly three days after activating its multimedia messaging service (MMS) to iPhone 3G and 3GS, AT&T Inc. said today it was "pleased with the rollout" despite continuing user complaints on its own Facebook page.

Many iPhone users complained late into the weekend and early today about the service not working or taking too long to send a photo. The service was activated mid-day Friday nationwide, after AT&T took heat from customers in June about not having it available when the iPhone 3GS launched. The complaints began rolling in later Friday but there were also some praise for the rollout mixed in.

"We are pleased with the rollout of MMS" to iPhone, said spokesman Mark Siegel in an e-mail sent about 9 a.m, reiterating comments he made when the service launched Friday. This morning, Eric Mooneyham endorsed that view with his Facebook comment, "Everything went fine for me. Just sent a video to someone on Verizon, and it went through just like that! Thx AT&T."

Tweetdeck, the popular, free Twitter client, is expanding its reach to Facebook and MySpace. The new versions of the desktop and iPhone program let you post to all three networks and read feeds from them, all within the same interface.

The big idea here, according to Tweetdeck founder Iain Dodsworth, is to make Tweetdeck a more powerful way to keep up with everything — like a web browser for socially distributed information, be it news, memes, or photos.

“Instead of just being a Twitter client, we want to be a new type of browser,” Dodsworth said. “Instead of browsing web pages, we want people to use Tweetdeck to consume all different sources of real-time data… [this] is the first step towards that vision.”

In addition to the MySpace and Facebook integration, which worked smoothly when we connected multiple accounts, the new Tweetdeck lets you group Facebook friends into subgroups, so you can follow work friends, personal friends and frenemies in separate columns. (Tweetdeck presents your social media feeds as a series of highly configurable columns — essentially, you get one for each account, group or service.)