San Francisco -- Well, it appears as though Facebook is not only resolutely dethroning Google in terms of being the most trafficked website in the U.S., but the social networking behemoth threatens to take over yet another category. A recent survey shows that Facebook is driving traffic to news and media sites, and according to Hitwise's follow up data shows that readers are more loyal to these sites and tend to come back for more, Googlers: not so much.

The community has lately established to hold an extremely loyal following among news readers, potentially threatening the dominant position held by Google News, which affects advertisers who are eager to leverage the social media craze. Meaning, they are not just one-click wonders but repeat visitors of the news and media sites as well, thanks to Facebook's traffic referral.

Mumbai, India -- In a move designed as part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, Facebook Inc., owner of the largest social networking hub, plans to open its first operations office in the Indian city of Hyderabad to support its growing global operations.

Facebook, the largest social-networking hub is once again spreading-out its wings, and this time, it is not just adding any new users or features, it is opening up more offices beyond the boundaries of the US. Don Faul , director of global online operations at Facebook, arrived in India on Tuesday and he is already scrutinizing CVs for the post of the company's India head. The world's largest online social network is also planning to hire local language specialists, IT security heads, and online sales managers for its India office, to be set up at Hyderabad.

San Francisco -- In an attempt to expand its scope across the Internet, Twitter users will soon be able to tweet, connect and follow on everyday sites such as YouTube and eBay without having to go back to their own Twitter page. Twitter CEO Evan Williams on Monday announced a new application called “@Anywhere” that empowers users to send and receive 140-character messages while surfing the web.

When it is officially becomes operational in the coming months, the new platform dubbed “@anywhere,” with simple script authorizes sites to link web content to Twitter accounts that users can follow journalists directly from their byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page.

“This is not an ad platform, it is an 'at' platform,” Twitter co-founder Williams said while announcing @Anywhere during an on-stage chat at a South By South West Interactive gathering here.

San Francisco -- Facebook is speedily taking over the world -- Google bumped after three years at the top. Facebook the most popular social-networking venue has now ranked as the most engaged website in the U.S., according to analytics firm Hitwise.

As the week ended March 13, 2010, Facebook has surpassed the previous most popular site, Google, in terms of overall traffic for the week, and this is the first time Google has not attained the top spot since 2007.

According to internet tracking firm Hitwise, Facebook accounted for 7.07 per cent of web visits, compared to Google's 7.03 per cent.

Facebook claimed 7.07% for all U.S. web traffic, whereas Google was at 7.03%. However, that was sufficient to knock Google out of the top spot for the first time since the week ending Sept. 15, 2007.

Los Angeles -- Twitter knows where you are -- at least in the U.S. The microblogging site, and its battalion of outside developers have discovered ways to maximize the content you can pack into the 140-character limit assigned to every tweet. Last week Twitter rolled out a new tool that empowers users to share their location information when they send tweets. The new feature, which is off by default, is only available to U.S. users right now, but should be rolled out in other countries fairly soon, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Twitter users can now insert their current location information in their tweets. The micro-blogging service has switched on an optional new attribute that appends geographical information to your posts. Users' simply have to follow these steps, assuming you have a Twitter account, is go to “settings”, scroll down, and click on “Add a location to your tweets.”

San Francisco -- As Google attempts to make inroads in the social networking world with Buzz, now MySpace, once the 500 pound gorilla of social networking, with shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups, has been in retreat for over a year -- but the company's new co-presidents are seeking to turn the site around with a new look, began wooing videogame developers as it moved to capitalize on the booming popularity of playing games online at social networks.

Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who took charge after the recent resignation of CEO Owen Van Natta, unveiled a fresh plan to revamp the former social media giant -- that includes a brand-new version of the site that will be implemented over the next few months. Recently at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Jones showed off a new design that heavily promotes games.

San Francisco -- Former MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who resigned from the social-networking company last year, has re-emerged as part of a group buying the Facebook online game provider MindJolt.

Los Angeles -- Twitter members have been once again targeted on Wednesday with what appears to be the second phishing attack in a week, which displays a message that says “This you????” followed by a link that directs to a fake Twitter log-in page, according to a security blog post by Sophos' Graham Cluley. Users are warned not to click on “This you????” messages.

The attacks are spread via messages tagged “This you????” followed by a link to an external site which is intended to harvest passwords. Earlier in the week, a phishing attack Earlier by the “Lol” via direct messages that were widely distributed because of third-party services such as GroupTweet, according to Sophos. Compromised accounts were then used to send pharmaceutical spam for herbal Viagra.

San Francisco -- Xerox Corporation last week filed a patent infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Delaware, accusing Google, Yahoo, owners of the two biggest U.S. search engines, and Google subsidiary YouTube of violating two Xerox patents associated with automatically-generated search queries and data integration.

One patent was granted in 2001 and another in 2004, the Xerox patents encompasses methods for integrating heterogeneous data and for automatically searching for related content. In question are U.S. Patents 6,778,979 and 6,236,994.

The document management and services company claims that Google has violated upon its patent “System for automatically generating searches” with its AdWords and AdSense software.

Barcelona, Spain -- Adobe Systems, hard at work is preparing a mobile version of (AIR), on Monday announced making improvements to its popular Flash video player that promise to enhance the experience of watching video on a mobile, and said it would support Google's Android phone platform.

