Writing about customer service is inherently paradoxical in today's totally connected online world: if you have any kind of platform to get your musings or complaints heard through social media, there's a good chance you'll be able to get someone from the company in question to help you, if only to avert bad publicity. But this is not really good customer service -- it's good public relations, a related but definitely separate discipline. After all, the point of customer service is that it should be good no matter what, whether or not anyone will notice, and regardless of whether someone …

No one rhapsodizes about the romance of statistics, but the statistics of romance -- now that's a different story. With about 600 million members today, Facebook has seen plenty of relationship drama over the last year... and like every other important part of the human experience, it's all quantifiable, baby. Over the course of 2010 precisely 43,869,800 people changed their relationship status to single, presumably tapping out the sad news amid mounds of used tissues (or with a celebratory drink in hand). Meanwhile 28,460,516 changed their status to "in a relationship," to the great relief of mothers who were quietly …

Just a few months after revealing a mostly beside-the-point redesign and re-launch as "My___," MySpace is preparing to take another important step on its road to reinvention, according to a report from CNBC: firing half its workforce. No matter how you slice it, it's hard to put a happy face on mass layoffs. But the cuts were probably inevitable, following ominous statements in November from News Corp. executives warning that MySpace had to become profitable soon, or face more rigorous measures. These included cuts and a possible sale of the network -- steps which certainly aren't mutually exclusive (the layoffs …

Like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin, the social media business is rolling in dough following one of the most funding-est weeks in its history. Facebook just raised $500 million in a round of funding led by Goldman Sachs with help from Digital Sky Technologies -- not long after Groupon revealed it has already raised an equivalent sum as part of a planned $950 million round of funding announced just last week. These investments valued Facebook at $50 billion and Groupon at $6.4 billion. And it was just two weeks ago that Twitter raised $200 million in a funding round …