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Following Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ keynote interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, where he unveiled the site’s new @anywhere service – the details of which Twitter are still being a little vague about – there was controversy over the interviewing techniques of reporters present at the conference.

As a result, Williams has participated in a number of subsequent interviews; in one of which he discusses the company’s goal to increase the amount of valuable information on Twitter and cut down on users tweeting rubbish. He believes that users can get maximum value out of Twitter without sharing anything about themselves or their personal lives.

Williams has said that the direction Twitter was heading in involved becoming a valuable real information service, rather than simply a social networking site. Discussing the amount of time users spend on Twitter, Williams has said:

“If anything we’d like to decrease it. We want to make Twitter a tool for you that helps you get stuff done.”

He went on to say that Twitter wants to help users find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and that they hope to achieve this by ‘increasing the signal-to-noise ratio’.

It has recently been announced that Yahoo! has signed a lucrative advertising deal with music streaming service with We7 music streaming service, leading many to speculate on future product integration between the two companies.

The deal was announced yesterday, on March 16th, and it will see Yahoo! take an active role in selling We7’s display advertising inventory. Out of the two companies, it seems that We7 will benefit the most from the deal, as they hope to upscale and grow their service with the backing of such a powerful advertising medium.

We7 currently caters to around three million users every month, all of whom can access the service for free but are also exposed to display and audio advertising whilst they stream songs. We7 are also expanding in other directions; a We7 iPhone application is currently available and an app for Android is on the way.

This said, it seems that Yahoo! will also benefit from signing up with We7. The two companies have confirmed that they are contemplating many future content partnership projects, with We7 releasing a statement saying:

“We are examining content opportunities with Yahoo! and the possibility of allowing access to We7 music via several Yahoo! locations.”

In a recent interview, the newly installed co-presidents of MySpace, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn, have claimed that they will be ‘innovating at an accelerated pace’ as they bid to win back users who have left the social networking site.

The pair believe that offering new products is vital and there will be a steady roll-out of a number of new features in the coming months. It is clear that action has to be taken as MySpace has been losing ground to rival Facebook for quite some time.

However, Hirschorn makes a distinction between the two sites, saying:

“MySpace is a not place for people to talk about what they are up to. It’s the place people talk about what they are into.”

Reflecting this, one of the first new MySpace features will be a ‘recommendation engine’ which will offer users games, music and videos based on what they are interested in. New users will see this already and it will appear for existing users at some point over the next couple of months.

Social games are another priority. Around a fifth of MySpace users are involved with some sort of social game at present and the two co-presidents would like to see this proportion closer to half.

Jones says that the product is currently the priority, but when that is in the right condition, they are planning a marketing campaign for later in the year.

Two-thirds of people questioned in a recent survey said that they thought Google’s Street View project was ‘intrusive’. The major gripe seems to be the lack of permission required to publish these images.

Almost a quarter said that it was ‘a service for burglars’, but Thames Valley Police say that there is nothing to support the theory that Street View could lead to an increase in the burglary rate in an area.

However, the service has been recently expanded and a third of people polled said that this was a positive move. Furthermore, a spokesman speaking on behalf of the Information Commissioner’s Office, said that there hadn’t been any official complaints lodged with them since the expansion.

Google have defended the project, saying that they are always aware of privacy concerns. Every image features a link, allowing a person to request that it be blurred or even deleted.

A spokesman speaking on behalf of Google said:

“Street View has already proved immensely popular in UK in the last year, with clear tourist benefits for Britain and millions of people using it daily.”

“Anyone who has a privacy concern and wants to remove their house can do so quickly and easily but in fact we often find people get in touch asking us to come and put their street on the map.”

Facebook is the latest high profile company to make a base for itself in the city of Hyderabad in south India

A number of large internet corporations already have a presence in the city, including Google and Microsoft, who make use of the lower costs in India when employing programmers and customer service staff.

Facebook is currently one of the most visited websites on the internet and around 8million of its 400million users are based in India. The largest user base is in the US, but around 70 per cent of users are from elsewhere.

The Hyderabad office joins Palo Alto and Austin in the States and Dublin in Ireland as a centre of Facebook operations. The company’s director of global online operations, Don Faul, says this is vital so that a service can be offered 24 hours a day to serve all the time zones of the world.

The initial team that will be employed in Hyderabad will be relatively small, but fairly rapid expansion is envisaged. Facebook now makes enough money to cover its running costs and has achieved this well ahead of schedule, paving the way for further growth.