Technology, Social Networking | 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.

LinkedIn reported fourth quarter 2012 earnings that beat Street expectations, sending shares soaring in late trading.

...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.

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

The clear favorite was Budweiser's "Brotherhood" spot, which told the story of a horse trainer reunited with a Clydesdale he had raised as a foal. Overall, there were 26,131,270 tweets about Super Bowl ads.

Twitter said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.

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.

Amid concerns over adult content popping up on its new Vine video app, Twitter appeared Tuesday to have restricted how users can share sexually explicit clips.

Twitter says it turns over user data to government agencies in the U.S. in 69 percent of the requests made for such information, according to a new transparency report released by the microblogging site.