U.S. Senator Dick Durbin provided an indication of the kind of scrutiny Facebook will be under if it is able to get into the Chinese market, with a letter he wrote to the CEO of Baidu, Robin Lee, which he also posted to his website on Wednesday.  Baidu is a Chinese web services company based in Beijing in the Haidan district.

In his letter, Durbin expressed concern that a partnership between Facebook and Baidu could negatively impact free speech and privacy for users.  Durbin urged Baidu to …

Internet research marketing company comScore said yesterday that, based on its comScore ad matrix, Facebook was the number one display ad publisher in 2011, delivering 346.5 billion impressions, almost twice the number it delivered in the first quarter of 2010.  Facebook’s share of the online display advertizing market increased 15% from 16.2 percent in Q1 2010 to 31.2 percent in Q1 2011.

ComScore’s executive vice president Jeff Hackett said the online display advertizing market …

Reports have surfaced that both Facebook and Google are thinking about making a deal for a joint venture or partnership with Skype, which makes the software that lets people make voice and video calls, and text chat on line.  Talks are still in an early stage so it is not yet clear whether a deal will be concluded. Skype in January decided to delay its initial public offering until the second half of 2011.

One source said Google has had initial talks with Skype regarding a joint venture and …

“There has never been a time we have been pressured to turn over data – we fight every time we believe the legal process is insufficient” a Facebook spokesman said by way of dismissing the charge made by Wikileak’s chief editor, Julian Assange, that Facebook and other major tech companies actively help the U.S. government get information about its citizens.  Assange, in an interview with Russia Today this week, called Facebook “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been …

Salesforce.com, the San Francisco based enterprise cloud computing company that develops applications for customer relationship management, this week acquired Radian6 for $340 million.

Radian6 provides a social media monitoring platform that lets companies aggregate what is being said about them online on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums, and engage people in a conversation. Radian6 has helped its clients like Kodak, GE, Dell, and UPS monitor, review and engage hundreds of millions of …

According to people who have recently reviewed Facebook’s financial information, the social networking giant is likely to make over $2 billion in 2011, higher than it had forecast in 2010, prompting talk that it may reach a $100 billion valuation by next June. This would make Facebook one of the largest technology companies on the planet, surpassing Cisco and Amazon.

Facebook’s valuation was calculated to be about $50 billion in January 2011 when Goldman Sachs and Sky Technologies …

Julian Assange, editor in chief for the whistle blowing, secret telling website Wikileaks, in an interview with Russia Today, slammed Facebook for being the worst spying tool ever devised and charged that the government actively uses it to spy on its citizens.

Assange also charged that numerous tech companies actively assist the government in its effort to get information about people.  “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all the major U.S, organizations have built-in interfaces for US …

Renren Inc., the leading social networking website in China, launched its initial public offering today in the United States which could more than double Facebook’s valuation. According to Renren’s submission with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Renren will try to raise $743.4 million dollars by offering American depository receipts for $12 and $14 to 53.1 million Americans.

Darren Fabric said Renren shares are overvalued but people will buy them anyways, because “the growth is …

News that the terrorist and mastermind of the 911 attacks in New York and Washington erupted and spread like wildfire in our newly emerging parallel universe of Tweets and Facebook pages.  Scores of exultant young people left movie theaters in L.A. Live yesterday upon finding their cell phones filled with Twitter and Facebook messages about the news that Osama bin Laden was dead.

Twenty-year old Jarrari Johnson expressed a great feeling of relief that Bin Laden had been killed and said Obama …

Chinese internet holding company Tencent, and Criterion Capital, which owns the social networking website Bebo, are among at least five companies expected to bid for NewsCorp’s struggling social networking website MySpace this week.  According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp hopes to have a buyer that will pay at least $100m for MySpace, by the end of the week.

MySpace has been treading water, just barely, this year as it continues to lose members probably due to the …