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UK netizens may find their online activities under ever-greater scrutiny in the near future. The UK government has pushed ahead with a proposal to require monitoring of Internet usage, including social networks such as Facebook and conversations within online games.

The new UK law would require communication firms to hold records of who contacted whom, rather than the actual contents of online conversation. About £2 billion ($3.34 billion) would go toward compensating the firms for the technical challenge of collecting the data.

Twitterati and other netizens should already know that their Internet musings are public and could potentially become fodder for intelligence analysts. But now U.S. spy agencies have officially invested in a software firm that monitors social media and half a million web 2.0 sites daily.

So all that importance-of-social-media business you keep hearing about Iran? This should tell you something about the underlying truth, no matter how numbing the barrage from the media can be: When the U.S. State Department heard of Twitter's plans for an hour-long regularly-scheduled maintenance outage that would have denied daytime Twitter service to Iran, they stepped in and "urged" them to reschedule.

Good news for the 150-million-plus users of Facebook: Now you don’t have to lift a finger to follow your friends. The upcoming Palm Pre and the British-made INQ1 are the first in a new crop of phones designed for constant connection to the social-networking site.

Sure, people said they were working during yesterday's inauguration, but the Internet tells a different tale. It seems that a large portion of Americans actually stopped working and searching the Internet while Obama was speaking, and on the flip side, Twitter and Facebook shot through the roof.

Given members' compulsive desire to collect online pals like living Pokemon, you could argue that social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Hi5 are one big game unto themselves. But thanks to heavyweights like Electronic Arts and Wizards of the Coast, they're also rapidly becoming home to high-quality, innovative and multiplayer digital diversions.

This probably seemed really funny until they heard about the court order.

A few anonymous Facebook users—most likely students—created a fake profile for the dean of Roncalli High School, a Catholic prep school in Indianapolis, then sent out messages and images from the account to other students. The profile has since been pulled down, but the dean sued Facebook to find out who created it.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Facebook, the hugely successful social-networking site, is going to settle its disagreement with the founders of semi-rival ConnectU. The ConnectU founders all attended Harvard with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and say that after they hired him to work on their idea for a kind of dating site called Harvard Connection, he stalled instead, and developed his own project while halting progress on theirs. According to ConnectU, Zuckerberg basically grabbed their idea and turned it into Facebook. Another ex-Harvard entrepreneur has made similar claims, but doesn't plan to sue.