Social media round-up

Happy New Year

Hope everyone is managing to stick to their New Year"s resolutions and isn"t missing the mince pies and selection boxes too much. Grab a cuppa and enjoy Siren Communications" first social media roundup of 2012.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has joined Twitter, much to the bemusement of the social network's users who struggled to believe the account was real. News Corp confirmed the posts were being written by the 80-year-old who amassed almost 25,000 followers in less than a day. Former deputy prime minister John Prescott tweeted: "Welcome to Twitter...@rupertmurdoch. I've left you a Happy New Year message on my voicemail!". See the full story.

Grab your skis - Expedia has further developed its Facebook Trip Companion application into a Snow Companion service. The new service allows users to plan, create a shortlist and book a ski holiday with a group of friends within Facebook.

Everyone"s favourite search engine is rolling out a major revamp of its homepage, in a bid to simplify the page and improve user experience. Google said: "We have rolled out the new Google bar to some users and are looking to broaden the rollout in the coming weeks."

Using LinkedIn? Should the top executive have been sacked from his £68,000 job for posting CV on networking site? See full story here.

If climbing on the scales is too traumatic right now, consider a different type of diet - the virtual one. Apparently far too many of us are allowing gadgets to dominate our lives. See how you score here.

And finally…. One of the country's leading horse racing commentators Simon Holt (Channel 4) was left red-faced after accidentally sending out a tweet on his public account, which read 'I want your hot body tonight babe'….