A majority of U.S. social networking users say their fellow users mostly kind, and that the sites make them feel good about themselves.

Depending on your taste in music and tolerance for others’ tastes, President Barack Obama’s latest social media move – sharing his 2012 campaign playlist via streaming music website Spotify – might be a case of over-sharing: Ricky Martin, REO Speedwagon and James Taylor all made the cut.

Microsoft has entered into a broad partnership with customer-service software provider 24/7 that the companies expect will yield a superior cloud-based platform that large companies can use to better address their customers' needs.

Lync Online, the instant messaging, online meeting and PC-to-PC voice and video communications tool in Office 365, will gain interoperability with non-Microsoft IM networks.

Although Facebook (FB - to be traded on NASDAQ or NYSE) is by far the most high-profile dot-com company to go public over the past year, it is actually one of several companies that have led to a revival of web company IPOs. And while many dot-com IPOs have been long on hype, they haven't yet paid off in terms of shareholder value.

Social networkers resorted to Twitter during and following a brief Facebook outage on Thursday, a day after the company filed for its initial public offering.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have issued a list of 9 tips for better tweeting based on a study of Twitter usefulness (see "Most tweets are useless, Twitter users say").

Twitter has been celebrated for its ubiquity and impact on world events from natural disaster recovery to political uprisings. But researchers from a group of big time universities have found that useful tweets are few and far between.

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including Cloud computing, enterprise search, and mobile application development. (These are in addition to seven hot Cloud companies and seven storage companies to watch that we highlighted last year.)

Much has changed since we examined the ongoing war between Facebook and Twitter in the autumn of 2010. The stakes are higher, the competition has increased, and we see LinkedIn and Google roaring into the social networking arena like never before.

When Ben Fried left his post as IT managing director at Morgan Stanley and took over as Google's CIO in May 2008, he knew what he was getting into: supporting a user base full of technology experts and computer industry stars, like co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President Vint Cerf. In a recent interview with IDG News Service, Fried spoke candidly about his job and shared tips and advice for fellow CIOs, including the urgent need for tablet device strategies. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

It's official: I can no longer think of a single person I know (unless, of course, you count my two-year-old) who doesn't have more work on their to-do list than any human being can reasonably be expected to handle. If you're like everyone I know, chances are you could use a few new tools to help you manage your priorities, simplify your life, and accomplish more. This guide is for you.

Google on Monday announced that it will introduce versions of Google Docs for tablets running both the Android and Apple iOS4 mobile operating systems.

Boston Scientific wants to tear down barriers that prevent product developers from accessing the research that went into its successful medical devices so that they can create new products faster. But making data too easily accessible could open the way to theft of information potentially worth millions or billions of dollars. It's a classic corporate data privacy problem.