Barbara Ortutay

You may have noticed your Facebook friends getting considerably more colorful. More than 26 million Facebook profile photos have taken on a rainbow hue in the days since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that marriage is a right guaranteed under the Constitution regardless of a person’s sexual orientation. People have been covering their profile photos with the Facebook-supplied overlay that uses the best-known symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights movement: the rainbow. Call it armchair activism. Call it a mark of a shifting tide in public opinion. The rainbowsare the latest sign of the important place social media has taken in our...

What happened to Sheryl Sandberg could happen to anyone: The woman who wrote the book on balancing career and family will have to figure out how soon she will return to her high-profile job following the unexpected death of her husband. In the book “Lean In,” the Facebook chief operating officer wrote that marriage is “the biggest career decision” a person can make and implored women who want to move up the corporate ladder to settle with someone who wants to do his share in the home. Now, Sandberg faces the prospect of raising two young children and continuing...

In its five short years of life, Pinterest has become ‘the’ place where brides-to-be create wish boards of wedding china photos and do-it-yourself home renovators bookmark shiny turquoise tiles for bathrooms. It’s where people share ideas and ingenuity and get creatively inspired. And it’s fueled a new way of searching for items that’s even stolen traffic from tech giant Google. The San Francisco-based venture capital darling was recently valued at $11 billion. While its core audience has always been female, Pinterest says its popularity is growing faster than ever among men. It is winning in the all-important social-mobile space — the...

​Download Periscope, Twitter’s just-launched live video-streaming app, and you’ll find people broadcasting all sorts of mundane stuff: waiting for AT&T to fix their wiring, getting out of bed in Silicon Valley, looking outside their office window in Chicago. Watch the videos, and you might ask yourself, is this really the next big thing? It could be. Check back in a few months, and you’ll likely see much more enticing content. After all, the first tweet, sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006, simply said “just setting up my twttr.” Now nearly 300 million people tweet photos and messages every...

Uber, Facebook, Instagram — sure, they’ve been all the rage, but as 2014 winds down we’re all ready for something fresh. From ride-hailing to photo sharing, here are a few up-and coming apps and startups to watch in in 2015. Which will be the breakout hit of the new year? TELL A STORY Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc., now has 300 million users — more than Twitter. Scrolling through its snapshot feeds gives users a quick glimpse into the lives of friends and strangers. (At least the parts that include empty beaches, cappuccinos with perfect foam hearts...

Facebook is launching a new free mobile app for its popular Groups feature that lets users create and interact with communities on the site, whether they’re based on hobbies, geography or culture. More than 700 million of Facebook’s 1.35 billion members use Groups, according to the company. It says the site hosts hundreds of millions of groups, which people use talk to others who share their religion, to plan holiday dinners, or to discuss hobbies or health issues. The new app is meant to make accessing Groups easier on a mobile device, allowing users to avoid having to dig...

The little blue bird is flying high. Stronger-than-expected financial results pushed Twitter’s stock sharply higher on Tuesday after the short messaging service said its revenue more than doubled in the second quarter. Twitter also grew its user base more than expected, alleviating concerns, at least for now, that it doesn’t hold appeal for a broad swath of people. Its larger rival, Facebook, also posted strong results last week and its stock is trading near a record high. San Francisco-based Twitter’s stock jumped 30 percent to $50.01 in extended trading Tuesday. Twitter Inc. posted a net loss of $144.6 million,...