Social Networks

LinkedIn is making a fresh push into the original content market by opening up its publishing platform. The company until now allowed only selected "influencers" to use the service's long-form publishing tools to craft posts offering professional advice, insights and inspiration to other users. Such...

Facebook on Thursday added custom gender options for users to identify themselves other than "male" and "female." Users now can identify themselves as bigender, androgynous, cisgender, or in one of more than 50 ways. The move initially applies only to the company's 159 million monthly users in the U...

Twitter on Wednesday announced Q4 2013 revenue of $243 million, up 116 percent year over year, and a 30 percent YoY increase in average monthly active users. Wall Street reacted by sending its share prices down 21 percent, and analysts promptly downgraded the company. That could be because Twitter's...

This week in 2004, Harvard undergrads became the first group to use Facebook -- the social network launched at the college. Fast-forward a decade, and the company is a technology mammoth, with 1.23 billion users and profit of $1.5 billion for 2013. Facebook is by most accounts a gargantuan success...

A YouTube video posted by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was blocked after what national media described as "mischievous" spam reports. The video, "Delivering on our Promises," was replaced with a boilerplate YouTube message saying that the video had been removed because of "a violation of Yo...

Facebook on Thursday announced next week's launch of Paper, a free app for iOS that combines user and curated content into a personalized news medium. Users can create stories as well as receive stories based on their interests and organized into sections. Section stories are chosen by both human an...

GoDaddy reportedly has admitted one of its employees handed out customer information to a scammer who carried out a scheme to obtain a prime Twitter account. Naoki Hiroshima this week detailed how the scammer was able to force him to hand over his prime Twitter account, @N. The scammer used social e...

Twitter has launched analytics for Twitter Cards to help users determine how well their media-rich tweets are performing on the network. Twitter Cards allow developers, brands and publishers to add photos, videos, deep links within their apps, content previews, and other rich media assets to their t...

Perhaps foreshadowing a sequel to their much-publicized tiff with Nokia, tax authorities in India are claiming that Infosys and HP each owe oodles in unpaid taxes. India is irked about deduction claims made for software and manpower that was, as The Register reported, "developed and deployed on cl...

Facebook on Thursday announced Trending, a new product designed to surface relevant and timely conversations occurring on the network. Trending, displayed to the right of the user's News Feed, will feature a list of topics that have recently spiked in popularity, personalized according to subjects o...