Stories by: Heather Havenstein

Just a few months after launching Lively, Google Wednesday said it will shut down the browser-based three-dimensional world by the end of the year to focus on the core Google business.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and the makers of Motrin have all learned the hard way that online assaults from external users on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter can damage their brands.

Whoever takes embattled Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's place will need to pare the former Web sweetheart's services to effectively compete in a market where it is under siege from Google and multiple social media players for online advertising, analysts say.

The maker of pain reliever Motrin is now feeling the pain of a social media backlash to its recently released online ad that riled a large group of bloggers and Twitter users.

The US military Tuesday launched TroopTube, a new site to upload and share videos, more than a year after the US Department of Defense banned YouTube from military networks for being a bandwidth hog.

"Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I'll be keeping an eye from here."

While much has been written about  the impact of President-Elect Barack Obama's successful use of social networking and other Web 2.0 tools, the campaign had been mum about the future of My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's social network, immediately after last week's election.

Just a day after Google walked away from a proposed search advertising partnership with Yahoo, the latter firm's CEO said a takeover by Microsoft would now be the best thing for his company.

Google Wednesday announced that it is ending its effort to forge a search advertising partnership with Yahoo.

While online video has proved to be one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications, the sites that show them are constantly battling to fend off copyright infringement notices from broadcast and media companies that own much of the video content posted by users.

Google this week took another step in its effort to shed light on the so-called Dark Web with its announcement that its engine can now search scanned documents in Adobe Systems's PDF format.