Vine, the app from Twitter that lets iPhone owners create and share six-second videos, scored a few updates on Tuesday. It’s easier now to make videos that star you, and Twitter-style mentions are now supported, too.

No longer are challenging hand contortions required when you want to film yourself. With the 1.1 update, Vine now supports using the front-facing camera while you shoot video. You can, of course, switch back and forth between the front- and rear-facing cameras in the same video.

The new support for mentions means that Vine users can, in video descriptions and comments, use Twitter’s @-notation to reference their friends.

The updated Vine app also includes improved people search and assorted minor fixes.

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Beginning in Mountain Lion, OS X features social media integration options with both Twitter and Facebook, letting you post to the services from the OS itself, as well as sync contacts.

To associate an account, open up System Preferences and go to the Mail, Contacts & Calendars preference pane. You’ll see a list of accounts that you’ve already set up; just click the Plus (+) button at the bottom to add a new one.

When prompted, choose the type of account you’d like to set up. In this example, we’ll use a Twitter account. Enter your Twitter username and password in the following sheet and click Sign In.

Your account will now show up in the left hand pane. On the right side, you’ll see a couple of options: “Allow others to find me by email” does pretty much what it says on the tin. Tap the Update Contacts button to look through OS X’s address book and add info gleaned from Twitter to your friends’ contact records. (Don’t worry, this won’t add people you follow on Twitter, or those who follow you, to your contacts—it just updates any existing contacts who also happen to be on Twitter.)

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The way we find jobs and pitch ourselves to prospective employers is changing rapidly, and LinkedIn is trying to help you stay ahead of the game. The “social network for professionals” recently introduced a new feature called Endorsements that, with a little help from your coworkers and close friends, can help you catch the eye of recruiters who are short on time but long on candidates.

Give a quick overview of your skills

Endorsing someone is a bit like tagging a photo on Flickr. Add just a few tags, er, skills, to your LinkedIn profile, and recruiters can find you more easily and get a quick overview of your areas of expertise. You can also meet other LinkedIn members with similar interests and get a better idea about related fields that you could branch into or specialize in.

Let yourself see more of the big picture

When you’re logged into LinkedIn.com, the Skills & Expertise menu (More > Skills & Expertise) at the top lets you search for skills to add to your profile. Type a few letters of an “area of expertise” into the search box, and LinkedIn will suggest matches and (ideally) more-specific terms. Click a suggestion to add it to your profile, and you’ll see a page that tells you more about the skill, related skills that you might want to focus on, geographical locations where related positions are especially common, and fellow LinkedIn members that you could reach out to.

Your skills appear on your profile, and the real magic commences after you add a few. When your coworkers and friends log in to LinkedIn, a big blue box at the top of the site will ask them to endorse you and confirm that you possess the skills you claim. Contacts can also visit your LinkedIn profile to see this box.

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Can you ever have enough microblogging services? Probably. But the newest popular entrant into the field that Twitter made popular, App.net, rose up in large part as a response to the increasingly onerous restrictions Twitter places on its developers—and by extension, its users. I tested a slew of App.net clients for iOS to find the best options available: Netbot (), Appeio (), Rhino (), Adian (), and Felix ().

I know what I want out of a good Twitter client: I want features like buttery smooth, stutter-free scrolling; easy access to profiles; feature-rich composition screens that make quick work of posting status updates with metadata like photos and videos attached as desired; seamless insights into the conversation surrounding an individual post; with all of that bundled into an attractive design. Are those the same features I’d like to see in my ideal App.net client? I truly didn’t know, before I dived into this new world of App.net apps.

Here’s what I found.

The global feed

There’s a tendency amongst App.net clients to include access to a global timeline—one that shows every App.net post, across all users of the service. It’s a feature that will steadily make less sense as the service grows in popularity, and I don’t value it much. Rhino, Adian, Appeio, and Felix all make that global feed a top-level option. Netbot tucks it away under search instead of giving it a hallowed spot in its tab bar, which I appreciate; I don’t ever want the firehose, so I appreciate it not gobbling up such prime real estate.

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Facebook integration comes to iOS 6, and it looks an awful lot like Twitter integration did starting in iOS 5. Anywhere iOS used to let you send a tweet, you can now post to Facebook as well. Also new to iOS 6 is the way the interface looks when you share photos, links, and other data—that process sports a dramatic makeover.

Facebook

You can share photos within the Camera and Photos apps, share your location from within Maps, send updates from Game Center, and post status updates with Siri. For that last trick, you can say “Post to Facebook I love reading Macworld,” “Write on my wall I love Mark Zuckerberg,” “Post I’m in the mood for brunch to Facebook,” or similar alternatives.

To share photos on Facebook from the Camera or Photos app, tap the Share button, and then tap Facebook. The Facebook share sheet that appears will superimpose an album name atop the photo, which is attached to the typing area. Tap the photo to choose a different Facebook album for it. In the bottom-right corner, you can tap to choose which audience to share your photo with; the options available to you will reflect your Facebook privacy settings. You can also choose whether to include location information for the photos you share.

Sharing your current location in Maps works pretty much the same way. You tap a pin, tap the blue arrow, and scroll down to tap the Share Location button. You then choose Facebook to bring up the Facebook sharing sheet.

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