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.
Don't expect Twitter to be tweeting about an initial public offering any time soon. The popular online communications service has raised another $200 million so it can keep growing without Wall Street's help.
Facebook is adding a new feature: deals from businesses if you check in. Sound familiar? Foursquare, Gowalla already offer deals to their users, and Yelp also plans to introduce "check-in offers" this month. But Facebook has a lot more users.
A four-hour Facebook outage -- the worst in more than four years for the company -- caused plenty of commotion among users whose access was blocked or slowed Thursday. The trouble came only two days after a hacker attacked Twitter with pop-up windows.
CNN firing Octavia Nasr over a questionable Tweet is the latest high-profile controversy regarding social media. The dust-ups show the difficulties many corporate cultures have as their employees embrace new ways of communicating.
