Social Media | featured news

After the social-networking service Twitter announced Monday it was in talks to develop an unscripted series based on the site, two of the service's most prolific users have expressed fear that such a jump would mean an unfair intrusion on their lives.

Facebook sells a 1.96% stake to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn.

Twitter is confronting a slew of challenges -- from hiring, to keeping its service up and running, to finding meaningful revenue -- as it deals with sudden stratospheric growth.

Finally, Twitter has a significant use. It allows you to bypass the endless taxi line at the McCarren airport in Vegas so you can lose money quicker!

It must be something in the air. Spring perhaps. But when high level employees start to leave perfectly good startups before a liquidity event, there's usually something pretty important that they think they need to work on.

Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday's visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week.

Although many retailers are reducing their online marketing budgets, spending on social media is falling at a slower rate than spending in other online marketing channels.

It's happened: America's favorite Tina Fey character - Sarah Palin, former Republican Vice Presidential nominee - has joined Twitter. With the handle AKGovSarahPalin, Palin jumped on the social phenomena the other day and has started posting things like Alaska's swine flu status and her staff being misquoted.

A French hacker posts 13 screenshots of a Twitter product manager's admin interface to prove the claim.

The software giant thinks it can make money in social networking the old-fashioned way - charging subscription fees.