Internet, Social Networking | featured news

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.

Chinese social-networking Web site Renren sold shares in its IPO at $14 apiece.

A computer programmer, startled by a helicopter clattering above his quiet Pakistani town in the early hours of the morning Monday, did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

Twitter has released a slew of statistics in recent months, from how many tweets are sent per day to the number of accounts created per day.Here's another one that's been more elusive: the number of users Twitter actually has.

Google's YouTube is expanding its movie-rental service, as the video site tries to shift from homemade videos to professional entertainment content.

What happens when you cross the world's largest social network with one of the hottest business models in e-commerce? Facebook wants to find out. Facebook is launching a deals program Tuesday in five U.S. cities, following on the popularity of Groupon and other services that offer deep discounts - for example: $50 worth of food at a local eatery for $25.

Whoops.Looks like The New York Times has a little embargo breaking situation on their hands. (Which we love -- chaos!) They've just put up a story with the URL: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/latest-rival-to-groupon-livingsocial-facebook-embargo-till-midnight/ (bolding mine). That page is obviously no longer found, but it was live for a bit. And it is a big one: Facebook's Groupon/LivingSocial "killer".