social network

When money and friendship mix, the results can get awkward: You front a friend some cash, and then what? Venmo, an app that helps you exchange money through mobile devices, is designed to remove that awkwardness and replace it with something social, and even fun.

Trefis currently has a $30 price estimate for LinkedIn stock -- about a third of the market price. Why the disparity? Take a look at the prospects for the three businesses that bring in the vast majority of LinkedIn's revenue, and the answer becomes clear.

LinkedIn made its initial public offering Thursday, and soared immediately to more than twice its target price as Wall Street swooned over the stock. But IPOs are happening fairly regularly again after a recessionary lull: Why is there so much fuss over one not-so-major social networking site?

In an attempt to crack down on spam, Facebook has shut down a number of third-party software applications in the past week. The move could signal that the world's most popular social network plans maintain righter control over the apps that run on its site.

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.

Have social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube become the weapons of revolution? Egypt's president shut down the Internet on Friday to try to calm the protests rocking the country. But while the Internet may be an enabler of the demonstrations, it's not the cause of the discontent.

U.S. gamers spent about the same amount of money on video games last year as they did in 2009, even as sales of consoles and other hardware took a plunge. Purchases of physical game discs slid 5%, in spite of the record-breaking success of "Call of Duty: Black Ops," but downloadable and social-network games made up the difference.

As more shoppers spend their money online, retailers are deciding where to put their e-marketing. According to a new ForeSee study, promotional emails were still far more effective at driving traffic to retail sites than social networks like Facebook this holiday season.

Here's a new foundation for a social network app: Storytelling. The just-debuted application called Broadcastr lets people record audio stories tagged to geographical locations. The plan: Contributors will create compelling tales and imbue places with new meanings through voices.