Social Networks

Zynga announced Thursday that it will be rolling out the full version of Zynga.com next week as part of the gaming company's ongoing process of decreasing its dependence on Facebook's social platform. Currently, gamers looking to play Zynga offerings such as Farmville have to sign in with their Face...

Movie and TV buffs will soon be able to share what they've watched on Netflix more easily, the service announced Wednesday. Users in the United States will be able to take advantage of "frictionless sharing" with their friends on Facebook in the coming days. The sharing will be available only on Net...

The social bookmarking site Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing social networks of the last two years, released a new analytics tool Tuesday so that users -- especially businesses and marketing professionals -- can do a better job of tracking traffic and sharing aspects of the site. Pinterest Web ...

It is possible to predict intimate personal characteristics such as sexual orientation by studying a person's Facebook Likes, according to findings released Monday by University of Cambridge researchers. Just by studying Likes, the team was able to determine a person's race, age, IQ, personality t...

A day after Facebook announced a mobile-centric makeover of its News Feed, rumors have resurfaced that HTC may be working on a phone that features special integration with the social network. The spark for speculation is the Friday publication on the Web of the device's specifications. The smartphon...

Facebook unveiled its new look this week, providing bigger photos and more links in users' News Feeds, along with additional ways to view specialized streams based on topics of interest, such as music. This is apparently an attempt to corral all the random musings and disjointed pictures users are a...

Facebook has flatly denied the suggestion by a New York Times columnist that it might be gaming its own system -- that is, that the way it pumps up views of fee-based promoted posts could be by limiting the sharing of ordinary posts. "There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algo...

Hurricane Sandy, which struck the U.S.' Eastern seaboard last October, exemplified the use of social networks in disaster communications. Millions of residents were affected. For many, real-time information was provided through independent, citizen-generated Facebook pages like Jersey Shore Hurrican...

HootSuite has incorporated paid advertising into its dashboard for the first time with the rollout of HootSuite Promoted Products integration for Twitter. It allows users to buy Promoted Tweets and manage their accounts on the HootSuite dashboard. This is a significant step for HootSuite's users, ...

Twitter launched an API for advertisers Wednesday, a move designed to help the social network boost revenues to better compete with its Internet ad competitors. The company has had an ad structure in place since 2010, when it launched its Promoted Tweets program, which allows advertisers to push 140...