Online flirtation can have violent consequences: over the weekend a Texas man was shot and killed during an argument about a tweet the assailant had left for another man's girlfriend.

Less than a year after Facebook's disappointing IPO, social media stocks are on the upswing, reflecting growing investor confidence in the sustainability of social media business models -- at least in some cases.

While a handful of states have passed bills forbidding employers to ask employees or prospective employees for social media passwords, so far there hasn't been any federal legislation on the subject. That may change (or not) now that three members of the House of Representatives have reintroduced a law, the Social Networking Online Protection Act, for consideration by their peers.

A majority of Facebook users say they sometimes take breaks from the social network because they feel bored or overwhelmed, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which surveyed 1,006 U.S. adults about their online habits.

Where romance is kindled poor judgment reigns, it seems, judging by the results of a Match.com survey of the online habits of 5,000 single folks. According to Match.com one-third of the singles surveyed (32%) have sent a "sext" -- that's a revealing photo of yourself sent electronically, for those readers living in burrows -- and over half (51%) have received one.

You know it's a crappy Super Bowl when the most interesting part is the lights going out. But that didn't stop people from talking about it online: despite the general tedium of a one-sided game and a raft of totally insipid, uninspired advertising, Super Bowl XLVII generated a whole bunch of activity of Twitter, proving that people will talk about pretty much anything, even if it's just to say they can't see what's going on.

After Notre Dame’s football program suffered through an embarrassing “but she didn’t actually exist” scandal with Manti Te’o and his fake girlfriend, who tragically died of fake leukemia, it’s understandable that university sports programs might be concerned about who their athletes are talking to online -- or rather, who they think they’re talking to, and what they might tell them, or, ahem, show them.   According to SI.com, the University of Michigan athletic department decided to …

Apparently social media command centers are now A Thing. For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl -- which somehow manages to be the most important sporting event of all time, year after year -- has its own dedicated social media team that will be tweeting and Facebooking and Tumblring and Instagramming and all that stuff all through Super Bowl weekend.

While it's obviously sensible to avoid sending naked pictures to people you don't know on the Internet, the only way to be really safe may be to avoid taking naked pictures of yourself at all, period, full stop.

Hopefully by this point everyone is aware that the powers that be are monitoring social media. But for anyone who isn't aware: psst, they're monitoring social media! Now you know. According to Twitter's biannual "transparency report," the number of requests made by U.S. law enforcement officials for Twitter user data increased by about 20% between the first and second half of 2012, from 849 to 1,009.