Social network and groups

Professional network LinkedIn is making some investors on Wall Street awfully happy.

In premarket trading this morning, LinkedIn shares were up over 10 percent to $102.90. In early morning trading, the company's stock has risen to $106.83, helping it to boost its market capitalization to over $11 billion. Since the beginning of the year, LinkedIn's shares are up 70 percent.

LinkedIn's strong showing today has resulted from its impressive performance during the second quarter. The professioinal network yesterday reported that it earned a $2.8 million profit during the second quarter on $228.2 million … Read more

The drama surrounding Twitter's suspension of a U.K. newspaper reporter over his criticism of NBC has taken a rather surprising twist.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that it received an e-mail from Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sports vice president of communications, who told the news outlet that his company was alerted to tweets The Independent reporter Guy Adams sent out criticizing NBC over its Olympics coverage by Twitter itself.

"Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it," McCloskey told the Daily Telegraph.

Adams … Read more

Facebook investors are bracing for yet another disappointing day on the Nasdaq.

The social network's shares are trading down 12.8 percent to $23.40 in premarket trading today. If this keeps up and the stock closes the day around that level, it would mark the stock's lowest per-share closing price since Facebook went public in May. Facebook's lowest closing price so far is $25.52.

Facebook's drop is due to a disappointing showing in the second quarter that saw the world's largest social network post a loss of $157 million on $1.2 billion … Read more

Latest update: 11:46 a.m. PT

Twitter is officially back up and running, a spokesperson has told CNET.

Today's outage started at around 8:30 a.m. PT. The social network announced the outage on its Status page this morning, saying that "users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter." The company didn't say what the issue might be, but did say that its "engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

After about an hour, some users were able to start logging into their Twitter accounts and post tweets. A Twitter spokesperson informed … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's time to think of Google as much more than just a search engine, and that should both excite and spook you.

Search remains critical to the company's financial and technological future, but Google also is using the search business' cash to transform itself into something much broader than just a place to point your browser when asking for directions on the Internet.

What it's now becoming is an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it.

Think … Read more

When Facebook finally announced its initial public offering, many believed that Twitter would be close behind. But on yet another occasion, the company's chief executive, Dick Costolo, says it won't be happening.

"We are going to remain private as long as we want," Costolo told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published yesterday. "I like being private for all sorts of reasons. It allows us to think about the business and the way we want to grow it in the small boardroom as opposed to being beholden to a particular way of growing the … Read more

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, what you like, and where you live. And still the ads suck. Google, on the other hand, gives you ads based only on what you're searching on, and its ads rock.

Can Google's ad performance be brought to Facebook and other social sites? Jeffrey Davitz is trying to do that with his startup, Solariat. The idea, he says, "is to take the Google model of responding to intention and place it in the context of social networks."

Davitz confirms that Facebook can help an advertiser find very … Read more

LinkedIn users hunting for a job may want to spruce up their profiles.

A recent survey from Jobvite found that 93 percent of job recruiters tap into LinkedIn to find qualified candidates, up from 87 percent last year and 78 percent in 2010. But the other popular social networks are growing in influence as well.

In second place, Facebook is used by 66 percent of the recruiters polled, up from 55 percent last year. And Twitter is on the watch list among 54 percent of those surveyed, up from 47 percent last year.

Overall, 92 percent of employers and recruiters … Read more

A new and improved edition of Twitter's iOS app may be around the corner, pleasing users who are less than thrilled with the current version.

Release notes and screenshots posted by 9to5Mac about the iOS 6 App Store seem to reveal a slew of changes destined for Twitter for iPhone version 4.3.

Among the features touted in the description are push notifications for tweets that you follow, an alert when new stories are available, better support for password entries, avatars that take you directly to someone's profile, and improvements to auto-complete.

Also promised are more interactive experiences … Read more