Facebook is still the word on the street nowadays, it seems. They're everywhere, they're influencing everything and everybody wants to be them.

The producers of Watchmen are putting a Facebook synch feature on the Blu Ray version of the film, allowing members to live-chat about it while they watch it together. The Linux Foundation's new Web site has a definite Facebook flavor. And Facebook itself announced a new  virtual currency system to make paying for goods easier, thus making gaming within the site an even more attractive prospect.

News was hot elsewhere in social media, too. Social  networking gaming company Zygna surpassed ten million daily active users.. BlogHer, a network for woman bloggers, nabbed $7 million in new funding. Two gaming executives and a former HBO honcho launched a new social media gaming company called Monkey Gods. All this did not stop the Wall Street Journal from  taking a negative view of social media, mistakenly viewing it as a threat and not a useful tool.

Also big in the last week was something on a small scale – handheld gaming. The iPhone is heading into this arena big-time with reports of  increased multiplayer capabilities in the device's next OS. The DSI raised total DS sales for April by 175 percent over the same month last year, and Electronic Arts announced plans to take Spore to the DS, as well as the Wii.

Speaking of the Wii, Xbox will be taking over the motion-sensor champion head-to-head with a motion sensing camera, which will capture a player's body motions and transfer them to the character on-screen. That's tthe biggest development for Micosoft's gaming platform since the price cut that put it on the map, and it's worth keeping an eye on. Sony, meanwhile, publicly said it has no PS3 redesign plans, which led some analysts to speculate that they definitely do.

Not all the news from the gaming world was upbeat, however. Factor 5 closed down and the long and sad saga of Midway continued to march on, with creditors of the company suing its majority owner. Midway's story is a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to get into  gaming – no matter how huge you get, an equally huge fall may be inevitable. However, LucasArts, once written off as dead, proved they are not dead yet with a lineup of new games.

And elsewhere in the electronic world, there was plenty about Amazon and e-books. There was the rather odd announcement that they were creating blog subscriptions for Kindle, which seems a rather pointless and unprofitable move.  The company launched its own imprint, AmazonEncore, which will focus on out-of-print titles – perhaps a direct move to compete with GoogleBooks? And a number of writers expressed fear of increased e-book piracy in the age of the Kindle (which indicates that Kindle security software may be very in-demand in the future!)

Electronic publishing was very much in the mind of traditional news companies, which struggled to play catch-up and "get  with the program."  The New York Times rolled out the Twitter-like NewsWire amid rumors that media mogul David Geffen is  buying the company and MediaNews Group said it would move away from free online content. Since it's still debatable whether the public is willing to pay for cyberpapers, what happens with their venture may be the test case for the entire struggling industry.

Finally, we may have our ultimate sign that anime is as mainstrem as baseball and apple pie in America now – Macy's in New York City hosted a Fruits Basket cosplay event as part of Pacific Heritage Month celebrations. Does this mean cosplay departments are on their way to all-American department stores? Hey, anything that opens up more geek jobs .  . .
- Bonnie