Social Networking | featured news

With stock options worth as much as $1.8 billion, a number of Facebook’s early employees are giving up their stable jobs to do what they say they like best: start companies.

Worried about when you might get dumped? That's according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.

Evan Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type: the entrepreneur with good ideas for a start-up, but not the leader to execute a sophisticated business strategy.

A 22-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Florida, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her 3-month-old son to death after his crying interrupted her FarmVille game.

Despite a few outages in the past few months, Facebook continues to zip along as the fastest social network in terms of average response time for the site, according to a report by web analytics company AlertSite.

Scholastic is releasing a new social networking site today, YouAreWhatYouRead.com, that lets people build a profile based on the five books that were most influential in their lives. Like GoodReads and other social networking sites for readers, users can find other people with shared literary interests, or "Bookprints," as Scholastic calls them.

Facebook said its head of advertising sales, Michael Murphy, is stepping down in December, leaving a vacancy in one of the social-networking giant's key positions.

Digg’s backers would likely be willing to sell the company now for as little “as $20 million to $30 million,” Arrington says. That’s a bummer, since investors have pumped $40 million into this outfit since it was founded in 2004, and Rose and his backers are rumored to have had chances to sell the company for $130 million.

The top 25 U.S. newspapers - according to the number of Twitter followers, as recorded by Journalistics a bit over a week ago - is below. Sitting very comfortably in first place is The New York Times with 2.6 million - and they are the only news source on the list that has more followers than print circulation. The Wall Street Journal is number two with 464,591 followers, and The Washington Post comes in at third with 204,514. The Chicago Tribune, however, if you count both of its Twitter accounts, including @ColonelTribune, totals a second-place 879,490. 1. @nytimes – 2,668,948 2.

What was meant to be an announcement from the Whitman campaign heralding the candidate's endorsement by the San Diego Deputy Sheriff's Association inadvertently became an endorsement of a much different nature due to a URL error.