Facebook Lite Is Twitteresque, and That's Good

Backlash prompts changes to unpopular new features

(NEWSER) - Facebook is giving its redesign a redesign in response to a chorus of user complaints, the Wall Street Journal reports. Users griped that the Twitter-like real-time feed featured in the new format was crowding out the information they really wanted to see. A company blog acknowledged the negative feedback and promised an update to address the issue within weeks. More»

Average users has 130 friends, spends 55 minutes a day

(NEWSER) - Facebook's runaway growth is well documented, but some details still wow, and some are quite odd. Website Monitoring takes a look at the salient facts.

• Popularity: The US has the most active users, but 70% of Facebookers are international. Sure, the UK comes in at No. 2, but No. 3 is...Indonesia? Turkey grabs the No. 4 spot, just ahead of France.

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»

Social network crowds out Google and Yahoo for first time

(NEWSER) - Facebook got a big present this holiday season: It was the No. 1 US website on Christmas and on Christmas Eve. Facebook, which lagged behind Google in second place last year, trounced that site and rival Yahoo—though the search engines generated more traffic throughout the balance of the year. And social networking pulled off a Christmas miracle, ReadWriteWeb notes, despite the recent controversy over new privacy settings. More»

$25M search deals with Microsoft, Google push it barely into black

(NEWSER) - Twitter will be marginally profitable this year thanks to deals with Google and Microsoft that open up the social networking site’s streams to those companies’ search engines. The agreement with Google is worth about $15 million, while the Microsoft partnership should net Twitter around $10 million. The short message site is thought to have operating expenses between $20 million and $25 million. More»