Social Networking, Acquisition | featured news

Salesforce.com agreed to acquire Buddy Media in a deal worth as much as $745 million, continuing its rapid expansion into social-media marketing. Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff said the deal will help the company keep up with demand as the online marketing business matures. Chief marketing officers are expected to outpace chief information officers in directing technology spending within the next five years, according to a recent report by industry researcher Gartner.

With all the talk about excessive compensation, ponzi schemes and the nasty side of Steve Jobs, it might be easy to assume that all successful CEOs are jerks.

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.

Facebook is spending $1 billion to buy the photo-sharing company Instagram in the social network's largest acquisition ever.

“OMG! A big Zynga group hug to OMGPOP, talented creators of Draw Something,” tweeted social games titan Zynga Wednesday. Apparently, in this universe, a “big Zynga group hug” translates to $180 million, the price that All Things D claims Zynga paid to acquire the makers of the most popular mobile Facebook app.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the YCombinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Facebook announced Tuesday that it was acquiring Push Pop Press, an interactive digital e-book publisher, although Facebook said it did not plan to enter the book industry.

On Tuesday, PopCap games announced it was being acquired by Electronic Arts, confirming speculation that circled late last month. The deal is valued as high as $1.3 billion in cash and stocks. But the company reportedly also fielded a huge offer from social gaming giant Zynga.

MySpace, bought by the News Corporation six years ago for $580 million, has been sold to Specific Media for about $35 million, two executives with knowledge of the sale said Wednesday.

An investor group has emerged as a frontrunner in negotiations with News Corp. to take control of Myspace, as the media company rushes to complete a transaction by June 30.