It seems that Yahoo is continuing its integration of social networks into its portal page, moving now to include access to Twitter for its users who also use the micro-blogging platform.

Another addition to Yahoo users' homepages

The aim with Facebook and Twitter integration, from Yahoo’s point of view, will be to keep people from ever having to navigate away from its page. Moreover, if Yahoo’s users can use Yahoo as a kind of universal homepage, offering both their various social networks and access to news, email and search then there are far more compelling reasons to make Yahoo a homepage and browse its content, something Yahoo will likely be pushing hard for given that it slipped last month from second most visited site in the US to third, Facebook taking the spot between it and Google.

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Microsoft took the time to release some figures detailing the number of subscribers to its online service, Xbox Live, prompting Sony to release official stats for PlayStation Network in response…

Twenty three million paying subscribers seems an awful lot...

Of course, this is something a lot of the die-hard single console faithful have been waiting a while to see. While many have pointed to Sony’s PlayStation Network as a solid base that’s been gradually improving over time, the fact that it’s free to all PlayStation 3 owners is the single feature most likely to have a pronounced impact on its figures. By contrast, Microsoft’s Xbox Live offers a for-pay service that is (as someone who has a fair bit of experience with both) just a little bit ahead in terms of both user interface and integration. Still, let’s take a look at the numbers before we go any further.

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It seems that Facebook users’ ability to share links through the social networkin service is changing the way people browse, with traffic from Facebook beginning to outweigh traffic from Google.

According to a report from Compete Inc. picked up by the folks over at the San Francisco Chronicle, Facebook has passed out Google, claiming the top spot when it comes to sending traffic to other major web portals, including Yahoo and MSN. The fact is that people tend to trust content recommended by their “friends” on social networking services, leading to them pursuing that content quite readily.

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Google has revealed that it already has tens of millions of users checking out its latest effort to push into the social networking space, Google Buzz, and that it’s already making changes based on user feedback.

Who knows... this could be exactly what Google Buzz needed to take off

Google Buzz launched earlier this week, combining a Twitter-style live update feed to Gmail users’ inboxes, offering them the ability to “follow” friends and receive their updates. Unfortunately, users have voiced complaints about the fact that Buzz has been built so tightly into Gmail, offering anyone with whom you’re in regular contact a closer look at your Google Account (which, for many, includes their search history).

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Microsoft is no stranger to criticism, whether justified or not, but it has responded to a recent piece from a former employee, Dick Brass, who essentially alleges that the company’s best work is behind it.

Gloves off, gauntlet thrown down, metaphores mixed

Brass was once Microsoft’s vice president in charge of ClearType and responsible for its ebook and tablet efforts back in the day when Microsoft was one of the very few companies that seemed to be taking the whole affair seriously. In a recent editorial piece for the New York Times, Brass paints a fairly sad picture of Microsoft, describing it by saying that,

“Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosectution of the 1990s.”

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For those who’ve been having issues figuring out what to do with themselves after yesterday’s sudden Twitter outage, today’s Boards.ie outage has probably caused a similar issue when it comes to combating workplace boredom.

Godspeed gentlemen

The word from the folks at Boards.ie is that its database was attacked by a source outside Ireland. Apparently, the attack saw those portions of the Boards’ database that contain members’ usernames, email addresses and “obfuscated passwords” accessed by the attackers. The folks from Boards had the following quick pieces of advice for anyone who has an account with them,

“If you use the same password on Boards as you do on other services, you should change it on those other services to be safe. Boards passwords are NOT stored in plain text, they are obscured with the standard vBulletin ‘Hash.’ While this provides strong protection, we have altered all passwords on Boards as a precaution and suggest you take this time to alter other similar passwords.”

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It’s emerged that recent deals to make Twitter’s mass of real-time data available to big search engines has ended up with the miblogging service turning a profit for the first time.

It’s certainly strange to see Twitter returning a profit so very quickly, and from something that had seemed to be entirely inevitable, but according to BusinessWeek the company has already moved into profitability. This much at least will be fine news to the folks at Twitter, who had been said to be struggling to find an avenue for the service to make profit without rendering it less attractive to users; searchabilty could well be just what the doctor ordered… temporarily at least.

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Many Twitter users are reporting seeing some misplaced Tweets in their usual feeds, with some seeing updates from users whose settings mark them as protected, and so shouldn’t be visible to anyone but followers.

Word comes via Cnet that Twitter has added the “misdirected” tweets to its list of Known Issues, and it’s usually a short enough step from there to an issue being solved, but for now users seeing tweets from a source they’re not following looks set to continue.

Of course, this issue has only been worsened by a kind of general misunderstanding of the new “retweet” functionality added to Twitter, which allows users to share content updated from another account with their followers. Unfortunately, the fact that many seem to have been unprepared for the new retweet model means that there were an awful lot of people complaining about misdirected tweets before the bug was really recognised as a bug, rather than users simply misunderstanding.

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Google’s realtime search may well already boast Twitter results, but now it has announced that it’s managed to get its web-crawling hands into Facebook’s live-updates as well, to say nothing of MySpace.

TechCrunch is reporting that, towards the end of its event on realtime search, Google’s Marissa Mayer officially announced that the company would be showing results from both current social networking high-flyer Facebook and one-time industry leader MySpace. Of course, for now there’s all kinds of questions about just what Google had to do to get its hands on the data, but it seems as though just about everyone is willing to speculate on it being some vast amount of currency changing hands.

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Twitter’s newest addition, the improved retweet functionality, has caused an awful lot of frustration for some users, while others love it. Last night though, that functionality disappeared for many, leading to a lot of questions about whether or not the feature is set in stone yet.

Immediately, folks like TechCrunch jumped to ask whether or not Twitter had finally ditched the by-now much maligned retweet functionality. That now seems not to be the case, with many reporting that they’ve seen the new style of retweets reappearing in both their standalone application streams and web-based Twitter feeds. Of course, the big issue here is that Twitter has managed not to put itself in a very awkward position.

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The world’s favourite collaborative encyclopaedia has been revealed to have lost somewhere in the region of 49,000 of its editors in the first quarter of this year, roughly ten times the number lost over the first three months of last year.

This news follows claims made during the summer that Wikipedia’s most frequent editors’ enthusiasm was likely to kill the site’s ability to maintain up-to-the-minute articles on just about everything. According to researchers at the Palo Alto Research Centre earlier this year, Wikipedia has long since stopped undergoing the exponential growth that characterised its rise.

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Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has continued to grow, despite analyst’s expectations that it had either already reached a terminal point and settled down or even be declining.

Rumours of Bing’s demise it seems had been greatly exaggerated. September figures for the search engine were released by several outfits that indicated Bing’s market share has started to slide, and the press was quick to pounce on what many perceived to be the carcass of Microsoft’s search engine. Since then though, more reliable figures have indicated that Bing had actually grown during the month of September, and TechCrunch is reporting that it’s managed to do so again in October.

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