Like every other company that offers support, the first and the only option Facebook had in mind when it came to offering support was – well, India. Social networking company Facebook said on Monday that it is setting up an office in Hyderabad in southern India. The new office will have online sales and operations teams, said Don Faul, a director of global online operations at Facebook, in a posting on the official Facebook blog.

Facebook will start with a small initial team in Hyderabad, which will include experts on the Facebook product to help users with their questions, and specialists in online advertising to help advertisers, the company said in a statement issued separately on Monday. The company said last week that it was setting up an office in Austin, Texas. Both the new offices will allow the company to better serve Facebook’s more than 400 million users, besides advertisers and developers, Faul said.

By having support centers in a variety of time zones, Facebook can provide better around-the-clock, multilingual support, he added.

The company is seeing significant international expansion, with 70 percent of the people using Facebook outside the U.S., accessing the service in more than 70 languages. More than 8 million people use Facebook in India, Faul said. The new operations centers in Austin and Hyderabad will supplement the company’s support teams at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and in Dublin, Ireland. The Hyderabad office is Facebook’s first in Asia.

In India, Facebook is ahead of Google’s Orkut social networking site according to Web traffic monitoring service Alexa. Zynga, a developer of games like FarmVille, for social networking sites including Facebook, recently set up a product development center in Bangalore.Facebook does not, however, have plans to move parts of its engineering and product development from Palo Alto to India. “We have no plans to base product managers or engineers in Hyderabad at this time,” the statement said.

Facebook may pull in an excess of $1 billion in revenues, according to estimates and poking around on behalf of industry blog Inside Facebook. That’s an increase from the same publication’s estimate of $700 million last year.

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen said last year that he projected the company would break $500 million revenue in 2009, and that it had the potential to be a billion-dollar company already, but that it was acting conservatively.

(Naturally, Facebook says that as a privately held company it doesn’t disclose its financials.)

What can Facebook credit this big jump in revenue to? It’s all about the Social Ads program. Facebook ditched banner ads altogether earlier this year when its longstanding ad partnership with Microsoft ran out and has chosen to focus on its edgier “engagement ads” program instead–and often these are sold by encouraging brands to promote their presence on Facebook with ad space.

However accurate these new estimates from Inside Facebook are, Facebook is certainly making money–and it’s making money because the Facebook “fan page” and complementary ad space to promote it are the hottest ticket in brand marketing right now. They won’t always be, and Facebook will have to maintain that front-runner status in plenty of advertising innovations down the road as the industry evolves faster than ever.

Plus, it’s well-known that some of the biggest buyers of Facebook advertisements are social-gaming companies looking to pull in more players: how long can they, in turn, keep up their place in the sun? Critics have long since pointed out the number of third-party companies that are effectively dependent on Facebook for traction and revenue, but the reverse is likely true as well.

Facebook has a potentially lucrative new revenue stream emerging when its virtual currency system, Facebook Credits, launches in full–Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all proceeds. But the developer world isn’t totally sold, and the product has grown far more niche from the days when it was rumored to be a “PayPal killer.” As Inside Facebook points out, advertising is still the core of the company’s business model. And here, it has to stay ahead of the pack more than ever.

This is more like a trend we see these days. Everyone is on the social networking track today. I wonder when social networking gained so much importance in our lives. Microsoft is also facing the social networking heat that they have also decided to enable features to support the same on their popular email client – Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft is partnering with Facebook and MySpace to allow users to see updates, photos and activities from those social-networking services within Outlook, as part of the OSC (Outlook Social Connector) integrated into the upcoming Office 2010. Those social-networking services will join Windows Live and LinkedIn as services capable of being viewed from within Outlook.

Also on Feb. 16, Microsoft announced the public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook.

LinkedIn for Outlook will enable users to view their contacts’ updates and photos alongside e-mails, and automatically update Outlook contacts with information from LinkedIn. Once the Facebook and MySpace applications are released, user information from those services will also appear in Outlook.

An Official Microsoft Blog post announcing LinkedIn for Outlook, as well as the Facebook and MySpace partnerships, couldn’t seem to resist taking a jab at Google Buzz, the search-engine giant’s new Twitter-like social networking application.

“What we think users will appreciate is that the Outlook Social Connector doesn’t add another professional or social network into the mix,” Dev Balasubramanian, product manager for Microsoft Outlook, wrote in the Feb. 16 posting. “The Outlook Social Connector does offer busy people, who are already a part of one or several networks, convenience.”

