The major selling point that twitter has over Facebook is its real-time nature. Updates on twitter happen almost instantaneously, changing before your eyes as whoever you’re following updates their status. This week it seems that Facebook has woken up to this threat, tweaking its algorithm so that now fresh information floats serenely to the top of search results almost as soon as your friends change anything.
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According to comScore, 14.8 billion online video were watched in January. The principal was, obviously, the Google controlled, YouTube, whose users exceeded 100 million for the first time in the opening month of 2009. Startling as the web viewing figures are, they are part of a longstanding trend and actually represent only a four percent increase on December’s figures.
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Facebook users are being warned to display vigilance when it comes to using third party apps on the popular social networking site. The warning comes after hackers launched yet another programme specifically aimed at convincing users to give up their log in details.
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Its official, in 2008, Myspace and Facebook suffered much less downtime than the other main social networking sites. That’s according to a report from Pingdom, an outfit which monitors websites around the world. The group studied 15 of the world’s more popular social networks for the entirety of 2008 and found significant differences in outages and down-time.
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The British Army have caused consternation amongst troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, after taking steps to curtail the use of Facebook and all other social networking sites. The Army is worried that troops who talk about their exploits in status updates or messages could be breaching the public disclosure of information act. In an order issued to all soldiers entitled, ‘Contact with the Media and communicating in public,’ members of the army were ordered to severely limit what they say on social networking sites.
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Facebook is redoubling its efforts to make the world’s leading social network available on a range of mobile devices by discussing a partnership with Nokia. Nokia are the world’s biggest handset manufacturer, so any deal with them would represent a massive step into the mobile market for Facebook, maintaining, even possibly extending their current meteoric growth rate.
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Corporate law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, have slipped up by revealing exact monetary details of a legal settlement paid by Facebook to smaller social networking site, Connect U. The leak revealed that Facebook paid the princely sum of $65 million dollars to the site after they accused CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their ideas in Facebook’s early development stages.
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For those who don’t know, Burger King recently designed a Facebook app that offered users a free Whopper if they deleted ten of their friends. The idea was that everyone has several Facebook friends that they never see or barely even know who could be sacrificed for a burger quite easily. Once the ‘friends’ had been dropped they were sent a fairly mean message informing them that their erstwhile friend prefers one tenth of a burger to them. It’s all part of Burger King’s new angry image to fit in with their new range of burgers.

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The 15 billion valuation of Facebook negotiated in their Microsoft deal last year appears inflated to many. Nevertheless, it has given the social networking site some clout financially. Enough, reportedly, to offer a buyout worth $500 million dollars worth of Facebook stocks to Twitter, the personal blogging site. A deal that Twitter have apparently rejected out of hand.
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