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.

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.

Software engineers from major social networking companies have apparently grown tired of Google's relentless drive to push its own Google+ social network at the expense of other sites.

Say this for Google+: It no longer has fewer total users than MySpace.

Leading into this year's Lotusphere conference, Constellation Research Group principal analyst and former IBM employee Alan Lepofsky said IBM will have to approach its new venture in social business by emphasizing the most important factor -- the benefits.

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.

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.

Sure, companies have started using Web 2.0 tools, but one man says we've only seen a glimmer of the serious change that they're going to bring to the way we do business.

The meet-up in San Francisco last month had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party.

CPS Energy, the largest municipality-owned gas and electric company in America, needed to get a better grip on its budget and its budgeting process. Since CPS Energy was an enterprise SAP user, more SAP AG software was the obvious and lowest-risk way for CIO Christopher Barron to go.

While Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks have been wildly popular with consumers, efforts to measure the technology's success for businesses have returned mixed results. In fact, recent research from the Burton Group indicates that business leaders have struggled to define best use cases, measure their success and chart returns on investment.

But analysts warn that companies should be prepared for potential online user attacks.

To outshine your competitors and win the gig in today's economy, here's a secret to success: Don't abandon the steadfast career tips passed down from generations, but rather, refine them -- with a keen eye for the value in Web 2.0 tools like social networking.