In a separate Feb. 17 posting on the Microsoft Outlook 2010 blog, Balasubramanian and Outlook program manager Michael Affronti pointed out a link for downloading the LinkedIn for Outlook beta, and suggested that “both Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as our official release of Office 2010 approaches.”

The announcement suggests that Microsoft is in the race to aggregate its users’ social-networking content into a single “hub,” a trend being embraced by companies ranging from Google to Xobni. Previously, LinkedIn had also partnered with IBM, Research In Motion and Twitter to port its users’ profiles onto those companies’ respective networks and devices.

On the Microsoft Outlook 2010 blog, Microsoft also nodded to the privacy concerns currently being raised about social networking.

“The design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience,” the posting added. “For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an email from you … if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy.”

Finally, Facebook  decided to go ahead and unveil the new Facebook interface. Currently, this change is noticeable only on 64% Facebook account. This change will be 100% once they have made the changes available on all their servers.

“Over the past few months, we’ve been testing several different designs of the home page to improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features,” said Facebook engineer Jing Chen, in a post on the company’s official blog.

“Today we started rolling out the most recent navigation updates to help you find what you are looking for on Facebook,” said Chen.

Among other things, the redesign puts some of Facebook’s more commonly used areas, such as pages, status updates, and links, in a more prominent location. “Now from the top left menus you can quickly get to what’s new and important,” said Chen.

Also, Facebook moved the Home and Profile links to the top right corner of the home page.

Additionally, Facebook made the Chat tool “more prominent by showing you a list of some of your online friends, and the Events dashboard lists your upcoming events along with events your friends are attending,” said Chen.

And, in a likely blow to office productivity everywhere, the site is also making it easier for users to keep track of those addictive game applications, like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

“You will also start to see counters next to the applications you have bookmarked on your home page,” wrote Chen.

“Counters will notify you when you have a specific action to take, so that you never miss your turn in a game or an update from a friend in an application,” said the blogger.

Cheng said the changes are all about making it easier for individuals to access and use what’s become the world’s most popular social networking platform.

“We hope the simplified design of the home page will make it easy for you to stay connected with the people, applications, and activities that matter most to you,” Cheng wrote.

Facebook on Tuesday said that it had partnered with McAfee to offer its 350 million members a complimentary six-month subscription to McAfee security software. “Now, if your computer is infected, you will be asked to run a scan … and clean it before accessing Facebook,” said Facebook project manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “We’re not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure.”

After the six month period, Facebook users who chose to renew the subscription will have to pay a fee. A McAfee spokesperson said the fee had not yet been determined and that it will probably be less than the annual subscription price charged to retail buyers of its security software. McAfee’s software requires a PC. A Facebook spokesperson was not immediately able to provide data about the number of subscribers who use Mac OS X or Linux.

According to NetApplications, about 5% of Internet users are running Mac OS X and about 1% are running Linux. That suggests about 21 million Facebook users aren’t helped by this partnership, though their computers may face less risk from malware.Facebook and other social networking sites have become targets for cybercriminals because of their popularity, the potential value of friend data to fuel social engineering attacks, and the tendency of users to trust messages that appear to come from friends.

In 2009, Facebook had repeated problems with the Koobface worm.

Even if no other free Internet service takes as much responsibility to keep user accounts secure, as the company claims, Facebook may need to do still more. On Wednesday, security researcher Ronen Zilberman published information about what he claims is a new type of vulnerability present in several major social networks, including Facebook. The vulnerability, which he calls Cross Site Identification, appears to be similar to Cross Site Request Forgery. Using this technique, an attacker who manages to lure a victim to a Web page with embedded malicious content can steal Facebook data if the victim is logged in to Facebook in a different Web browser tab.

After seeing the stats from Pingdom, we were shocked to see Facebook beat rest of the popular social networking Giants by miles. We definitely knew Facebook was the favorites in this race however, it was the stats that left us shocked. Facebook leads the way with about 260 billion page views with MySpace on their tail followed by Twitter. Here is the stats we received from Pingdom if any further explanation is required.

Probably, you might have heard this phrase in many meeting rooms: “its the numbers that speaks here.” The stats from Pingdom shows the steady growth of Facebook over the years. Several months back, MySpace was ahead in the race worldwide. And Facebook, at the time, was largely unsearchable and protected behind a login wall, keeping a damper on page views juiced by search engine optimization (SEO).

