Perhaps fueled by the publicity surrounding its recent IPO, LinkedIn is now the second-biggest social network, according to comScore. In June LinkedIn drew 33.9 million unique visitors, up from 33.5 million in May; meanwhile MySpace dropped from 34.9 million unique visitors to 33.5 million over the same period. In June Twitter had 30.6 million unique visitors to its Web site (I can't find any data for Twitter activity from apps and third-party Web sites, which have made up a big chunk of its audience in the past, and which aren't always counted in the big "unique visitors" number).

Thank you Netflix, a.k.a. the company who kicked the hornet's nest! After all, it's not every day the Internet gives us such a great case study illustrating both the potential and limitations of social media as a tool for interacting with, and attempting to shape or at least placate, public opinion. But Netflix has done that with its 60% price hike, which has not been, um, well-received, to put it mildly. The big question is: how does Netflix handle the social media explosion?

"Fish where the fish are," the saying goes, and when it comes to hiring, over half the fish in America are on social media sites of one type or another. Unsurprisingly, the number of employers who use social media to recruit new talent has risen sharply in recent years, according to a new survey by Jobvite of over 800 human resources and recruiting professionals across a variety of industries, including technology, health care, education, government, construction and utilities.

After years of ambivalence, American business executives are finally embracing (and even encouraging) the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter for business-related communications, according to a new survey from Robert Half Technology. But at the same time the phone survey of 1,400 chief information officers from companies with 100+ employees revealed that companies are also tightening social media policies to prevent employees from using social media for personal purposes at work.

Thursday brought the news that News Corp. will close the 168-year-old News of the World, a British weekend tabloid with total average circulation of 3.7 million, following a final edition to be published this Sunday. The decision followed an outpouring of public anger in the U.K. over unethical and illegal reporting tactics employed by some of the newspaper's reporters, including hacking into the phones of teenage murder victims, the victims of a terrorist attack in London in July 2005, and British troops killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There's no way to know whether Google+ will catch on as a new social network -- sorry, make that a "suite of social media tools" -- given Facebook's current domination of the social scene. But at the very least Google deserves credit for raising the bar in social media, forcing Facebook to keep up in key areas like video chat.

Words are tricky things. In the abstract, they have a simple, self-evident meaning that doesn't change -- the dictionary definition we all carry around in the back of our minds, in some form or another. But they attain a whole different range of flavors when they are actually employed to describe, comment on, or transform reality, depending on the context.

If you have been among the fortunate and happy few to receive a Google+ invite, you may have noticed a pronounced gender imbalance on Google's not-a-social-network, with many more men than women. And it wasn't just your imagination: it turns out that 88% of Google+ members are men, according to Google Analytics, compared to 10% for women and 2% for "other." In other words, Google+ is a total sausage-fest, at least so far.

There are a lot of parents out there -- around 155 million, according to the U.S. Census, including about 85 million mothers and 70 million fathers, of whom about 80 million are also grandparents -- and it seems reasonable to assume a good number of these parental units own iPhones, which sold a total 40 million units in the U.S. from 2007-2010. Now new research shows that parents who own iPhones tend to be significantly more social than parents without.