Internet, Social Media | featured news

Over the past year or so, Beyonce has opened the door to her heavily guarded private life and invited her adoring public in.

Facebook’s attorneys squared off Wednesday with the legal team of Paul Ceglia, a New York man who says that a 2003 contract proves he should own at least half of Facebook. Ceglia, for whom Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg did some work while at Harvard University, says he has a contract granting him at least half the ownership of Facebook. Facebook has denied the claim, saying that the contract and several other documents Ceglia provided are faked. The company subsequently filed to dismiss the suit last month.

Kimberly Hester, a grade school teacher's aide in Michigan, was fired for refusing to hand over her Facebook password to her supervisors. Hester posted a picture of a co-workers' shoes and pants bunched around her ankles on Facebook in April 2011 with the caption, "Thinking of you." She posted the picture in jest, but a parent who's on her Facebook friend list saw the image and reported it to Frank Squires Elementary where Hester was employed, prompting the investigation.

If you’re reading this, chances are you got here from some social media site. The growing industry has changed the way that people communicate on a daily basis. It’s changed how we consume our news, share with friends, and go about our lives in general. The biggest social media sites in the world are larger than many countries and have an infrastructure similar in many ways to an odd form of government.

Facebook has weighed in on a practice by some businesses asking employees or job applicants for their passwords to the popular social-media site.

A Democratic senator from Connecticut is writing a bill that would stop the practice of employers asking job applicants for their Facebook or other social media passwords, he told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said that such a practice is an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work."

Today marks the sixth year since founder Jack Dorsey and Twitter’s first members started using the communications platform. And for its birthday, the company has posted a number of stats about its growth in usage.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

Pinterest, the newly hot social networking site, has answered some questions about copyright permissions and how the company thinks about sharing.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the YCombinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.