Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in digital and social media. As always, the news and latest developments in the digital world have been overwhelming and really exciting. Here are some of the news pieces that caught my attention:

Mubarak fined for information shutdown

Hosni Mubarak was ousted in an uprising in Egypt in January 2011. A Cairo court yesterday fined the ousted president and two ex-ministers $US90 million for a mobile and internet shutdown during the uprising.

Egypt’s four main internet service providers and three mobile operators were instructed to suspend services and forced to abide by the Egyptian law. Read the full story here.

Google search goes global and +1:

In October 2009, Google launched its social search and got heaps of buzz all around the world. A few months later they rolled it in the main stream Google search result page. Last week Google announced that they are now rolling out the social search in 19 languages with more languages on their way.

Google also launched their much awaited +1 social button, much like the Facebook “Like”. Users who login to their Google profiles will be able to use the +1 button to endorse a particular piece of information.

These results will then appear next to search results and advertisements. This is another way for Google to collect valuable data, include peer recommendations in search results and taking word of mouth to the next level. All +1’s of any particular users are stored in a new tab on their Google profiles, which they may choose to make public or private. Read more about it here.

Follow us on Twitter:

Twitter follows suit and have asked 50 brands, including the Huff Post and Wall Street Journal to add the newly launched Twitter “Follow” Button to their websites.

This allows the website owners to stay connected with their visitors and possible increasing re-tweets, mentions and repeat visits.

The “Follow” Button can be easily added to your website from here. Grab the code and get people following instantly. Read more about the Button here.

Twitter photo-sharing service:

To no one’s surprise, Twitter is launching its photo-sharing service very soon which can possible bid farewell to third-party applications like TwitPic, YFrog, etc. Seems like a logical step for Twitter to add more features like this and improve the overall user experience.

I won’t be surprised to see a Twitter URL shortener soon. To read more, please click here.

Facebook Museum:

To wrap up the week, try Intel’s new cool Facebook app “The Museum of Me” here.

It’s simple – go to the page and sign in using your Facebook login. It then automatically fetches are the information from your profile and builds it into a Museum format which is visually amazing.

It’s all over the web and incredibly viral with over 90,000 Facebook ‘Likes’ already. Take a tour!