Social Networking | featured news

It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site.

The popular site Twitter crashed again on Wednesday morning.

Kim Kardashian, Soulja Boy and Lauren Conrad reportedly bank big bucks tweeting. In an effort to drive unemployed people totally insane, The Daily Beast compiled a list of how much celebrities get paid to Tweet. We already told you that Kim Kardashian makes at least $10,000 every time she tweets about a company. And let me refresh your memory: You were majorly bummed out about it.

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube.

We've seen some major world events unfold on the social media stage in the past week, the biggest being Google's threat to pull out of China and the Haiti earthquake.

Millions of dollars in relief aid has been collected via unlikely sources.

We’ve seen a host of deals recently in the Twitter app space, but here’s one that we now know didn’t happen: TwitPic selling out for north of $10 million.

AOL is currently in talks to acquire Mashable, the world's largest technology blog. A sale to the content-obsessed internet company would mean Mashable's 24-year-old founder Pete Cashmore really would have everything.