Microsoft, Facebook | featured news

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Facebook is paying $550 million to Microsoft for some of the patents the software giant recently bought from AOL, as the social network beefs up its patent defenses ahead of its IPO.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...

Yahoo is redesigning its email service to help stem a user decline and counter offerings from longtime rivals Microsoft and Google as well as social-networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Just when you thought teens had enough ways to connect to Facebook and Myspace, along comes Microsoft with their new line of socially focused phones the Kin One and the Kin Two.

A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network.

Nokia has announced it will bring social networking to the masses on its freshly minted C3, C6 and E5 phones. This comes just a day after Microsoft did the same for mobile Windows users, and Sony Ericsson is promising to catch up. The Nokia phones will communcate with Facebook and Twitter, as well as Ovi Mail and Chat. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson's Spiro and Zylo add Walkman branding to the inevitable Facetwit connections, as money ceases to be a barrier to social networking.

Microsoft unveils a phone called "Kin" which the firm says has been made for those who live their lives online.

The buzz around realtime search of social networks has mostly surrounded Twitter and Facebook. Collecta, OneRiot and the search giants, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all tap into Twitter (and Facebook too) to capture the realtime stream of content. But MySpace is also getting into the game, recently releasing a set of real-time APIs that both OneRiot and Google will be tapping into to provide content from the social network. Today, real-time search engine Collecta has launched a search platform that offers a real-time view into MySpace.

Microsoft has struck non-exclusive search deals with Facebook and Twitter to integrate real-time status updates and tweets into Bing's search results. Microsoft online services division president Qi Lu and Yusuf Mehdi ...