Technology, Social Networking | featured news

LinkedIn shares skyrocketed more than 80% to trade at about $86 a share, and at a high of $92.99 a share, on Thursday as the social networking site launched its initial public offering.

Sina’s Weibo has nearly 8 times more users than Twitter. In 2010, Twitter had approximately 17 million users in the US, according to an Edison Research report called Twitter Usage in America 2010. Even if Twitter doubled in size this year, which is unlikely, its Twitter account numbers would be dwarfed by Sina accounts alone.

Professional networking site LinkedIn raised its price range for its IPO this week by 30%, valuing the company at $4 billion, a strong indication that demand is running high for the new stock.

When Adorian Deck was home sick from high school, he entertained himself like countless other teenagers have in recent years: He started a Twitter account. Unlike other teenagers, Deck's account became a sensation. Deck, under the handle (at)OMGFacts, tweeted random bits of celebrity gossip and quirky trivia. In less than a year, he had attracted more than 300,000 followers.

Facebook users' personal information could have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past few years, according to Symantec Corp's official web blog.

Professional networking website LinkedIn Corp. plans to sell shares to investors for $32 to $35 each in an initial public offering, one of the first for a major U.S. social networking site.

Mark Zuckerberg is eyeing the takeover of the much popular Skype, in a deal that might cost Facebook close to $4 billion.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group said it had struck an agreement to buy Flixster, the parent company of Rotten Tomatoes, a website that analyzes movie reviews, awarding films a given number of tomatoes.

Chatroulette is plotting another comeback! The Russian website that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web’s tastemakers in the first half of last year, but it seems like everyone’s now pretty much moved on. The fact that the site was – and is still – frequently used by creeps who couldn’t seem to keep their pants on didn’t help much in that regard.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook.