Need more evidence that Facebook rules the Internet? Try this one on for size. According to research firm Hitwise, Google blinked, and Facebook leapfrogged ahead of the search engine as the most popular destination on the Web.

Combined, the two sites accounted for 14 percent of all U.S. traffic last week, but individually, Facebook nudged ahead of the search giant by claiming 7.07 percent of the hits compared to Google's 7.03 percent.

This marks the first time Facebbok has ever been able to outpace Google for a week, and likely not the last. While the lead is small, Facebook continues to trend upwards, having grown from a little over 2 percent a year ago. Not only that, but Facebook's membership has more than doubled in the past year as well.

Not surprisingly, users are also spending more time on Facebook, logging on average almost 6.5 hours per week, compared to less than 2.5 hours on Google.

Image Credit: justgetthere.com

Need more evidence that Facebook rules the Internet? Try this one on for size. According to research firm Hitwise, Google blinked, and Facebook leapfrogged ahead of the search engine as the most popular destination on the Web.

Combined, the two sites accounted for 14 percent of all U.S. traffic last week, but individually, Facebook nudged ahead of the search giant by claiming 7.07 percent of the hits compared to Google's 7.03 percent.

This marks the first time Facebbok has ever been able to outpace Google for a week, and likely not the last. While the lead is small, Facebook continues to trend upwards, having grown from a little over 2 percent a year ago. Not only that, but Facebook's membership has more than doubled in the past year as well.

Not surprisingly, users are also spending more time on Facebook, logging on average almost 6.5 hours per week, compared to less than 2.5 hours on Google.

Image Credit: justgetthere.com

The mood might be a little glum at the Foursquare and Gowalla offices today. Facebook is said to be readying new location sharing features for the popular social networking site. The launch is expected in late April. The user agreement on Facebook was updated in November to include language about the privacy of user location updates. The company also indicated that any location sharing features they might roll out (wink, wink) would be an opt-in service.

Early indications are that the location tools will come in two flavors. First, there will be an integrated ability to share your location via status updates. Secondly, Facebook will create and API for app developers to use to add location awareness to their apps. Advertisers would place high value on locations data for even a fraction of Facebook’s 400 million users.

The usefulness and possible consequences of this feature are still unknown. We hope Facebook will tread softly, having learned their lesson from past mistakes (coughBEACONcough). Though, what about app developers? We all know some apps can be on the shady side. Are you comfortable sharing your exact location with developers?

Facebook users know how it can be. You log in and notice you have a huge number of notifications. You find yourself dismayed as it becomes apparent that most of them are just app notification spam. You know the sort: so-and-so just answered a question about you, or what’s-his-face wants your help in Mafia Wars. Well, hopefully you won’t see quite so much of that anymore now that Facebook has ended support for the ‘notifications.send’ API.

We’re happy to see Facebook take even a small step to keep the service usable. Sure, developers may not like this so much, but Facebook did just give them the ability to request user email addresses for notification purposes. They also have the new games dashboard to play with. It is currently unclear how this will affect the newsfeed. Currently, we are still seeing a few app posts in it, and we wouldn’t mind if that went away.

Overall, this is a good move by Facebook. Even with the massive success Facebook is enjoying, they have to pay attention to the experience of users lest they become the next MySpace. Just think, that would have sounded like a good thing three or four years ago. Internet people are fickle.

What it means, exactly, isn’t clear. But what it could mean is trouble for social networking. Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed--the method it uses for “displaying a news feed in a social network environment.” A method which looks amazingly similar to something that all other social networking sites do.

The questions raised are: What does the patent describe? And what does the patent cover? From the patent’s abstract we learn this: “The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.” Graphically, (from Figure 5 of the patent application), this looks like this:

Overall, it seems general enough to cover a lot of social networking activity, which could be a problem. A generous interpretation of the patent would give Facebook tremendous control over social networking.

While it is possible, according to Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, that the patent could be as significant as the original six degrees patent, he’s guessing it probably won’t be. While the patent seems to describe what takes place on Twitter, for example, O’Neill explains that  it “appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user’s friends.” Maybe too fine a distinction of us to appreciate, perhaps, but O’Neill says the distinction is significant and could mean a lessening the patent’s potential impact.

Image Credit: Facebook

Microsoft is all set to incorporate certain elements of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into Outlook.

Read more:
Microsoft Injects Outlook With Social Network Mojo

You don't hear much about Silverlight these days, but rest assured, Microsoft is still hard at work on the speedy little flash competitor. Of course, a platform is only as powerful as its applications, and a new Silverlight Facebook client does a fantastic job of showcasing this power. The lightweight and lightening fast new interface works on both Mac's and PC's, and is a significant improvement to the look and feel of Facebook.

Created using the developer preview edition of Silverlight 4, the new Facebook client pretty much bypasses any need you would ever have to visit the full website. You can access your groups, friends list, inbox, and even upload / manage your photo galleries. It makes a great alternative for those who wish to get caught up with family and friends in peace, while conveniently doing away with those pesky ads.

