Microsoft, Social Networking | featured news

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.

Beyond talking about how fast it was growing, one of the hottest topics surrounding Twitter in 2009 was “how does it make money?” Perhaps that was the wrong question to be asking, though, because as it turns out, Twitter already makes money.

Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today.

Twitter is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Internet search leader Google and Microsoft in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what's on people's minds at any given moment.

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 ...

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below).

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine.