Facebook, Internet | featured news

A contract to stay off Facebook until the end of the school year isn’t the first pact Paul Baier made with his 14-year-old daughter, but it's his first parenting decision to go viral.

...And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go. Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.

Many of us know Facebook users who are on the site seemingly 24/7, but we also know others who sometimes feel Facebook fatigue, and who have stepped away from the social network to clear their heads. Now a new study says that 61 percent of Facebook users say they've taken such breaks for several weeks or longer in the past.

Facebook has faced a few controversies in the past few months, including controversies over privacy policies on its own site and on its photo-sharing site, Instagram. Still, the company has bolstered investor confidence with a series of moves that seem to lay the groundwork for Facebook to make more advertising dollars, particularly in the all-important mobile space.

...Our biggest disappointment was our misunderstanding of how Facebook Pages work. Instead of building a database of users that you can contact at will, you are essentially paying Facebook to build a list of people that you can then advertise to.

Social networking giant Facebook unveils tools that lets users search through all the information their friends have shared.

Facebook is expected to announce something big on January 15 and here's at look at what it could be.

It seems Facebook's planetary ubiquity is inevitable ... until you take a look at the sheer size ofthose competitors: Total membership of the four major non-U.S. networks total 778 million. Combine that with Twitter's 500 million active users around the globe, and you've got a social horde that eclipses Facebook's.

Facebook says it is testing a service that will charge users $1 to guarantee that messages they send to people they are not connected to arrive in users' inboxes, rather than in an often-ignored folder called "other."

The battle lines are sharpening between Facebook and Twitter, as they fight to become the prime hub for photo sharing on the Internet.