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 is susceptible to certain types of attacks that could allow someone to hijack an account while a user is interacting with another Web site, a security researcher warned on Monday. Reseacher Nitesh Dhanjani also said a design flaw in Facebook is granting third-party apps permission to access user profile data without express approval from users.

Facebook used to display a pop-up window warning users when they added any third-party app that doing so would authorize the app to get access to user profile information. This allowed users to change their mind before adding the app. The company has changed its policy and now some apps can choose to use a new implicit authorization feature that does not warn Facebook users that a third-party app is trying to request their data, Dhanjani said.

“This allows Facebook to gain increased adoption of third-party apps, which can translate to revenue,” he said, adding that any warning would deter some users from adding new apps. “The only information apps can access without first showing the ‘Allow’ screen is publicly available information (the limited set of info that includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, friend list, and pages) and information set to be visible to everyone on the Internet,” Facebook spokesman Simon Axten said.

In separate but related research, Dhanjani and Israeli security researcher Shlomi Narkolayev said attackers could use clickjacking attacks to hijack Facebook accounts by tricking users into clicking on sites hiding malicious code. A Web site that looks like an e-commerce site or that shows videos could hide a Facebook log-in page behind it so that when a user clicks on the site to play a video, for instance, the user’s account is opened instead behind the scenes, without the user realizing it.

“Using ClickJacking I also could fool users to click whatever I want: adding me as their friend, delete their account, and even open their camera and microphone using flash (Older versions then 10.x), or install Facebook applications that post their Web camera and microphone every time they connected to Facebook,” Narkolayev wrote on his blog. He demonstrates an example of an attack in a video on his site and acknowledges that other sites are vulnerable to this type of attack, as well.

Twitter was hit by a series of clickjacking attacks last year. Axten said the attack examples were standard clickjacking and not unique to Facebook. “We’re building some additional protections for these types of attacks and reminding people to be cautious of any message, post, or link they find on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet that looks suspicious,” Axten said in an e-mail.

Facebook has advanced systems to detect and block the posting and sending of malicious links on Facebook, Axten said. “If we learn of a site that’s using clickjacking against our users, we add it to our blacklist so it can’t be spread through the network,” he said. “We also work with third parties to get malicious sites added to browser blacklists or taken down completely.”

This isn’t the first research done into clickjacking threats on Facebook. A self-proclaimed white hat hacker who goes by the name “theharmonyguy” wrote about it on his blog last October.

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.

Seriously !! How did they do it ? They have an internet audience of more than 300 million active users, out of which atleast 50% of  users log on any given day.

The world over, people spend more than 8 billion minutes  each day with more than 45 million updates each day.More than 2 billion photos and 14 million videos are  uploaded each month.

It has more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries engaged in it. There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing it through their mobile devices.

You probably came to read this post through them. What am i talking about ? A website what’s changed societies, economies, strategies and perceptions of people all around the world. Just 5 years old,  founded by Mark Zuckerberg (25 years) with his college roommates and fellow computer science students. The name ?

Facebook.

Rodney Bradford, a teenager in New York City, has been freed after 12 days of incarceration after Facebook confirmed that a Facebook wall post sent at the time of the alleged crime was sent from an IP address matching his father’s physical address.

Bradford had been held for almost two weeks on suspicion of armed robbery in the Brooklyn project where he lived.

The teen had maintained his innocence, as did witnesses who said Bradford was in his father’s Harlem residence miles away when the crime was committed.

The Facebook post, sent to his girlfriend, asked playfully “where are my pancakes?,” about one minute before the robbery took place.

Facebook confirmed that the IP address matched that of the Harlem apartment.

When was the last time a website with gave you a migraine? For one of the best social networking site, Facebook some times makes the most lousy moves. If you have been on Facebook lately, you will know what I am talking about. For whatever reason, Facebook has tweaked the news feed to become more of a “top stories” format than a chronological timeline of your friend’s activities. (If you’re curious, here is why the company says the change was so necessary.) Oh yes, you still can get the old layout, but that’s now something you have to click through for and is called “Live Feed.” The site has attempted to make up for this by making that feed actually real-time: you no longer have to reload for the latest updates.

This was sprung on users without any warning at all. I initially thought Facebook was choking yet again when I noticed the status updates were all jumbled up. I actually didn’t realize there was a change until I noticed a news article highlighted on Techmeme. Apparently, neither did most of my friends. “What the hell is wrong with Facebook now?” one said. Those that did notice what just happened were not much kinder. “This new layout sucks!” was a common meme. Now Facebook groups are popping up demanding the old news feed come back. One called “Facebook: SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD NEWS FEED!!!” has garnered some 648,000 members in just two days. Another has about 440,000 members, and yet a third with over 51,000 users.

Such rapid opposition signals to me that Facebook is going to have a lot of trouble keeping this around. But it also should be a concern to those with interests in the social networking company: it is repeatedly making questionable decisions that really seem as if they are not being thought out very well. Facebook has grown exponentially as MySpace has collapsed. But at the same time, MySpace seemed to think through changes before it made them, or realized that sometimes it’s good to leave things alone. I see no good reason why Facebook needed to mess with the news feed. To begin with, this Twitter-like layout wasn’t really popular with its users, and now they’ve messed with it again in a move that seems to have significant opposition. If they keep doing this, Facebook’s time at the top may not be long-lived. In the end the customer is always right.