Online social networking heavyweight Facebook has, yet again, been tagged with criminal charges, this time for violating two registered patents from two separate companies. According to the charges against Facebook, the site is in violation of patents for providing “personal pages” and for tracking the relationships between people.
One look at Vkontakte.ru can spawn such a huge sense of deja vu.
Facebook has seriously been at the forefront of social networking website advances, so to speak, so it’s not surprising that they would serve as the benchmark and model for all future (and past) social net sites. However, it’s seriously just plain creepy how Russian net site Vkontakte.ru has been patterned to Facebook. And the best part is, they’re planning to launch at an international level.
Despite the ongoing recession, the social networking site continues to add big names to its company, which includes snagging talents from Yahoo!, Google, Six Apart and Genentech.
Massive tech critic site TechCrunch has divulged reports about confidential Twitter documents that they managed to get ahold of.
After the riot happened in Xinjiang, Northwestern China, where 140 people have been killed due to the clash between the demostrators and the police, the government of China controlled the country’s media by blocking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Two weeks ago, almost all Google services have also been blocked.
Owen Van Natta, MySpace’s new CEO, made his first major course of action by cutting back on staff by approximately 30% last Tuesday. This seems to be in response to MySpace’s continual traffic decline as rival site Facebook continues to grow even stronger.
Iran’s main mobile phone network was cut in its capital Tehran on Saturday evening. Popular websites like Facebook and YouTube were appeared to be blocked by internet providers, correspondents said.
Facebook has announced that they have hired Greg Badros, a Google Senior Director of Engineering. He is now Facebook’s Director of Engineering.
Facebook, in a move that mimics rival MySpace’s ongoing feature, will now offer its users the choice of acquiring a unique username to attach to their profiles.