I wouldn’t agree with the placement of Twitter in this list. Most of the users access Twitter services via third-party clients on different avatars of Computers and Mobile devices. This tend to make us at Techgiraffe believe there is more to Twitter stats than what we see here.

In social news, Digg pulls in twice as many page views as their competitor Reddit (which is actually a smaller gap than I would have expected), and seven times as many as nerd-news hub Slashdot.

Now here is some “TechGiraffe-Insight” on this whole deal: I wonder how much of this page view dominance on Facebook’s part was achieved when Facebook got the SEO bump from letting users and reserve brands’ “fan pages” unique URLs, hence making the Web address of an individual Facebook page much more search-result-friendly than a string of numbers. It’s also potentially driving more traffic indirectly through Facebook Connect, which lets the users of 80,000 (and counting) third-party sites log in with their Facebook credentials–in effect, spreading the Facebook brand all over the Web.

Recently, our Techgiraffe team was in Vietnam on a geek meet when we felt the urge to “Socially Network” with our friends and family back home. To our surprise, Facebook is blocked in Vietnam. We immediately got on line with Facebook spokesperson – Meredith Chin to confirm if Facebook blocked Vietnamese IP’s or if it was the other way around.

Internet Services providers blamed this issue on a Technical Glitch which couldn’t be explained to us. A representative from Viettel, a DSL and cell phone service provider, told me “there might be something wrong with Facebook.” None seemed to know what was happening however, during a media briefing on December 3, Nguyen Phuong Nga, a representative of Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry, affirmed that agencies have been evaluating the contents of certain social Web sites because “many people in Vietnam have been upset that a number of social Web sites have been misused,” basically posting information of an undisclosed nature that is deemed inappropriate.

I’m unaware of any misuse, but the upset seems much louder from the other side. With more than a million users and counting, the limited access to Facebook has created a lot of anguish. Lan Nguyen, a 23-year-old English student in Hanoi said, “I use Facebook daily. Now, it feels like something just got stolen from me.” She uses FPT Telecom, one of the biggest DSL providers in Vietnam.

Ha Do of Ho Chi Minh city, another mid-20s, self-proclaimed Facebook addict who has some 1,800 friends, put it simply: “This sucks big time!” She revealed, however, that she still could access the site from some cafes, though definitely not from home. Upset and disappointment are common feelings among those I talked to about the matter. This also affects a lot of small businesses in Vietnam, especially bars, restaurants, and tourism agencies that use Facebook to promote themselves to the outside world.

Since we were unable to hear a convincing reply from either Facebook or Local ISP providers, our eyes are gonna be fixed on Vietnam and Facebook for coming days.

HTC Hero

When ever I think of HTC hero, I think of Puff Daddy’s I got the power song. You definitly have the power if you are going to use HTC Hero because it is backed by Googles own Android and comes packed with loads of features. It’s loaded with Google apps, of course, plus a pretty big 5mp camera, a touchscreen, video features, WiFi and expandable memory. Plus there’s the Android Market – it’s not as overwhelmingly stocked as the iPhone App Store, but there are plenty of wares to choose from.

HTC Hero

Barrack Obama

January 20, 2009 is the day that Barrack Obama was declared the President of the United Stated, over opponent John Maccain. The reason for politics to feature on Tech Giraffe is because of his passion for the BlackBerrry. Yes, the most searched man on the planet cannot spend a day without his favourite gadget which now is the super encrypted and monitored by the NSA and complies with federal standards.

Barrack Obama

Michael Jackson

The King of Pop, the Moon walker, or more infamously as a child molester, Michael Jackson is one person who has swept each one of us off our feet with his music. And if music weren’t enough, he cemented his legendary status with dance moves so sharp and energetic, that they are a rage even today. The reason he features on this list is because it was not his music, not his dance or his antics, but his death that brought all major internet based companies crashing due to unprecedented overload.

