Social Networks

This week CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook has reached 1 billion active monthly users. The number is a nice round one for the firm to publicize -- especially in light of the past few rocky months. However, like anything Facebook these days, the announcement was accompanied by a healthy dose of...

Facebook has a new offer for users with $7 in their pocket -- they can use that cash to pay to promote their own posts on the social network. The social network already uses a complex algorithm to determine which posts appear on any given News Feed. With Facebook's new feature, though, users can pay...

LinkedIn took the first step toward opening up its walled garden with the introduction on Tuesday of a feature that lets members follow 150 of the most influential thought leaders on its network. These super-influencers include President Obama, Mitt Romney, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, British...

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg met Monday with Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow. Russia is something of a "test case" for Zuckerberg and Facebook: a country that is commercially significant but nonetheless tightly regulates -- and censors -- its media. With more Internet users tha...

Despite government-imposed bans, Facebook and Twitter have tens of millions of users in China. Facebook use in China has reportedly swelled to 63.5 million people, a roughly eightfold increase over the 7.9 million who used the site two years ago. Twitter, meanwhile, has nearly 36 million users in Ch...

MySpace is rolling out a sleek, media-centric new version of its social network in an effort to restore some of its Web popularity. MySpace was once one of the hottest online social networks, but it declined with the rise of Facebook and Twitter. MySpace posted a video this week previewing its new l...

Google is poised to climb past Facebook and be this year's top earner in display ad revenue, according to new research from eMarketer. Google is expected to earn $2.31 billion in display ad revenue this year, a 38.5 percent jump from last year, just ahead of Facebook's expected $2.16 billion in earn...

Twitter unveiled a new design for its iPad, iPhone and Android users this week, offering a more streamlined look on its mobile apps and asserting more control over how its mobile users interact with the social network. Twitter's revamped apps are now common across Apple and Android phones. The iPad ...

On Monday, news that Google had purchased Nik Software triggered speculation that the Internet giant was following in Facebook's footsteps. Nik is the maker of the Snapseed photo editing app. Facebook in April purchased Snapseed competitor Instagram for $1 billion, and Monday's announcement was seen...

Despite pending appeals, on Friday Twitter handed over an Occupy Wall Street protester's tweets to a New York criminal court judge. The capitulation comes after months of attempts by the social networking company to fight a subpoena from prosecutors by claiming that micro-blog posts were private con...