Technology, Social Media | featured news

A phone hacking scandal may have cost Rupert Murdoch his biggest-selling newspaper in 2011, but the billionaire media mogul managed to end the year with a modest addition to his empire -- an account on Twitter.

Facebook and other social media sites are becoming a go-to place to find a person with a kidney to spare.

A survey by a UK-based divorce website shows that Facebook figures prominently in one-third of divorce petitions, an increase of 13 percent from two years ago.

Although Facebook dominates Twitter in many areas, it lost to its smaller competitor in at least one metric for 2011. Twitter was discussed in about 50 percent of media coverage regarding social networks this year, while Facebook was only talked about 45 percent of the time, according to HighBeam Research. The report did not even bother mentioning Google+.

Our overall happiness is apparently in decline. How do we know? It's on Twitter. A team of mathematicians from the University of Vermont analyzed 4.6 billion Twitter messages worldwide over 33 months. They assigned happiness grades to more than 10,000 of the most common words, crunched all the numbers and plotted them on a graph that shows a gradual downward slope during the past year and a half or so, through mid-September.

Google has added several new Google+ features and improved old ones, among them some of the most popular requests from users.

Investors appear to be souring on social networking shares, a development which bodes ill for the eventual IPOs for Facebook, Twitter and other players in the industry. Perhaps unnerved by the lackluster reception for Zynga shares, the sector took a pounding in Monday's trading.

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his investment company said Monday they are investing a combined $300 million into Twitter, giving the microblogging site a cash boost as it looks to entice more users and paying advertisers.

Zynga is poised to harvest some cold hard cash in its initial public offering. Who knew that selling virtual cows and digital corn on Facebook would create a $7 billion company?

Social games maker Zynga is preparing to set a final initial public offering price on Thursday, a day before it begins trading on the stock market, in what is shaping up to be the biggest U.S. Internet IPO since Google.