Social Media Digest:Zynga’s $7bn, YouTube Redesign & More

Weekly back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. Here’s our run-down of the top five:

1. In news that will spark fears of another dotcom bubble, Facebook games producer Zynga has been valued at c.$7Bn. The company plans to raise $1bn (£630m) in its initial public offering, valuing the fledgling internet firm at the massive amount. The company behind popular Facebook games Farmville and Mafia Wars said in a regulatory filing on Friday that it intends to sell 115m shares – 14% of its common stock – at up to $10 each.

2. YouTube has revealed its biggest redesign in its history. The redesigned video site displays a single news feed in the centre of the homepage featuring videos that an individual’s friends have uploaded onto sister site Google+. There is a channel feed on the left hand side of screen encouraging users to ‘subscribe’ to their favourite YouTube channels and shows – which could mean a major boost to TV networks and individuals who have their own channels on the site. And there are big Facebook and Google+ ‘buttons’ also in the left hand column so users can easily share and see content from the video site through to their choice of social network.

3. Foursquare launched its “Save to Foursquare” and “Follow on Foursquare” buttons on Wednesday in an effort by the New York company to get users to integrate what they do on the Web with what they do in the real world. The Save to Foursquare button is aimed at online publishers and can enable publications to relate stories and reviews to places listed in the Foursquare app.

4. Google has rolled-out a new feature for its Google+ service, allowing US and Canadian users to make phone calls from within its Hangouts space. Hangouts currently enable up to ten Google+ users to meet up and use voice and video chat to communicate. The new service now allows users to make external phone calls and host conference calls, even to people who aren’t signed up to Google+. Revealed by Google employee Jarkko Oikarinen, the inventor of the first Internet Relay Chat, the update is available via a plugin from the Hangouts with Extras page on the social and business networking site.

5. Facebook now has 1000 times the referrals of Google+. The amount of activity on Google+ is falling, according to the latest data from web monitoring firm NetApplications, with Facebook massively ahead of the competition. The data showed that Google+ was outpaced not only by Facebook, but also sites like YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn. While Google+ is still relatively news to the social networking game, its data is no longer rising, but falling away.