Michael Jackson

Swine Flu

The H1N1 virus, more popularly known as the swine flu virus, spelt mayhem to many developing countries.The virus which was a strain prominent across farm bred pigs, spread like wildfire once it jumped to human beings . The virus which originated from Mexico, spread rapidly across borders creating security nightmares to governments. Personal hygiene suddenly became a huge issue as the virus was capable of spreading through body contact. The reason why the swine flu features on our list is because it was well known to use airplanes/mobiles/gadgets as carriers

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing particle beams of either protons or nuclei. The huge particle collider, running a mammoth 27 kilometres in circumference underneath switzerland. It created a world record this past week by becoming the the machine to propel particles the fastest in an enclosed environment, 99.9% the speed of light. Now that is a new definition of being fast.

Large Hadron Collider

Twitter

A Microblogging behemoth, that surpassed all expectations and is changing the way real time information is read on the internet. It also happens to be the most searched of the year 2009

Twitter

Please click here to read more our previous article related to Twitter.

Rio de Janeiro wins the bid to host 2016 Summer Olympics

Rio de Janerio, the capital of Brazil ain’t all sand and sunshine as we are led to believe. And Brazil isn’t a country submerged in the Amazon’s either. Brazil’s strong internet demography is making a lot of heads turn, and their presence in the world of technology is cemented after winning the bid to host the 2016 summer Olympics.

Rio de Janeiro

Velupillai Prabhakaran killed in battle

For decades, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam controlled most of a tiny island country that we know as Sri Lanka, branded a terrorist harboring country because of him. On May 18, 2009, he was killed in an encounter which happens to be another story. The reason his death is featured because he was detected and tracked using the latest in tracking and navigational systems, something that the 2000 odd strong army of Sri Lanka recently acquired. Goes to show technology can bring a lot of change in a short period of time.

Velupillai Prabhakaran

4chan

For those of you who havent heard of 4chan, its an English-language imageboard website primarily used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga and anime. Internet memes such as lolcats, Rickrolling, “Chocolate Rain”, “Pedobear”, and many others are all terms that have their origins from 4chan. “Lunatic, juvenile… brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.” is what The Guardian calls them.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The 6th movie in a series of 7, the Harry Potter series needs no introduction. Touted as the highest grossing movie of the year, amassing almost a billion dollars is on the list. It is also the movie to spend the most on computer generated UI and rendering.

Harry Potter and the half blood prince

Sixth sense

SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, ‘SixthSense’ sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. ‘SixthSense’ attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

source : http://www.pranavmistry.com

Pranav Mistry

Windows 7

Love it, hate it, can’t live without it. These are some of the mixed emotions one comes across when dealing with Microsoft’s products. After Vista failed to live up to its expectations, Microsoft had to come up with something to save face. And that something might just brighten Microsoft’s face as Window’s 7 has been receiving good reviews from every nook and corner. Built from scratch, this operating system is already making heads turn with some nitty gritty features.

Windows 7

Unbelievably, a few minutes after posting the previous blog entry Twitter – The Top Word in English for 2009 , we couldn’t access the twitter website. Any user visiting the site as of now, Monday 30th of November 9:10 am (GMT), will see a huge banner that says Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets. Please wait a moment and try again.

Twitter over capacity

I guess the shock of being the most used word of the year is having a tough time tweeting about its success !

AOL will soon become Aol as Time-warner is planning on abandoning the sinking ship. The decisions were made about an year back however, it took time for it to be put into action. With new changes around the corner,  AOL decided they would start off with changing the logo. AOL, which dropped its familiar America Online name in favor of the three letter identity in 2006, is now Aol., as in capital A, lower case “o” and “l”, followed by a period.
The period is an important addition, according to Maureen Sullivan, chief of staff for AOL. “The period is really a pivot point to show the breadth and depth of our content and products that we are focused on delivering,” she says. It shows that we are standing behind the AOL brand, and the period invokes that.” The “Aol-dot” logo, as Sullivan refers to it, will be consistent, but will be used with varying backgrounds and animations throughout its properties.

AOL is undergoing a painful transformation that will include eliminating a third of its workforce and other restructuring that will cost the company $200 million in the next few months. “The most important part of this new brand identity is that we wanted to do it for the employees, who are energized by it and feel it finally communicates to the world and all of our partners the goals we have as the new AOL,” Sullivan said.

AOL hired innovation consultants Wolff Olins to develop the new brand identity. It also worked with artists, including Universal Everything, GHAVA and Dylan Griffin, to create the art and animations. The new brand identity will be fully unveiled Dec. 10, the day AOL will begin trading as an independent company, eight years after merger with Time Warner.