Forget Angry Birds and FarmVille. Twitter and the U.S. State Department have a new game for people to play: Working with other connected citizens to collar criminals on the lamb! “Cops have routinely shared mugshots with one another -- and with the general public -- for ages,” writes Wired.com. “But distributing the photos globally, and hoping for an instant capture in five places at once? That’s anything but routine.” Wired is referring to a worldwide manhunt, which is set to kick off at the end of March. The search across America and Europe for five fugitives, identifiable only by their …

Beginning next week, Vevo will reportedly only accept new registrations via Facebook. Citing an email apparently being send to select users, The Next Web writes: “This would be a huge coup for Facebook, as musicians are finding quite a bit of success using its social network to share tracks and connect with fans.” Last September, Vevo announced a Facebook integration that would allow users to share videos with friends on the social network as part of its launch on Facebook’s Open Graph. The reported change should also fuel rumors that Vevo -- which is owned and operated by Universal Music …

Though not uncommon for flashy tech startups, Yelp saw its stock soar in first-day trading on Friday. “The online reviews site's IPO priced above its targeted range of $12 to $14 per share,” The Associated Press reports. “That already suggested strong investor demand for a slice of the 8-year-old online reviews site, which has yet to turn a profit.” Yelp’s IPO price valued the company at $900 million. By Friday afternoon, aggressive trading had shot it value up to about $1.49 billion. “Such a big first-day jump is common for high-profile Internet companies such as Yelp,” AP notes. Most recently, …

Before adding that extra bandwidth-heavy bell or whistle to your Web site, we suggest reading this story in The New York Times about increasingly impatient Web surfers. These days, how long is too long for consumers to wait for various site responses? “Even 400 milliseconds -- literally the blink of an eye,” NYT tells us, citing new research from Google engineers. Among other activities, “that barely perceptible delay causes people to search less. Every millisecond matters,” says Arvind Jain, a Google engineer, and, in NYT’s words, “the company’s resident speed maestro.” Given that time is money, therefore, Google and its …

Who needs Google Maps? Not Foursquare, apparently. Dropping Google’s API, the location-based social network is now using OpenStreetMaps to show users where they are. The Next Web calls it an “interesting” move, “and one that the company says it has done because of a desire to support the start-up ecosystem.” In a blog post, Foursquare says it was surprised to find so many strong alternatives to Google Maps. “When we initially began looking around for other map providers, we found some incredibly strong alternatives,” according to Foursquare. “And while the new Google Maps API pricing was the reason we initially …

Discovering that endorsements aren’t just for pro-athletes, ReadWriteWeb looks into Skills.to -- a new people endorser and search engine. “The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills,” RRW reports. In the words of founder Joshua Schachter, Skills.to is a: "Search engine for people by property of the person … Portable reputation someday." Yet, Schachter admits that the start-up is far from scaling. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go …