MySpace

Facebook is acquiring Instagram for about $1 billion, and if a hot social network snapping up a popular photo-sharing site sounds familiar, it should. Remember MySpace and Photobucket?

Since the Web was born, its dominant companies have all had one thing in common: Eventually, they all crashed ... hard. Prodigy and Netscape are toast; AOL, Yahoo! and MySpace are shadows of their old selves. And then there's Facebook ...

Prerecorded music has been a fading industry for years, and herding struggling labels together will only make it that much easier to identify the remains. And there aren't too many people mourning major labels' passing.

Back in July 2005, the deal seemed so promising. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace parent Intermix Media for $580 million. The social media pioneer was, by some measures, the fifth most-visited website in the U.S. This week, MySpace was sold for a fraction of that amount.

Yahoo may be considering selling off its stake in joint venture with Japanese Internet giant Softbank. What would it do with the $8 billion?

Facebook has won the most customer loyalty, by far, out of all social media sites, according to the latest Brand Keys's Customer Loyalty Index. The network easily outperformed News Corp.'s MySpace, Twitter and others.

News Corp. more than doubled its earnings for the fiscal second quarter, the company announced Wednesday. Part of the gain comes from a settlement charge a year earlier, which dampened year-ago earnings on a one-time basis. The company also is considering selling MySpace.

Social networking pioneer MySpace could find itself going solo again soon. Its owner, News Corp, is considering a potential sale or spin-off of the social network as it looks for a way to stem the tens of millions of dollars in losses it's taking from the unit, according to a Bloomberg report.

MySpace, the floundering social network site, may be on the verge of massive layoffs.

Facebook ruled the Internet in 2010. It was both the most-searched term -- accounting for 2.11% of all searches -- and the top-visited website, attracting 8.93% of all U.S. visits, compared to Google's 7.19%.