Video Chat

In a video posted Thursday, Facebook explains that its renovated News Feed is intended to clean up the site's design. The new version of the feature has bigger picture thumbnails, shows larger maps when friends check in and shows larger previews for articles users share. Facebook has also introduced a feed switch, so users can toggle between the type of content that they want to look at. This includes photo feeds, music feeds, all friends feeds and others. LIVE DISCUSSION: Join us at 2:30 p.m. "By providing these different feeds, that really empowers people to see the things they care about most," a Facebook employee says in the YouTube video . In pictures and on video, the new design looks clean, but will users embrace it?

What does it take to get into " Best American Short Stories "? We'll ask Tom Perrotta, the guest editor of this year's collection, when we talk to him at 10 a.m. PDT Tuesday. Save this link; the video will appear here. Perrotta, whose most recent novel is "The Leftovers," is the author of "Election," "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher. " His books often take slices of suburban American life and give them a unique, even hysterical, spin: affairs, sex education, a hyper-ambitious student council presidential candidate.

By now, "iCarly" fans are aware of the looming reality: The Nickelodeon teen sitcom will be wrapping its run after five seasons. The series, from Dan Schneider ("Drake & Josh," "Victorious"), broke new ground with the way it entwined the Internet and technology into its story about three friends who start up a Web show, speaking to a generation glued to their cellphones and laptops. It was a scheme that would prove beneficial. Early in its run, "iCarly" would outpace fictional teen queen "Hannah Montana" in the race for young viewers.

Who wins a Pulitzer Prize for being funny? Dave Barry, that's who. Technically, he won the prize for commentary for his columns at the Miami Herald -- where his job was, and is, "to write about issues ranging from the international economy to exploding toilets. " Barry has just published his first solo novel in a decade, "Insane City. " The book is about a groom on his way to his wedding when things begin to go wrong. "Things" include angry strippers, Russian gangsters, a refugee on the run, a very large pimp and a gigantic white python.

Join us Tuesday for a live video conversation with award-winning author Amy Wilentz about her new book, "Farewell, Fred Voodoo. " After a massive earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, Wilentz, a journalist who has been writing about the country for more than two decades, felt compelled to return. This is the story she came back with, one that weaves history and culture to understand a fractured present. "Haiti needs to be understood in Haitian terms," Wilentz writes. In his review of the book in the L.A. Times, Hector Tobar writes: " 'Farewell, Fred Voodoo' is a love letter to - and a lament for - Haiti, a country with an already strange and tortured history that became even more tragic, interesting and convoluted in the months after the earthquake....

NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average didn't crack 14,000 on Tuesday but it nonetheless closed at its highest level in more than five years. The Dow gained 72 points, or 0.5%, to finish at 13,954 Tuesday, just shy of a milestone not reached since October 2007. The stock market's slow, grinding march upward in recent weeks has been fueled by growing optimism now that Washington has defused the so-called fiscal cliff and investors know how the government will tax capital gains.

You once had to leave home to see a psychiatrist for therapy, a music teacher for guitar lessons or a makeup artist for face-to-face consultations. Now they can come to you, virtually, through video chat. Long the darling of science fiction aficionados, video chat has never much caught on for personal calls. But this year, with the technology being incorporated into a widening array of digital gadgets, professionals specializing in one-to-one services are experimenting with video chat as a way to vastly extend their reach.

Think talking on a cellphone in public is anti-social? Just wait. Soon, folks might be staring at their phones as well as mumbling into them. Video chat on mobile phones has arrived. On Friday, the HTC Evo 4G — the first U.S. phone able to access the speed-enhanced 4G cell network — went on sale, with Sprint Nextel as its exclusive carrier. Tapping the 4G network enables the Evo to do faster Web browsing and downloads, in addition to higher-quality video streams and the aforementioned video chat.

  Join us at 10 a.m. today for a live Google+ Hangout chat with NFL columnist Sam Farmer, deputy sports editor John Cherwa and Mark Thompson, best known as the Mark part of the "Mark and Brian" radio show. They will be discussing the upcoming NFL season. The season kicks off tonight, when the New York Giants, eager to pick up where they left off last season, take on the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys have been dominated by the Giants in recent years, losing seven of nine meetings since early 2008.

In one of the first frontal assaults on Apple Inc.'s increasingly popular iPad tablet computer, smart-phone titan Research in Motion Ltd. on Monday announced a pad of its own. The 7-inch device, called the PlayBook, will be released in early 2011 — and it will go places the current iPad doesn't. The PlayBook's two built-in cameras will allow for video chat (the iPad is camera-less), and the device will permit Adobe Flash programs, which make up a huge percentage of online video and games.