According to recently released figures from eMarketer, Facebook‘s revenue for advertising alone — which excludes revenue for virtual currencies and other sources — came to an astonishing $1.86 billion for all of last year. Not bad for a web startup that’s yet to see its seventh birthday. As we reported last month, Facebook was...

A widely discussed article in Wired last summer posited the idea that the web is dead. The argument, which, on closer inspection appeared based on semantics, predicted that consumers would experience the web via peer-to-peer networks like Facebookand, increasingly, apps, in the future. If that proves to be the case, a dead web may be...

Google which long ago passed Yahooin search advertising, now has overtaken the company in display ads as well, according to IDC. Google claimed the number-one spot in U.S. display advertising in the first quarter, with 14.7% of the market ($396 million), up from 13.3% in Q4 2010. Yahoo’s hold on the market declined from 13.6% to 12.3%,...

A bug in Facebook’s code briefly gave users access to other users’ Facebook photos — including those of Mark Zuckerberg — without permission Tuesday. Members of a body building forum first spotted the bug, which appeared in a new feature that allowed people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously....

 Facebook is cozying up to small businesses in a big way with a new program that gives away $10 million in free advertising.

The program, Facebook Marketing Solutions, which includes a partnership with the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will roll out over the next few months. In early 2012, Facebook will give each qualified (more…)

Twitter’s native video- and photo-sharing features may have hinted at its desire to go after Facebook, but the redesign it launched on Thursdaystated them loud and clear. Twitter now looks a lot more like the world’s largest social network, with features that focus on social interaction and brand pages. Twitter once differentiated...

If you’re trying to understand why Facebookelicits such an emotional response, look no further than the name. A study commissioned by Facebook examined how consumers’ brains responded to the site as well as to Yahoo’s and The New York Times‘s homepages. NeuroFocus, the Berkeley, Calif., firm that executed the study, found that...