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.

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.”

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.

Microsoft is making a huge marketing effort with Bing and the TV campaign is a key means of challenging Google’s overwhelming supremacy at present. The overall campaign is said to be costing the software giant $2billion.

The campaign is set to last three months and features three separate TV ads, all of which feature the theme ‘Bing and decide’ and are meant to show Bing as offering more straightforward, easily-interpreted results compared to Google’s.

People are shown asking others for information and receiving nonsense answers. One features a woman asking for directions to Euston station.

The ads will be run for a full month and then in fortnightly bursts thereafter. There will also be a digital campaign running in parallel.

Ashley Highfield, speaking on behalf of Microsoft UK, said:

“People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching. We are also in a world where people have forgotten there is an alternative search engine.”

Williams says that the open exchange of information as a means of combating censorship and will fundamentally alter the way we interact with our governments.

He also confirmed that Twitter still had no intention of charging users.

“Our goal at Twitter is to be a force for good,” he said. “We have a fundamental belief, having worked on this type of thing for 10 years, that the open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world.”

The challenge now is to extend Twitter’s reach into areas where technology is not so well advanced. Williams thinks that the site’s influence will be even greater in these areas as there is less access to information. Efforts are being made to improve SMS coverage in remote areas of India and in Haiti, as this would allow people to keep in touch with the world even via a relatively low-spec mobile phone.

“My hope is that eventually the open exchange of information will prevail in most regions, but we don’t have any specific plans in China or other areas where we’re blocked,” he added.

The deal covers everything from two of Italy’s national libraries and would see them all accessible via the internet. This would include books by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo and they would all be available for free.

All of these books were published prior to 1868, which means that there are no copyright issues and the scheme has been welcomed in Italy as budget considerations have limited what can be spent on trying to preserve the collections that are kept in Rome and Florence.

A 1966 flood in Florence damaged thousands of books and Mario Resca, speaking on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, pointed to this catastrophe, saying that having the books scanned for the internet would ensure that the content was never lost.

Other Google attempts to scan books have encountered difficulties. A French court found that the process was an infringement of copyright, while the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers brought a lawsuit against the search giant for the same reason.

Microsoft is looking to raise awareness about its new search engine and is using traditional advertising means as well as those online. Bing will sponsor The Simpsons on weeknights on both Channel 4 and Channel 4+1. This will be Microsoft’s first TV partnership and will coincide with the 20th anniversary of the immensely popular cartoon sit-com.

The adverts will incorporate Simpsons characters and will be shown before and after each episode as well as in the ad breaks. Different Simpson family members will be shown using the search engine to solve problems.

Bing was launched in November of last year as Microsoft made a renewed effort to close the gap on Google and Yahoo! According to the most recent statistics concerning internet usage, Bing currently has 4 per cent of the market share in the UK, as does Yahoo! Google is still way out in front with 86 per cent of the market.

Some have described the way the new interface displays the web as similar to ‘an interactive entertainment magazine’, and this sounds about right. It is an experimental feature that focuses heavily on the visual, as well as the fun, side of browsing RSS feeds.

How does it work?
Google Reader Play focuses on pictures and videos, and also displays statistics and information in the form of entertaining graphics and maps. It lets you browse one story at a time this way, making it easier and more entertaining to spend time reading news feeds.

One of Google’s software engineers, Garrett Wu, believes that:

“Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise,”

Unwittingly however, Wu has highlighted one of the main user complaints about the new interface; that it is great for time-wasting, but not for efficient and speedy searching. This is likely why the product is only an experimental feature, an entertaining distraction from serious searching. The fact that Google Reader Play has been introduced just a few weeks before the launch of the Apple iPad is also another probable reason behind its launch.

• Follow more than 10 other Twitter accounts
• Have 10 or more followers
• Have posted more than 10 tweets since signing up to the micro-blogging service

The results of the study showed that only 21 percent of Twitter users match this description and can be classed as active.

Implications
This percentage of active users is much lower than most people’s expectations of Twitter’s total user base. Promotion from celebrities and high-profile figures – dubbed the ‘Twitter Red Carpet Era’ by the report - as well as frequent reports of the service’s popularity in the media result in a misleading impression of how many people actually use Twitter. The results of the Barracuda Labs’ study could have a detrimental impact on Twitter’s ability to attract advertisers, although the strength of the brand nowadays seems to overshadow the total number of users.

Active users are on the rise
Despite these surprising results, the report does however demonstrate that the number of active Twitter users is on the rise. The number of accountholders gaining followers has risen to 34% from 17%, whilst figures for inactive users with no followers have dropped from 30% to 17% since June 2009.

Posting on the Twitter blog, she explained how the site has taken steps to protect users from phishing scams through what she calls ‘bad links’. This is basically where a link is sent through Direct Messages on the site, which the user receives and clicks on, resulting in malicious viruses and other attacks.

How the new service works
Basically, Twitter is routing all links submitted to the site through the new service, so that the Trust and Safety team can identify and effectively stop the spread of deceitful links throughout the whole Twitter network. Users will not notice this new service; except for the fact that link URLs in Direct messages may be shortened to twt.tl. Without this system, the team is only able to detect scams and malicious links after problems have already occurred.

Harvey went on to explain that they are focusing primarily on Direct Messages at the moment because this is where the most problems occur, but that the team is also looking at email notifications relating to these untrustworthy messages.