Social Media, Social Networking | featured news

In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol's oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks.

This morning, professional social network LinkedIn announced that it is opening up its API for developers to build applications around the platform.

While some of us might be willing to pay to make Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars go away, it appears that Wall Street has other ideas.

BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year.

One of the best things about Twitter is the way that it allows content and information to spread quickly across the network from person-to-person. This happened for two reasons: 1. because Twitter is a one-to-many communications platform and 2. because it allows for content to be easily repeated.

Yahoo Inc. is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in its latest attempt to get people to use its Internet search engine more frequently. Beginning Thursday, Yahoo will mine the short messages posted on Twitter to find fresher information about hot topics. Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. had earlier announced plans to incorporate Twitter messages into search results, but Yahoo said it will be the first among them to include such "tweets" on its main search results.

Newspapers should become "radically open" if they want to make money in the online world, the co-founder of Twitter says.

Salesforce.com launched a social enterprise application here at Dreamforce today that will allow companies to create their own private, social networks and integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social applications.

Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, the application serves as a secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform.

Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today.

Social networking has crept into the enterprise with little oversight.