Alycia Williamson-Smith and her family didn't have anywhere else to turn. It had been days since a devastating tornado ravaged Joplin, Mo., home to her second cousin James Williamson. With cell-phone service largely unavailable and a distance of several thousand miles between her house in Amsterdam, N.Y., and Joplin, Williamson-Smith posted photos of James on several Facebook pages that were created in the aftermath of the tornado. Less than 24 hours later, she saw a comment on ...

"Welcome to the 21st century!" That was how one Facebook user responded to the news that Malta, the only country in the E.U. that still prohibits divorce, had voted to allow married couples to officially split. In a country reported to be 95% Catholic, the results of the May 28 referendum took many on both sides of the issue by surprise. But for supporters, the vote is a sign that the island nation, located 55 miles ...

Vulgar, vulnerable, wise and neurotic, Bethenny Frankel, Bravo's last-minute addition to its blockbuster series The Real Housewives of New York City, was a poor man's Housewife from the first. Not a wife nor a homeowner , she weathered patronizing barbs from older, wealthier castmates for these and other deficiencies with a captivating mix of insouciance and insecurity. Ah, how the Juvederm has turned. Now, while former castmates struggle to comfort themselves on camera with a smidgen of ...

Spam hardly needs an introduction. Anyone with an e-mail account knows the acute frustration of being inundated with offers of pills from virtual pharmacists, financial propositions from Nigerian princes and pictures for fetish sites that really, really shouldn't exist. Spam has even gone beyond e-mail: like kudzu, it adapts to clog whatever online inbox you might choose. On Oct. 30, the social-networking site Facebook won a $711 million judgment against the self-proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace. Wallace, ...

Brian Ward lost his job on a Friday afternoon. Eleven days later he had a new one. With nearly 1 in 10 people out of work and the typical job search lasting 12 weeks, how did the Cleveland-based software architect pull it off? In a phrase: online social networking. Welcome to the new rules of the job hunt. Gone are the days of simply posting your rsum on CareerBuilder, e-mailing former colleagues and trolling company websites for open ...

Jeff Gordinier is tired of being force-fed the Beatles, the Summer of Love, Facebook and Britney Spears. He says being heard over the media din about boomers and their offspring, Generation Y, or "millennials" as they're now known, isn't just a challenge, it's annoying. Being overlooked and underappreciated? It's never-ending for him and his tribe of fellow Gen-Xers. Clearly Gordinier, 41, has a generational chip on his shoulder the size of the whole faux grunge scene circa ...

In early March, Barack and Michelle Obama appeared in an exclusive Facebook video from the White House. The topic was bullying prevention, and it was by far the highest profile in the series of online conversations the social-media behemoth has produced with various members of Congress and federal and state officials in recent months. "You can participate in the conversation online," the President said, "right here on Facebook." That endorsement is one of the most provocative examples of ...

Convened via Facebook and Twitter, thousands of demonstrators gathered in the square outside Rabat's El Had gate on Sunday. Shouting the now familiar slogans — "Down with dictatorship!" "End the corruption!" "We want change!" — they slowly marched down the city's central artery before coming to a halt at Morocco's Parliament building. There, as security forces maintained a watchful distance, young men brandishing megaphones and middle-aged women in djellabas drove the protest to a fever pitch, calling ...

Why Zuckerberg should like the Facebook movie "The Social Network," the movie dramatization of the founding of Facebook, comes to U.S. theaters on Friday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly opposed the making of the film, which charts his rise to become the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Zuckerberg need not worry. "The Social Network" ultimately paints him as a tireless visionary who stops at nothing to achieve his dream. Facebook's management had cause for concern, of course: "The Social Network" is based on Ben ...

Like a lot of people, Anna Owens began using MySpace more than four years ago to keep in touch with friends who weren't in college. But soon she felt too old for the social-networking site, and the customizable pages with music that were fun at first began to annoy her. By the time she graduated from the University of Puget Sound, Owens' classmates weren't on MySpace -- they were on Facebook. Throughout graduate school and beyond, as her ...