Social Networks

Facebook's stock soared Wednesday following the release of its Q2 earnings report, which beat Wall Street expectations. Investors seemed pleased with the company's strong user growth and better-than-expected gains from mobile advertising. It reported $1.81 billion in revenue, a 53 percent year-ove...

Devout followers pay heed: The Catholic Church is offering indulgences for those who take the righteous step of following Pope Francis on Twitter. The granting of indulgences, a centuries-old practice, is believed to reduce the time that one must spend in purgatory. Traditional means of obtaining in...

In Japan, a flubbed privacy setting made public a Google Groups chat among Japanese bureaucrats, allowing any-and-everyone to see internal memos, including negotiating positions for an international treaty. The default settings for Google Groups, which are established by the party that started the c...

Social commerce website Fancy has racked up $53 million in funding from investors including American Express and actor Will Smith, according to press reports citing a July 3 SEC filing. The company currently is valued at $600 million. Fancy reportedly brings in about $3 million per month, and its ba...

After launching Graph Search into beta earlier this year, Facebook on Monday announced that it is now beginning to roll the feature out to everyone who uses the social network's U.S. English version. Graph Search lets users perform searches on the social network that combine phrases -- "my friends i...

There's no question that books have gone digital. Sure, there are still paper books aplenty in a smattering of brick-and-mortar bookstores -- and available online as well -- but there's no escaping the proverbial writing on the wall that book-selling behemoth Amazon now sells more electronic books t...

Remember Bebo? In its heyday, five or six years ago, the social networking site showed enough promise to be considered a possible rival to then-dominant MySpace -- and to pull in an $850 million purchase price when it was acquired by AOL. What a difference a few years make. Fast forward to 2013, and...

A bug that has been in Facebook's network for about a year has exposed private information on about 6 million of its users to other users during that period. This has revived concern that the company maintains a database of shadow profiles of members and their friends, even if the latter are non-mem...

Buzz is building over Facebook's rumored plan to launch a mobile video app for Instagram at an event on Thursday. Video functionality in Instagram, the company Facebook purchased for $1 billion in April of last year, would be a direct challenge to Twitter's Vine app. Vine lets users take 6-second vi...

In the wake of recent revelations that the government has been tapping their networks to monitor users, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft in recent days have all published more information about those monitoring requests. Facebook, for example, on Friday reported that for the six months ending December ...