AIR, short for Adobe Integrated Runtime, whose Flash program enables most video viewed online and made YouTube possible, also said it believed Apple would eventually bow to market pressure and include Flash on the iPhone and the new iPad tablet computer.

Adobe plans to present a demo of AIR 2.0 running on a Google Android-based smartphone today at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona. Examples of AIR applications is evident in the New York Times Reader and the TweetDeck for advanced Twitter usage.

Barcelona, Spain -- Nokia and Intel at the Mobile World Congress, on Monday said they have forged an alliance in a new clash of the operating systems with the joint creation of MeeGo, to power sophisticated smartphones and netbook computers, in an attempt to catch up with Apple and Google.

When executives from Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile handsets, and Intel appeared on the stage in Barcelona Monday to announce their latest joint effort, both sides hurried to say they wanted to avoid the “f-word.” That is “f” as in “fragmentation.”

Both the company said they would merge its Linux Maemo software platform, used in its epitome of N900 phone, with Intel's Moblin, which is also based on Linux open-sourced software, to create a new platform, MeeGo.

Palo Alto, California -- Facebook, the popular social-networking site, which recently surpassed the 400 million user mark and is celebrating its sixth anniversary, has once again started rolling out a revamped homepage last week, a redesign intended to make it easier to find certain features, like notifications, news photos, and chat. As of last weekend, 80 million out of Facebook's 400 million users should have received the new home page, according to Inside Facebook.

Just as when Facebook users got accustomed to a new interface, engineers at the social network press the redesign button. The redesign is the latest of several home page changes launched by the company in recent years -- many times to the dismay of its users.

“Today we are celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook,” CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company's blog.

San Francisco -- Amazon appears to be making strides towards making the Kindle a little more touchy -- now that Apple's iPad is official and being hailed as a “Kindle Killer”. Amazon has reportedly acquired a small New York startup called Touchco, a leading touch-screen innovator amid rumors that it is developing a new Kindle that will rival the Apple iPad, according to a report in The New York Times that cites a person briefed on the deal as a source.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo Inc.'s continued strategy to lighten its corporate load, and as the national unemployment rate continues to remain around 10%, considering this the Web portal has dumped another of its property deemed expendable by CEO Carol Bartz, selling HotJobs to Monster for $225 million.

As part of the deal, the Internet pioneer Yahoo has been reducing costs and improvising its online focus in the face of tough competition from Google and the aftermath of a botched takeover campaign by software giant Microsoft.

According to the terms of the deal, online employment firm Monster Worldwide Inc. would become authorized provider of career and job postings on Yahoo's home page in the United States and Canada for three years, being paid based on clicks and other “expressions of interest,” Monster said today in a statement.

New York -- With the escalating technological improvements, and ever since Google rolled out its free Google Maps Navigation application for Android 2.0 devices last October, the days for standalone GPS devices and paid GPS applications on smartphones now becomes history. Verizon, North America's largest mobile carrier, recently announced a new version of VZ Navigator 5.0, taking the mobile GPS navigation to a whole new level and integrated the service with Facebook.

For those who were earlier depended on charging for GPS services have to reconsider and get creative to keep consumers interested -- based on technology from TeleCommunication Systems, VZ Navigator 5.0 upgrade of the navigation utility brings an updated interface, faster route planning through the use of streaming data, and the ability to run multiple VZ Navigator functions simultaneously within a navigation session.

San Francisco -- Amidst the Apple iPad buzz, a major event in the mobile world that took place last week and as the mobile browsing technology is concerned - Mozilla has been steadily expanding its wings toward its goal of officially releasing the first Firefox Mobile, a condensed version 1.0 of the popular open-source browser that runs on Nokia's Maemo platform--previously code-named Fennec—arrived.

However, before you rush to hit the download button on your phone, it is at present only available on the Maemo operating system found on the Nokia N900.

“Starting today, Nokia N900 owners can enjoy many of the same Firefox features they know and love on the desktop on their mobile device,” said the foundation in a blog post.

Los Angeles -- If you are a Facebook-freak and cannot imagine life without it, now they can have more tools to deepen their addiction on the world's most popular social-networking site. Facebook has just released an Internet Explorer version of its browser toolbar, about two months after shipping one for Firefox, the company said Thursday.

Los Angeles -- Twitter has announced that they have now added a new “Local Trends” feature last week that can make the service more relevant, and now the company reports Local Trends is live to all.

Local Trends utilizes the geolocation data to generate a list of popular terms as per different regions.

Mountain View, California -- Google may have defined advertising with its search engine, but its online video site YouTube just jumped out in the opposite direction with the announcement that it will make movies from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance film festivals available for online rental that will generate money without relying on advertising to foot the bill.

For the first time that YouTube, world's most favored free video-sharing website is entering into the pay-per-view business, will now charge users.

San Francisco -- In an effort to improve its mobile ad network, the Norwegian browser maker Opera Software announced that it has jumped onto the mobile advertising bandwagon with the acquisition of AdMarvel, a small privately-owned mobile advertising company situated in San Mateo, California, which has developed a product suite that manages how ads are delivered to mobile phones, seeking to create a new dimension to drive revenues through its highly popular mobile browsers, the Norwegian Web browser company said on Wednesday.