Social Media

Facebook introduced a long-expected development on Wednesday: Timeline for Pages -- that is, Timeline for brands. It is similar in look and feel and function to the feature that was pushed out to user profiles last fall. However, the implications of Timeline for Pages are much greater for brands, bo...

Twitter launched an expansion of its mobile advertising system Tuesday, putting promoted tweets into the timelines of users accessing the service from mobile applications. Users accessing Twitter from iPhone and Android apps have been able to search out promoted trends and tweets before, and promote...

Yahoo is pressuring Facebook to pay licensing fees on several patents covering a variety of website functions like advertising, website personalization, social networking and messaging. Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual prope...

Yelp, the online local review service, expects to sell 7.15 million shares in its IPO, at US$12 to $14 each. The total potential take is $100 million. The company will list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "YELP." Yelp's price target values the company at roughly $778 millio...

Facebook is reportedly working on a system to put ads in its mobile services. The news comes just days after the social networking giant filed for an initial public offering, hoping to raise $5 billion. In its IPO filing, Facebook stated that the number of active mobile users of its social network i...

Zero hour is approaching as the certainty grows that Facebook will be filing for its initial public offering this week. Zero hour for excited investors and Wall Street banks -- and zero hour for privacy advocates. Even as a private company, Facebook had no problem pushing the envelope, said Consumer...

This is it -- the week every social media investor has been waiting for. Facebook is expected to file for its IPO this week, according to widely circulating rumors, in response to huge demand in the market -- to say nothing of its own employees, many of whom stand to become millionaires overnight. M...

Your online store did record sales this past holiday and you are a happy person at the start of the year. After a few days of rejoicing, it is time to get back to the grind and look at how you can move forward and take your online store to even greater heights. There are a few fallouts of the holida...

Brand graph company 33Across has acquired Tynt, a company that tracks user behavior for publishers. Both companies were mum about the amount of the all-stock deal. Tynt will take 33Across into a new market; the combined companies will reach 1.25 billion users globally, according to 33Across. 33Acros...

On Jan. 1, I found that these Twitter names had hordes of followers: @ladygaga had 17,554,645, @Starbucks had 1,927,255, and @noahkravitz had 24,273. If you have a Twitter account, you can easily see all of who the followers are. Having Twitter followers doesn't mean you get to keep them, though. F...

A lawsuit alleging Facebook violates a California law on commercial endorsements can move forward, a federal judge has ruled. Facebook failed to persuade the court to dismiss the suit altogether, but District Judge Lucy Koh did reject the plaintiff's claim that Facebook had unjustly enriched itself ...

The market for local commerce has been the holy grail for Internet companies since the dawn of the modem. However, that market has been more like "Monty Python And The Holy Grail." Until now. The missing link for local commerce hasn't been the Web, it's been four things: web usage as everyday "utili...

Ask just about any research company that tracks online spending about this holiday season and you will get bombarded with cheer: "good," "strong," "robust," and "surprisingly strong" are among the adjectives used to describe online shopping activity this month and last. The latest indicator is a rep...

Jive Software has made its debut on the Nasdaq, following on the heels of other recent tech company IPOs such as Groupon, LinkedIn and Netflix. Jive, a maker of collaborative social media software for the enterprise, doesn't have the consumer orientation of those three, but it's apparently similar e...

The existing model for daily deals is broken. The biggest issue: It's simply not making merchants money. In just a few quick years, daily deals have shifted the concept of local marketing from traditional advertising to blanket discounts aimed at driving first-time customers en masse. While the new...