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Next time you feel like broadcasting some gloomy tale of woe on Facebook, you might want to think twice. Your friends could catch your feelings. Psychologists have long known that emotions, just like germs, are contagious. People exposed to a person experiencing strong emotions may experience similar feelings, catching them through facial expressions, tones of voice or some other means. But now there is a new means of transmission -- social media. Facebook data scientist Adam D.I. Kramer analyzed postings by about 1 million English speakers and their roughly 150 million friends in multiple countries on the social network to show that the words people use in their status updates drive the emotions of their online friends, even days later. Kramer found people who used emotionally loaded words like "happy," "hug," "sick," and "vile" in their status updates sparked similar emotions in later Facebook postings by their friends.

Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.

If you've ever felt strange "Liking" a status concerning the death of a pet or other gloomy news on Facebook, you may be able to voice your support in a more appropriate way soon. According to The Telegraph, the social network has a "Sympathize" button in the works that can be used when the original function isn't exactly the best. The new item is the product of a recent hackathon event and will be tied to emotions tagged within updates to indicate the somber mood -- only appearing in those specified instances."

Social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube continue to polarize corporations and people in charge of networks, judging by a new report from OpenDNS. The sites showed up on both "top blacklisted" and "top whitelisted" lists covering the entire year of 2010.

Feedback from friends posted publicly on people's profiles also tend to be overwhelmingly positive, which can further boost self-esteem, said Hancock, who co-authored a paper published Feb. 24 in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking."Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves," Hancock said. "We're not saying that it's a deceptive version of self, but it's a positive one."It may be one of the reasons why Facebook has 500 million users, who spend more than 700 billion minutes per month communicating with their friends via photos, links and status updates."For many people, there's an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there's a psychological benefit of Facebook," Hancock said.

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.

Journalist and NYU fellow Nir Rosen probably didn't know he was putting his career in jeopardy when he hit send on Twitter yesterday. After all, it was just one of 600-odd tweets he'd sent since joining the social networking site.   Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.   It was probably something the war correspondent would say over a dinner party with buddies. Everyone likes a good joke at the expense of Anderson Cooper, right? The problem is the Twitter dinner party includes the whole world.

The FBI has long been known for its straightforward "Just the facts, ma'am" approach, an image reinforced by Director Robert S. Mueller III's stoic presence and reluctance to court the media. But in a sign that the online revolution is infiltrating that most traditional of agencies, the bureau unveiled Monday a publicity campaign featuring public service announcements in 14 cities and billboards in New York's Times Square, along with a heavy dose of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden's death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White House announcement. Keith Urbahn wasn't the first to speculate Bin Laden's death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. Why did this happen?