Future versions are expected to strip away the Window chrome , and will allow you to quickly and easily import pictures from a digital camera directly into any photo gallery. To give the beta a spin, simply navigate on over to the landing page to install the new version of Silverlight. Give it a try, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Facebook was reluctant to setup a payment platform in the past due to security, resources, and third-party competitors.  However, that’s all out the window and they have got their sights set on the big bucks now that they’ve teamed up with Zynga, makers of Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Zynga’s games have hooked over 75 million monthly active users, with a third of those people online harvesting or “pulling jobs” on a daily basis. Facebook’s plan is to pull a 30% fee off every transaction made using the Facebook payment structure. The virtual goods market in the US alone is forecasted to reach $1.6 billion dollars in 2010. $835 million of that comes from social gaming products, such as those developed by Zynga.

It is unlikely Facebook needed another revenue stream, but they aren’t going to ignore the low hanging fruit dangling from the social gaming money tree.

It's difficult to envision a life without email. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. Suffice, digital messaging is just a fact of geek life that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Whether your inbox gets flooded with messages like the Nile during rainy season, or it's barren as one of those outback wastelands that Bear Grylls likes to visit, you probably aren't using your email client of choice to its fullest potential.

That's ok. Neither was I before undertaking the research for this week's open-source and freeware roundup. But now that I have seen the light, as it were, I would never go back to the ol' vanilla installations of Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, or whatever one's particular email utility of choice happens to be. There are just too many interesting ways to tweak and alter the normal email experience to better enhance your ability to read, organize, and shuffle your messages.

That's kind of "the big point" of the roundup this week--making your email work better for you. Click the jump, and I'll show you five apps and utilities for taking your email processing to the next level!

KLS Email Backup

If you're the kind of person who likes to run full system backups, then congratulations--you may skip over this helpful piece of freeware because you're as protected as you're going to get on your PC. That said, you might want to keep reading anyway. If your email is a lot more critical to your daily life than what your weekly (or whatever) backups provide, then you'll want to check out KLS Email Backup and its wide array of potential uses. This simple app makes it easy to backup and restore a huge range of programs to local or network drives, including both full and incremental backups as well as zip-based compression. I'd list the all the supported clients here, but it might take up another full paragraph...

Download it here! 

MailDrop

You've seen plenty of examples of how to use the popular file-synchronizing client Dropbox to, well, keep a consistent folder full of files across however many desktops or laptops you use. Here's another trick: MailDrop is a little utility that, once run, will open up your common Dropbox folder to the wonderful world of email. The program runs in the background of your system and checks an email account you specify on a fairly regular basis. When it finds new messages and attachments in this account, it'll automatically download the files and slap them into your Dropbox folder, which will then synchronize said files across whatever computers you've elected to put into your Dropbox Web.

And no, you don't need to make a new email account to use this functionality--MailDrop will only look for files and messages in a specific "Dropbox" folder in your messaging system (or Dropbox label, if you're on Gmail).

Download it here! 

OutSync

Outlook-only on this one, folks. And what a bummer that is, because OutSync is a pretty useful tool for automatically populating your Windows contacts with photographs of your friends. The only catch is that you have to have a working Facebook account for this to happen. Why's that? OutSync mashes up your Windows contacts with their respective profile photographs on their Facebook accounts. It might sound lame at first glance, especially to those of you who aren't into the whole Web 2.0 community thing. But the alternative--manually finding a picture for every single contact you know--sounds a bit mind-numbing to me.

Download it here! 

Zindus

Fair's fair, Thunderbird users. Here's an add-on that's for you and you alone. Zindus is a simple little utility that allows you to synchronize your Google Contacts with Thunderbird's Personal Address Book (or an address book that's been named after your particular Gmail address). The synchronization is two-way, so feel free to add and update new information on either the Thunderbird or Gmail side. If you're an intrepid user, you might notice that certain fields don't exactly correlate between the desktop client and your Web client. Zindus tracks following fields during your synchronization attempts:

• Full Name
• Primary Email address and Second Email address
• Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Work Fax, Pager, Mobile
• Instant Messaging (AIM)
• Company and Title
• Notes 

Download it here!

Googsystray

All this talk of desktop clients makes me feel like I've overlooked a biggie. I apologize for not finding an application or utility that's more applicable for a whole host of Web-based email services than what's offered by Googsystray. However, I think it's safe to say that most--if not all--of us have Google accounts for some kind of service. I mention that fact, because Googsystray is an excellent tool for keeping abreast of what's going on in all of the Google services worth knowing about. As the name implies, this app pops up a little message box in the corner of your desktop whenever something new happens in one of the following services:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Calendar
• Reader
• Wave 

It's as simple as that! You can have the app notify you with a little sound if you prefer, and even run a specific command whenever a particular action takes place (like a new item popping up in your RSS feed, for example).

Download it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you're dying to recommend!

According to market research firm comScore, Facebook now has more than twice as many U.S. users (111.9 million) than it did in 2008 (54.5 million). To put that into perspective, no other Web company since Google has been as successful as Facebook, which now earns about $2 billion in profit every quarter.

"Ever since it opened registration to the general public back in the fall of 2006, Facebook has seen considerable growth, so it's not like this story is new by any stretch of the imagination," comScore noted. "And yet, even in its native market, Facebook continues to add to its audience at an incredible rate... It now accounts for 7 percent of all time spent online in the U.S."

And it's not just the number of users that so impressed comScore, either. The research firm noted that Facebook manged to "grow substantially across nearly every performance metric," including total pages viewed, average visits per visitor, average minutes per visitor, and several more.