social-networking site

Looks like Burger King has found a way to use social networking to promote its signature Whopper burger. With an unusual strategy, Burger King is using popular social-networking site Facebook as a way to reach out to consumers.

In a new ad campaign featuring a Facebook app, Burger King offers a coupon for a free Whopper -- but it comes with a catch. The campaign offers Facebook members the coupon after they publicly cut 10 of their friends from their Facebook list. Usually, members can delete friends anonymously, but not this time.

Where everyone else sees economic gloom and doom, Reid Hoffman sees opportunity. As the freshly minted CEO of LinkedIn (and its founder), he is shepherding a moneymaking tech company in battered Silicon Valley. And he anticipates more growth next year.

That is no small achievement. The social-networking site, which lets business professionals create online profiles to seek jobs and network, is adding members faster than ever despite its own recent layoffs and a management shake-up.

Facebook is walking a fine line again by rolling out Facebook Connect, a feature the company first talked about in May. Facebook Connect allows one log-in to easily share content across other social networks and Web sites.

The convenience of no longer having to type in profile information on multiple Web sites may be valuable to users, but at what risk to users' privacy? The popular social-networking site said the new feature will let a user connect a Facebook account with a Web site, using a trusted authentication process.

The trial of a Missouri woman charged in a tragic MySpace hoax resumed Thursday. Testimony began Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in the controversial trial of Lori Drew, who is charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of computer fraud.

The charges stem from her alleged participation in a MySpace hoax which may have caused the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier. Drew is being tried under the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act.

Salesforce.com continued developing as "the enterprise cloud computing company" Monday with announcements that it is extending its Force.com platform to Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

The announcements are part of a series of recent moves that include the unveiling this week of Force.com Sites, enabling businesses to utilize the Force.com platform and applications in the creation of public Web sites.

'Social Meet CRM'

As IBM sets out to launch its Bluehouse corporate social network to compete with Cisco and Google, word comes that Facebook and MySpace are the most popular social-networking sites for mobile-phone users.

According to ABI Research, nearly half (46 percent) of those who use social networks have also visited a social network through a mobile phone. Of these, nearly 70 percent have visited MySpace, and another 67 percent visited Facebook. No other social-networking site reached 15 percent mobile adoption.

The Facebook duo is no more. One of Facebook's two cofounders is leaving the popular social-networking site.

Dustin Moskovitz is leaving and forming a new duo by taking engineer Justin Rosenstein with him. Together, the two will launch another company, Rosenstein said on his Facebook page.

Rosenstein, who was recruited from Google by Moskovitz in the early stages of launching the company, said the two have had similar visions on software and what Facebook needs to do to evolve as a company.

Users of the popular social-networking site MySpace can now listen to and download music from several music companies, including Sony, EMI and Warner.

Starting Thursday, users will have free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from hundreds of record labels -- but there's a catch. MySpace's 120 million users who want to use the free service need to deal with the advertising that comes with it, and they will only be able to access the service using a PC.

Research in Motion announced Thursday a raft of mobile multimedia partnerships and applications. The introduction of RIM's Blackberry Pearl 8220 Flip on Wednesday was a departure from its business-focused product line, and deals with TiVo, MySpace and others confirm its attempts to appeal to the consumer marketplace.

Consumer RIM

If you're on Facebook and were thinking about playing Scrabulous -- an online, unauthorized version of the classic word game Scrabble -- the word you're looking for is "banned." As in "banned from Facebook," since that popular social-networking site has now pulled the game from most of the world that could still play it.