News

Google + has crossed 90 million users mark since its launch in June last year. The social networking site was opened to the public on September 20. Since the launch of the social networking site, the search engine giant has been constantly working to promote it – by adding toolbars and other buttons on its websites to aggressively promote the service. "I am super excited about the growth of ... Google Plus, which now has 90 million users globally - wellover double what I announced just three months ago.

Google is gearing up to provide more personalized search results by extracting data from its social network service Google+ in the coming days. This would include photos, news and comments posted on Google+.

  Yahoo named Scott Thompson as its new CEO after running the company without a leader for four months, amidst several shareholders' calls to sell the company. Thompson will relieve the company’s interim CEO Tim Morse who will return to his position as chief financial officer. The appointment of Thompson, previously the president of PayPal (under whose leadership the company more than doubled its active userbase as well as its revenues), follows the ouster of Carol Bartz who was unceremoniously fired by the company's board via phone in the month of September.

Microsoft Corp almost overtook Yahoo! Inc. for the second spot in the U.S. Internet search market in November after Microsoft’s Bing service recorded gains on other sites, according to ComScore Inc. ComScore said Microsoft accounted for 15 % of U.S. Internet queries for the month of November, up from 14.8 % the previous month. Yahoo! Inc., on the other hand, had 15.1 %, lowering from 15.2 %. Search engine giant, Google’s share also dropped to 65.4 % from 65.6 %.

Type in "do a barrel roll" in Google search and you will be surprised to see what follows next. The search term will manipulate the layout of its results page and the image in your browser will do a barrel roll!   iPhone users had discovered a similar phenomenon earlier this year in April when they entered "tilt" on Google on their iPhones, using Safari or Google's app. The image on the screen's display actually tilted a bit and when googled "ascii art," the company logo appeared in the same art form on the results page.

Facebook has come up with another interesting feature that helps you get to your Facebook account in case if you forget your password. The novel feature is named ‘Trusted Friends’ that lets you log back by allowing you to take help from your friends on Facebook. The process starts with your choosing trusted five friends from security settings page. You can arrange the settings in such way so that if you log out and later forget your password those friends will get a code.

Seasoned entrepreneur Bill Gross and owner of UberMedia of Pasadena is introducing a social media platform named  Chime.in to attract more users by centering itself around particular fields instead of the wider potpourri of topics that come on Facebook or Twitter. Gross had launched UberMedia as TweetUp Inc. in April 2010 as a medium to generate money from the stream of tweets and tweeters. It was later renamed as PostUp at one point of time and third-party Twitter apps Echofon, Twidroyd (now called UberSocial for Android) and UberTwitter were also purchased.

Facebook said on Wednesay that the cookies error, which could have been used to track the users after they had logged out of the social-networking site, has been remedied. The cookies error was revealed by Australian blogger Nik Cubrilovic in a blog post earlier in the week.

A recent study by entrepreneur and hacker Nik Cubrilovic reports that Facebook can keep a track of the webpages visited by you with a Facebook button or widget even if you are not logged in Facebook. According to Nik Cubrilovic Facebook simply changes its tracking cookies instead of deleting them completely when you log out. This enables the browser to send personal information of a member back to Facebook even when the member is not logged in. Cubrilovic’s claims are supported by his study of HTTP headers sent by browsers to Facebook.com.

ComScore, the internet marketing research company, released a white paper providing details for which Facebook features are most used and where users interact with branded content on Facebook.