Social Networking, Stock Market | featured news

Companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to unveil key information about their operations as long as they’ve told investors where to look for it, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday.

Facebook joins the Nasdaq-100 Index, a move accelerated by the departure of Infosys, which is moving to the New York Stock Exchange.

A commerce site called Limited Run, in announcing that it was deleting its Facebook page, claimed that 80 percent of its ad-clicks on Facebook came from "bots" or automated accounts, and only a fifth from genuine users.

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc said it will offer cash and rebates totaling $40 million to compensate clients affected by the problems with Facebook Inc's initial public offering.

Facebook on Thursday priced its initial public offering at $38 per share. The social networking company, which is expected to go public tomorrow under the ticker symbol "FB," stands to reap $18.4 billion in the IPO.

Facebook will list its shares with Nasdaq, according to media reports. That would be a big win for the Nasdaq, which competes fiercely with NYSE Euronext Inc., especially for an initial public offering as large as Facebook's, pegged at $5 billion. The New York Times and CNBC cited anonymous sources on the potential listing.

Investors appear to be souring on social networking shares, a development which bodes ill for the eventual IPOs for Facebook, Twitter and other players in the industry. Perhaps unnerved by the lackluster reception for Zynga shares, the sector took a pounding in Monday's trading.

Jim Cramer got really angry on CNBC yesterday. The LinkedIn (LNKD) IPO got him in a tizzy. Why? Because he said that the underwriters for the offering (Morgan Stanley (MS), B of A Merrill (BAC), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM)) decided to play the old “dot com” games of only releasing an artificially small amount of shares on the market, in hopes of creating a feeding frenzy.