Social Networking, Mobile | featured news

Over the weekend, Facebook added a stalkerish feature called "Find Friends Nearby" to its mobile website; on Monday, it was gone. "Find Friends Nearby" let users of iOS and Android devices locate BFFs — and perhaps nBFFs (never BFFS) — who were within range.

Facebook Inc., owner the world’s largest social network, says it’s working on a location-based mobile-advertising product that will allow companies to target users with real-time data showing their whereabouts.

The new app is similar to Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook is in the process of buying for $1 billion. The acquisition, however, has not yet been completed, and Instagram's employees did not work on the Facebook app. Facebook has said it expects the Instagram app to close sometime this year.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

As the biggest social network across the Internet, Facebook has a lot of people to reach. And the current usage evidence shows that people really want to let their friends what's going on even when they're not near a computer so that means mobile devices. The result: Facebook has plans for its own smartphones in the ...

Wal-Mart is starting to turn heads in the tech world — and that might have important implications for the way we think about the future of the shopping experience. Once known for a soulless retail store experience and a hyper-efficient supply chain that delivered “everyday low prices,” Wal-Mart has been fusing innovations from the mobile and social-networking worlds to create the foundation for a radically new type of hyper-personalized shopping experience.

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.

What if you could see the cellphone photos taken by everyone within 150 feet of you? Would you be hesitant about potentially seeing yourself captured in one of those photos or would you be smiling as your inner voyeur jumps in joy?

All the people who use these clients on Android, Blackberry and IOS were no longer able to gain access to the popular social network from their mobile device.

A strong holiday shopping season will help Google Inc beat Wall Street's quarterly targets again, but investors may need more convincing to buy into the Internet giant's longer-term future.