Social Media

By now Facebook must rue the day it went public -- or at least rue its initial offering price of $38 per share. On Thursday, the company's stock closed at $19.88, after hitting a low of $19.69. Early Friday, it hit a new low of $19.01 -- half its IPO value, plus a penny. By mid-day, it had recovered...

App.net founder Dalton Caldwell watched the social Web's trajectory with admiration and then dismay over the years. From all accounts, he liked its initial promise. As it morphed into a commercialized, ad-supported ecosystem of products, however, he apparently grew disillusioned. Hence the crowd-fun...

Facebook on Tuesday launched "Bingo & Slots Friendzy" -- a bingo game that uses real money -- exclusively for its members in the UK. As with all of its apps, Facebook is taking 30 percent of the revenue. Facebook has its fingers in numerous revenue-generating pies. To name a few examples, it is ...

Privacy in the cloud may be an illusion, given the known cybersecurity risks, not to mention the laws in the U.S. and around the world that permit government agencies relatively easy access to remote data including data stored in the cloud. Of course, businesses have relied on storing data in the cl...

It is hard to remember that only a few months ago, the market was greedily speculating about how high Facebook's stock might go. Fast-forward to one IPO debacle, several negative research reports, the departure of several top executives, and a lukewarm earnings report, and the question is now fearfu...

When Google withdrew from China, it didn't send out a press release or hold a press conference. Instead, it announced the news on its corporate blog. This move proved to be a "milestone event for corporate blogging," said Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency. "Even though the Google corporate blog...

Facebook on Thursday released its first quarterly earnings report since its monster IPO in May. During the period, Facebook reported revenues of $1.18 billion but couldn't turn a profit, losing $157 million, or eight cents a share. Investors weren't happy with what they saw. The company's stock pric...

Zynga reported second-quarter earnings lower than expected Wednesday, sending its stock sinking as much as 40 percent Thursday morning. The maker of popular social games such as "FarmVille" and "Words With Friends" reported a net loss of more than $22.8 billion, or 3 cents per share. Facebook was pa...

Foursquare is following up on a feature it introduced last week that layers on new ad functionality for brands seeking to target local customers. Unveiled last week, "Local Updates" lets users keep up with places they like in their Friends tab. Now the social service has rolled out "Promoted Updat...

Facebook shares fell on Tuesday, as the social network faces problems adding new users in multiple markets. The number of users on Facebook in the United States actually slipped by 1.1 percent, according to a new report from Capstone Investments. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth since its incept...

It's not enough to have just a website, or just social media profiles. Businesses need to have both -- and the traffic needs to flow seamlessly between them. Numerica Credit Union was looking for a way to offer customers a useful tool on its Facebook page while driving traffic from Facebook to its ...

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a study that suggests television news needs to revamp its approach to how it uses videos to support its reporting. The study found that YouTube has become a major news source -- in particular, for eyewitness videos -- that c...

Oracle is snapping up another social media company: It announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to buy Involver, a platform provider of SML, or social markup language. SML is a developer tool used to create customized marketing applications for social media sites and Web campaigns.

Yahoo and Facebook are ending their patent infringement lawsuits against each other with a settlement that includes a licensing partnership as well as an expanded content distribution and advertising relationship. The new agreement allows for collaboration on ad campaigns during major media events.

Facebook is rumored to be testing a Want button that would be similar in look and function to its now ubiquitous Like button. The feature was spotted by developer Tom Waddington, who published the button's code on his blog. Such buttons already exist -- but they have been developed by third-party b...