(CNN) — Their paths crossed on YouTube on an August night last year.

Jeremy and Christy Nueman used YouTube to find their adopted baby, Caleb.

Amanda, a college student seven months pregnant, scrolled past a YouTube video of a young California couple seeking adoption.

The couple, Jeremy and Christy Nueman, wanted to adopt a baby after struggling with infertility for five years. But instead of relying solely on newspaper ads or bulletin board fliers to increase their chances of connecting with a birth mother, they created a short YouTube video to show who they are.

Upon watching the video online, Amanda immediately connected with a snapshot of the Nuemans’ adorable miniature pinscher named Penny. She giggled when she saw video of Jeremy Nueman dancing happily in his kitchen, which reminded her of her own father.

She played the video over and over again.

“The video was comforting, and I could relate to them” said Amanda, who picked the Nuemans to become the adoptive parents of her baby boy out of hundreds of profiles she viewed online and through adoption agencies. Amanda chose to keep her last name anonymous for privacy reasons. “It’s so hard when you are just reading a letter to figure out what are these people like.”

With a high demand for domestic infants, adoption experts say the wait for a baby can be months or years. To gain a competitive edge, a growing number of adoption-minded couples are using Web sites like YouTube and Facebook to sell themselves as parents. Going online is cheaper, faster and reaches a wider audience than using just on print advertisements and word of mouth, they say.

Some wannabe parents are uploading YouTube videos featuring a hodgepodge of photos, home tours and interviews. Others are writing on blogs and personal Web sites to give birth mothers a glimpse of their adoption journey. To help spread the word, prospective parents also are utilizing social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook in the hope that their friends may know of a potential birth mom.

“Today’s teens and young adults looking for adoptive parents are more tech savvy than before,” says Jeff Siler, who owns ParentGallery.com, a free site created in 2007 where couples wanting to adopt can post pictures and video online. “Even before teens talk to an adoption agency, they may already be trying to Google for an answer online.”

Social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are also gaining traction among private adoption agencies. Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies, which completed more than 730 domestic infant adoptions last year, advises its couples — including the Nuemans — to create a YouTube video. Video & More on CNN:

Adoption seekers using YouTube, Facebook to find birth moms – CNN.com.

keine Angst vor SCHWARZ

They’re no Strunk and White, but Dom Sagolla and Adam Jackson are aiming to do for Twitter what “The Elements of Style” did for good writing on paper: outline elementary rules of usage, composition and grammar.

The bulk of the book, titled “140 Characters, A Style Guide for the Short Form,” will revolve around eight key lessons from the Twitter universe, such as the importance of simplicity, honesty and humor. The project will also highlight notable figures worth following on Twitter, anecdotes from the community and even examples of the few occasions Twitterers have gone overboard: For example, Mr. Sagolla points to “bathroom tweets,” or messages about bodily functions, as falling into the category of things not to post to Twitter.

“This is a new genre of writing,” said Mr. Sagolla. “A new form of literature, in some ways.”

A portion of the book will also double as a memoir from the perspective of Mr. Sagolla, who was involved in the early stages of development for the tool. Mr. Sagolla, who now works at Adobe Systems as an engineer, is also planning on including a mini-dictionary of Twitter lingo, like “retweet,” the reposting of another Twitterer’s message, or “twoosh,” a message that is exactly 140 characters.

The book came about after Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sagolla met after an informal gathering of iPhone developers and began chatting about Twitter. Mr. Sagolla decided to bring Mr. Jackson, who he said updates his Twitter feed as many as 10 times an hour, into the fold.

The two expect the book to be available for download on Apple’s iPhone by the end of the month. Although the plan is to eventually get a version of “140 Characters” in print, Mr. Sagolla said releasing the book through iTunes first would be a good way to reduce the need for a major investment upfront, as well as a springboard to attract interested publishing houses.

“140 Characters” isn’t the first book written about the popular San Francisco, Calif., micro-blogging company. There’s also “Twitter Revolution,” “Twitter Means Business” and “Twitter for Dummies,” for starters. But Mr. Sagolla says that while the previous publications tended to home in more on the business and money-making potential aspect of the tool, “140 Characters” is an attempt to create easy rules for all sorts of social networking sites, including Facebook.

“Our goal is to make Twitter applicable to any kind of user,” said Mr. Sagolla.

The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

This past weekend’s announcement by Facebook that the company would be opening up its APIs to allow for posting of notes, videos and more has left some companies scrambling to add new functionality to existing applications. Below we’ve highlighted a handful of the ones that let you post to Facebook from a desktop client, be it standalone or something that plugs into your browser.

We’ve talked to the people at each one to see when you should be expecting to be able to make use of the new API in each app:

“Blogo already supports Facebook status updates through its integration with Ping.fm,” says Benjamin Jackson, Blogo’s technical director. “As for more robust Facebook integration, you can be absolutely certain that we’ll be running to integrate this as quickly as possible. We’ll be shooting to send out a beta next week.”

Friendbar creator Edo Segal says “we love the fact that facebook [is] opening up more services,” and “definitely plan to include support for these API’s in upcoming versions.” Segal also says he wants a higher level of access to that data. “For example, to be able to post comments to users photos and status updates, and to directly send a Facebook message to a user via the API.”

Posting of notes through Ping.fm is up and running. “We’re still assembling some other ideas on how to use their new features,” says founder and CEO Sean McCullough. Worth a mention is that many of the services on this list go through Ping.fm to re-syndicate user messages.

“Sociagami has always been committed to deep integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and we will definitely be taking advantage of the new API features in 2.0,” says Charlie Robbins, director of social network integration for Sociagami. “Unfortunately, using an API based implementation will mean that Sociagami 2.0 will not have the messaging and wall posting features that came with 1.0.”

Working on it for an upcoming build. “The video part will be an important one!” says Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic which acquired/owns Twhirl. The latest version, which was released on Monday added in Ping.fm support, letting you cross post messages to your Facebook profile.

“Yes, we are actively working on implementing the new Facebook API and rolling it out ASAP,” says Regan Fletcher, Yoono’s VP of business development. Our overall objective really is to maximize our use of the Facebook API in order to allow users who have added Facebook to Yoono to have the best possible experience and functionality.”

“It does look like some of this new functionality is available via the REST API which we use and we can run FQL queries (which we do),” says AlertThingy creator Clive Howard. “We will be revisiting this prior to the next version and if we can do then I’m sure it will make it into 3.x.” Version 3 of AlertThingy was released on Monday morning.
Apps that we pinged but have not yet responded: Flock, Feedalizr, Moodswing/blast, and Gwibber. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs? | Webware – CNET.