An Australian man has been jailed for seven and a half months after he was found guilty of defacing Facebook tribute pages for two dead children. Bradlet Paul Hampson, a self-confessed Internet “troll” from Brisbane, posted offensive messages on the two Facebook pages, uploading pictures of male genitalia, in February of last year. On one Facebook page, Hampson wrote “woot I’m dead” across a photo of the dead child, morphing the boy’s face to the inside of a woodchipper and making it look as if blood was coming from the machine....

Small businesses struggling for sales this holiday season, you’re in luck. Facebook, Google, Twitter and other digital pioneers are joining with American Express for Small Business Saturday (SBS) 2011, a national initiative meant to drive sales. Together, these innovators will provide toolkits enabling small business owners and independent shops to better market their brands. Starting today, the business owner toolkit will be available onFacebook,iStockAnalystreports. Although SBS is fairly young — it’s only seen one year since its launch in 2010 — Senior Vice President of American Express OPEN, Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, points out that it’s been incredibly helpful to affiliated merchants....

Whilst some countries have a penchant forbanning social networksoutright, back in June, France hit theheadlinesfor introducing a different type of social media ban. Was a great governmental firewall erected to prevent French Internet users accessing social networking sites? No. French broadcasting regulators ruled that TV and radio show hosts must not utter the words ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’ unless it’s in direct relation to a specific news story involving those companies. Put simply, presenters were no longer allowed to direct the public to ‘Follow’ a story on Twitter, or invite its audience to ‘Like’ a network’s Facebook page....

Update: All services are back online after an outage that lasted over five hours. To the 3.5 billion users who depend on the apps, Facebook says “sorry.” The company states its engineering teams confirmed that the root cause of the outage was a “faulty configuration change.” It also claims no user data was compromised during the outage. In news that will surely be greeted warmly at Twitter HQ, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger have all gone down in a huge global outage....

Here’s a clever idea for Facebook; it should either integrate Skype as its standard video chat platform or buy a video chat startup likeBibbil. As Facebook increasingly adopts services that other companies are offering, like Facebook Deals over Groupon, it’s increasingly becoming many users default homepage. Offering a one stop shop for people accessing the web. However, since video chat is currently experiencing such huge growth, it’s quite surprising that Facebook has not yet fully integrated Skype, recently acquired by Microsoft, a Facebook shareholder....