Social Networking | featured news

New money will give Facebook power to steal away employees, develop products and possibly pursue acquisitions, all without being publicly traded.

This may go down as the year that social networking trumped searching as America's favorite online pastime. In 2010, Facebook pushed past Google to become the most popular site on the Internet for the first time, according to two Web tracking firms. The title caps a year of rapid ascent for Facebook in which the social network hit 500 million users and founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. It also marks another milestone in the ongoing shift in the way Americans spend their time online, a social change that profoundly alters how people get news and interact with one another - and even the definition of the word "friend."

Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, announced Tuesday that it had passed 1 million registered users in just two months.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg toured the offices of China's top search engine Monday during a visit that has sparked speculation the social networking magnate is looking for business opportunities in the world's largest Internet market.

Over at Quora, Tripline founder and CEO Byron Dumbrill answers the question, "Why did Delicious fail?" Dumbrill joined Yahoo in 2006, about nine months after it acquired the bookmarking service, and his explanation corresponds with what we've been hearing for several years about its fate. Delicious was back-burnered while the company focused on Yahoo Bookmarks.

Insiders tell Bloomberg that Facebook is on track to generate a whopping $2 billion in revenues in 2010. The figure smashes the company's own expectations and is more than double what the company hauled last year, a reported $700 to $800 million. According to Bloomberg, the social network's swelling userbase has become irresistible to big-name advertisers including Adidas, JPMorgan Chase and Coca-Cola. Here's how bloggers are explaining the company's success ...

Twitter has raised a big new round of venture capital, $200 million, valuing the company at $3.7 billion.

So many people love Justin Bieber. They love him so much, that this year Twitter changed the way it counts its most tweeted-about topics to effectively exclude him....

The car manufacturer is rewarding those who purchase a new Toyota by January 3 with a $500 debit card for tweeting about it.

TODAY takes a look back at the viral videos that lit up the Internet. (Today Show)