It is not the first time a big social network has gone public; LinkedIn launched a share offering last May, but the $350 million that sale raised will look like pocket change compared to the cash that will pour into Facebook’s coffers.

This increase in Facebook’s financial resources is certain to underline the company’s dominance, not just as a social network for individuals, but also as a platform where businesses will have to be represented. This fact is underlined by the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg who, in an open letter to accompany the IPO, wrote that the company was giving people the power to ‘transform many of our core institutions and industries’.

Company pages are already well established on Facebook but they are likely to increasingly become a necessity in the future, particularly for companies offering consumer goods and services.  In an increasingly social world, it will no longer be possible for companies who want to succeed to hide behind an anonymous contact form on a website.

The public are likely to progressively demand direct interaction that occurs in the public arena. For many companies this may be a frightening prospect, but for the ones that place an emphasis on quality and good service it provides an opportunity to shine.

The social future of business offers both risks and rewards. The first step is for companies that want to avoid the pitfalls and take advantage of the opportunities that social media can deliver is to have a true understanding of how social media works, a subject that is comprehensively covered in our workshops.

For many, this is a natural evolution in the science of search. After all, internet use over the last few years has increasingly moved to social networks and therefore it is natural that search should follow into that web space.

However, opponents of the change (and there are many) argue that the results are far too heavily weighted in favour of Google’s own Google Plus network and represent a backdoor route for the company  to force people into adopting its network.

Currently, Facebook and Twitter results are not listed because, Google says, their competitors have forbidden the deep indexing of their sites. Google has publicly stated that it is willing to work with its rival companies to include their results, which may be necessary as a number of politicians in both the USA and Europe have questioned whether Google’s new update falls foul of regulations governing monopolies.

According to Google CEO Larry Page, the Google Plus network is growing at an impressive rate. Last week’s financial statement from the company claimed that the service had 90 million users and that 60% visited daily. However, many observers claimed the figures were misleading and Google has been coy about reporting how much actual interaction occurred on the network.

Whatever the truth, Google Plus still has a long to go before matching market leader Facebook, which claims 50% of its 800 million users log in daily.

When undertaking a search the new update, known as ‘Search, Plus Your World’, provides search users with results drawn in part, from content shared by people in the user’s Google Plus network. However, the change has caused disagreement in the tech industry not least among Google’s competition in the world of social networks.

Twitter was particularly critical of the change describing it as a ‘bad day for the internet’ and claiming that it ‘warped’ search results. Other industry experts voiced concerns that the update skewed results and led to a decline in the world’s most popular search engine’s ability to provide the most relevant results. They claimed that the failure to include results from other social networks like Facebook and Twitter was a mistake.

Google hit back that its terms of service with both those networks did not allow it to perform the kind of deep searches required to include the information in their results and claimed it was prepared to discuss the issue with rival companies.

Quality of search results was not the only issue seized on by critics of the update. Google, which has already drawn the attention of lawmakers with regard to its potential monopoly over online advertising, was – according to some observers – in breach of anti-trust regulations regarding Search, Plus Your World.

They argued that Google’s dominant position in the world of search did not allow it to discriminate against rivals.

Listen With Friends lets Facebook users listen along with any of their friends who are playing music.

Alexandre Roche, a product designer at Facebook, wrote a blog post about the feature last week in which he said: “ This feature lets you listen along with any of your friends who are currently listening to music. You can also listen together in a group while one of your friends plays DJ.

“You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time—so when your favourite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you’re jamming out at a performance or dance club.”

The feature works via the chat sidebar. When a Facebook user is listening to a song, a music note will appear next to their name. To join them in listening to the track, users can hover over their friend’s name and then click the “Listen With” button.

Users do need to share the same music service in order to use the feature, with Spotify and Rdio being the only two services that are currently used by Facebook. If a user attempts to listen to a song with an incompatible music player, they will be prompted to install the right one instead.

Listen With Friends is also part of Facebook chat, meaning that users can chat online about what they are listening to.

The card, a customised Visa debit card, works in the same way as a credit card. Facebook adds more money to each researcher’s account as they report more bugs.

Ryan McGeehgan, manager of Facebook’s security response team, said in a recent interview: “Researchers who find bugs and security improvements are rare, and we value them and have to find ways to reward them. Having this exclusive black card is another way to recognize them. They can show up at a conference and show this card and say ‘I did special work for Facebook’.”

The card might also give researchers other benefits, such as passes to get into Facebook parties.

The social media giant is also planning to tap further into researchers’ knowledge. For example, researchers may be brought into products as soon as they reach production stage in order to help Facebook catch any problems as early as possible.

Researchers who report security bugs that are eventually confirmed can make at least $500, but they have to follow Facebook’s Responsible Disclosure Policy and not go public with the vulnerability information until the problem has been fixed.

