Social media holds tremendous opportunity for law firms in terms of marketing, client relations, and recruiting, but many lawyers remain reluctant to take the plunge because of the daunting regulatory obstacles to adopting this new form of communication. However, LexisNexis is making it easier for lawyers to get social with a new Social Media Visibility service, unveiled this week at LegalTech in New York City.

There are many remarkable facts surrounding Facebook's upcoming initial public offering, which the Wall Street Journal reports could get underway (at least with the filing of preliminary paperwork) as early as this week. For example, the fact that a $10 billion stock offering might value the social network at $75 billion -- and that this might even be considered a tad low. But one piece of trivia struck me as especially interesting: valuing Facebook at $100 billion, as seems to be the general consensus, would make it the same size as McDonald's.

While social media's potential benefits for small businesses are clear, it's equally clear that small business owners with limited resources and expertise are still having a hard time tapping into them. With that in mind, American Express is launching a new "Social Media Show + Tell" to help small businesses successfully adopt social media. The AmEx Social Media Show + Tell, hosted on its newly-created Business Knowledge Share enhanced LinkedIn user group, consists of a series of videos in which representatives from the most popular digital and social platforms explain how they can help small business with marketing and advertising. …

The country's premiere law enforcement organization is looking to develop an early warning system for domestic and global threats drawing on information from social networks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation released details of the planned system in a request for information from private contractors who are qualified to help build it. The FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center said the RFI was intended to determine the capability of industry to provide an "Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application solution." As indicated here, the system would be able to scrape material from social networks about emerging threats …

Big sporting events are natural generators of social media energy, but they're also fraught with peril; put dozens of mouthy athletes, tens of thousands of vocal fans, and millions of opinionated viewers together in virtual space, and any number of things can go wrong. No surprise, then, that the organizers and advertising sponsors for big sporting events are increasingly concerned to control -- or at least attempt to positively guide -- social media associated with their investment.

Wow, that's a lot of cats doing funny stuff: YouTube visitors are watching an average of four billion videos per day, according to a post on the video platform's blog, which represents an increase of 25% over eight months ago, double the volume in May 2010, and four times the volume in October 2009. Meanwhile the volume of video content uploaded has increased to 60 hours per minute, up from 48 hours eight months ago. Here the growth curve goes from 10 hours per minute in January 2008 to 20 hours in May 2009, 24 hours in March 2010, then …

If you've ever felt like everyone else on Facebook seems to be having more fun than you, well, you're not alone, according to a new study by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, published in an academic journal called Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. The study, titled "'They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am': The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives," is based on a survey of roughly 425 college students asking them about their own lives and the lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The students were also questioned …

Google's big push into social networking appears to be gaining traction, with the news that Google+ now has over 90 million registered users, according to CEO Larry Page, who announced the figure during Google's earnings presentation on Thursday. While this number tells us nothing about engagement, including time spent or number of visits per user, Page did claim that "engagement on Plus is also growing tremendously." Again, this statement is entirely relative so it doesn't tell us much, beyond the fact that Google+ is indeed growing.

While I would never encourage anyone to break the law, I take it as axiomatic that if you are going to do something criminal, you probably shouldn't boast about it in a public forum. Apparently no one told the members of the "Wavegang" and "Hoodstarz," two gangs in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn that were recently busted by the New York Police Department for a series of shootings that killed three, injured more, and generally kept their neighborhoods in a constant state of terror. Social media played a key role in nabbing 43 gang members from both gangs, according to …

Some interesting new data from our friends south of the equator proves that social networks can still rise -- and fall -- with remarkable speed, when a newcomer's utility (and publicity) outweigh the incumbent's many advantages including, well, incumbency. In an American setting, the story is a cautionary tale for Facebook, which faces a determined challenger in Google+. In an ironic twist, however, in Brazil Facebook is David and Google is Goliath.