Facebook’s MONOPOLY Waning and 2 Social Media Stocks Hitting Headlines

Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB): According to Tristan Louis, Internet monopolies may be endings due to Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) constant innovation leading to encroachment upon each other’s specialties, such as search, digital media, cloud service, social networking, etc. Louis believes that the large scope of the companies’ investments cause them to resemble VCs by pouring money into too many separate businesses while trying to create partnerships between them.

LinkedIn Corporation (NYSE:LNKD): A recent blog post by LinkedIn reads, “By now, many of you have read recent headlines reporting that 6.5 million LinkedIn hashed passwords were stolen and published on an unauthorized website. We take this criminal activity very seriously so we are working closely with the FBI as they aggressively pursue the perpetrators of this crime. As you may have heard, there have been reports of other websites that have suffered similar thefts…It’s important to know that compromised passwords were not published with corresponding email logins. At the time they were initially published, the vast majority of those passwords remained hashed, i.e. encoded, but unfortunately a subset of the passwords was decoded. Again, we are not aware of any member information being published at any time in connection with the list of stolen passwords. The only information published was the passwords themselves. Thus far, we have no reports of member accounts being breached as a result of the stolen passwords. Based on our investigation, all member passwords that we believe to be at risk have been disabled.” The company says that by the end of Thursday.” The company continues by stating that “all passwords on the published list that we believed created risk for our members, based on our investigation, had been disabled.” The shares traded down $1.18 (1.23%) recently at $95.08.

Zynga, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZNGA): Strategy Analytics report that  Electronic Arts’ (NASDAQ:EA) iOS games somehow accounts for more than 25% and 20% of all 2012 weekly appearances in Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store’s lists for top-grossing paid iPhone and iPad apps. On the other hand, it does not make much of an appearance on top-grossing “freemium” lists because EA possesses fewer offerings in this area and faces strong competition from Zynga and Glue Mobile (NASDAQ:GLUU). EA may attempt to remedy this situation as the virtual goods market continues to quickly grow.  The shares traded down $0.3 (4.96%) recently at $5.75.

Want news like this in real-time so you can get an edge? Click here for Wall St. Cheat Sheet Pro.