According to research by Experian Hitwise, the social networking giant now accounts for just over three per cent of all searches.

This represents a huge 46% increase from 2010’s figures.

Four variations of the term ‘Facebook’ also appear throughout the list of the top ten most searched-for items in the US. Altogether, these terms account for just under five per cent of overall searches, marking a 24% increase from 2010.

The second most searched-for item in 2011 was YouTube, which has moved up one space from last year’s third place on the list.

Third is ‘Facebook login’, which is followed by ‘craigslist’ and ‘facebook.com’.

A host of new terms also appeared throughout the list of the top 50 most searched-for items. These included ‘addicting games’, ‘amazon.com’, ‘cnn’, ‘chase online’, ‘face’, ‘facebook sign up’, ‘hotmail’, ‘pandora’ and ‘twitter’.

Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, said: “Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar.

“Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches. Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search engine optimization campaigns because of this behaviour, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines.

Last week, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, announced the remarkable new expansion plans from the website’s New York office.

Sandberg said that Facebook would increase its operations, adding a slew of new engineers to make current features even better and to write code to create new features.

The website currently has more than 800 million users – a figure that could increase as the website itself expands.
In order to facilitate the expansion, Facebook will open an engineering centre in New York City early next year. It will be the first such office for Facebook outside of the West Coast.

Sandberg told journalists at a press conference: “We’ll be adding thousands of employees in the next year.”

The social media behemoth currently employs more than 3000 people in California and 100 in New York.

Recruitment for the New York office has already begun, with Michael Bloomberg, the major of New York City, telling reporters: “They’re accepting applications if any of you need a job.”

The website already offers a wealth of benefits to SME internet marketing through fan pages, targeted ad campaigns and other brand awareness initiatives. It is expected that the new engineers who join Facebook will work to create newer offerings for marketers to help them reach even more clients and consumers.

According to a report by tech magazine Wired, Ken Patchett, who manages a Facebook data centre in Prineville, Oregon, USA, has openly criticised the likes of Google for trying to gain a competitive advantage by keeping the designs of their data centres under wraps.

Patchett left Google to join Facebook last year; whilst at Google, he supervised the company’s data centre campus at The Dalles, Oregon.
He told Wired that on joining Google he was made to sign an agreement that would prevent him from sharing any details about Google’s data centre design for at least a year after leaving the organisation.

Patchett said that although this kind of secrecy is commonplace in the industry, it “doesn’t make sense at all” because he thinks that there is in fact no competitive advantage to a company who keeps their data centre design secret.

He told Wired: “How servers work has nothing to do with the way your software works and the competitive advantage comes from manipulating your software.”

Facebook, on the other hand, is very open about its data centre designs. In April it launched the Open Compute Project in order to share the custom-engineered design of its Prineville data centre.

The centre features rows of energy efficient machines which cool the facility with air from the outside instead of electricity-powered water chillers.

It has also published the specs and CAD files for the data centre’s servers, power suppliers and building design on its blog.

The social networking giant now has upped its limit to a massive 63,206 characters.

The increase will allow both users and businesses with official pages to post their longest messages yet.

Facebook’s status limit is now 400 times bigger than Twitter’s. Twitter is famous for restricting its status updates to 140 characters, marking an even more distinct contrast now between status provision on both sites.

Speculation as to the reasons behind Facebook’s increase is rife, with the social networking giant remaining relatively cagey about the development.
It is not the first time that Facebook has expanded its status character limit. In March earlier this year it upped the limit tenfold, from 500 to 5000. It has proceeded to increase this a further ten times in the ten months between then and now.

Incredibly, when Facebook was first made available to the general public, it only allowed status updates of 160 characters maximum.

In an official update, a Facebook spokesperson wrote: “You can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters, including status, group and wall posts.

“For reference, a novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in nine posts.”

The social media giant is expected to announce its backing for Next Gen Skills, an industry campaign to promote the skills needed for hi-tech growth in the UK.

Next Gen Skills also aims to develop computer science courses for schools that are relevant to industry.

The news will be welcomed by SMEs, who often complain that school-leavers and graduates are not equipped with the real-life skills in areas such as web design to help them drive their businesses forward. A modernised ICT education should help to change this situation, equipping businesses with the workforce they need to compete in the 21st century marketplace.

Next Gen Skills was created following the Livingstone-Hope ‘Next Gen’ review, which recommended that computer science be introduced into the national curriculum as an essential discipline.

Companies that have already proclaimed their support for Next Gen Skills include Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Talk Talk, Sega and the Guardian Media Group.

Alex Hope, joint author of the Next Gen review, asked for organisations across the industry to lend their support to the campaign in order to help force a new curriculum.

“We want them to join us and to highlight the issue, to get that message across to government and to take the opportunities they have to publicise this initiative and keep the dialogue in this domain. Only by doing that can we see change.”