The battle between Google Inc and Micrsoft to invest in the online social networking site Facebook has come to a conclusion with the latter agreeing to a 1.6 percent stake in the company.

In monetary terms, Microsoft will be paying a mammoth $240 million dollars in the hope that Facebook will continue to expand over the coming years.

Microsoft will also have the rights to sell advertisements on the site outside of the US.

Starting off life as a way for Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg to keep in touch with his college chums, Facebook is now said to the 7th most visited site in the world and the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.

"The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users' operating system on the Internet -- everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it," Morningstar analyst Toan Tran told Reuters.

Source :: Reuters