The social space online changes rapidly. Feedback stays on top of emerging media news so you don’t have to. Here are the top must-read social media articles of the week for July 17, 2011.

Facebook Enriches Comments

Facebook has updated commenting options. Now, if you post a URL to an image, video or website within a comment, it will appear in the same format as if you were posting a status update. Previously only the text URL would be displayed. As Mashable explained, “Now, when you comment on a post with a URL, Facebook will pull in a video player, a thumbnail or an overview of the website that you’re linking to.”

 

OSX Lion Debuts

Apple’s big debut of the summer is the desktop operating system OS X Lion.  Over 250 new features were added to the operating system including Multi-touch geastures and full-screen apps. Lion was released exclusively through the Mac App Store and on the first day it was downloaded over 1 million times.  You can purchase Lion for $29.99. Learn more here.

 

Big Growth for Apple

Speaking of Apple products, see a breakdown of how Apple product sales grew from December 2007  to June 2011 below. The infographic illustrates Apple’s massive sales growth. Apple’s revenues grew 82% last year. Woah.

Google Colorless

Google keeps getting shot down on purchase requests. We saw it with Groupon and Path and now we are seeing it with the photo-sharing app Color. According to Techcrunch, Google previously requested to buy Color for $200 million but Color declined. Google may actually have lucked out with this refusal as Color has become increasingly unimpressive.

In other Google news, Google Labs, Google’s product prototype experiment,  is being shut down. Learn more here.

 

Mobile Payment Predictions

According to a data report prepared by Gartner, mobile payment spending is on the rise. The data suggests that in 2011 141 million consumers will spend $86.1 billion using mobile payments. Shen, Research director at Gartner, “believes the mass market adoption of NFC payments is at least four years away, with the biggest “hurdle” as changing users behavior from using cash and credit cards to using their mobile phone. And she predicts that in 2011, merchandise purchases from mobile apps like eBay and Amazon will account for 90 percent and 77 percent of all mobile payments transactions in North America and Western Europe, respectively.” [via Techcrunch]

 

-Anna (@alucas9)