Walk-outs, adverts and sex stats
While the world waits for Facebook's email service, The LA Times has reported that Paul Buchheit (who created Gmail while working at Google) has left Facebook.
Buchheit joined the social network back in the summer of 2000 when Facebook gobbled up FriendFeed, which he founded, but he is now poised to set up his own firm Y Combinator, a seed investing company.
However, his departure does not look like it will be a huge setback for Facebook in terms of its email ambitions as Buchheit said he had not worked on Facebook's email proposition, but did describe its spat with Google over contact sharing as ‘entertaining'.
He told the newspaper: "One of the downsides of having worked on something like that [Gmail] that was notable is that everyone keeps expecting that you are going to work on that again. I have very little desire to work on e-mail again in the future. To me, there's a lot more interesting stuff out there."
As Facebook adds new features such as Deals, Places and now possibly an email service, its advertising power is also increasing.
According to information by research firm comScore, there is a one in four change that when an internet user in America sees an advert, they are using Facebook, The New York Times reported.
Since Q3 of 2009 Facebook has reportedly doubled its share of advert impressions and now dominates the display ad publishing space online, with Yahoo! in second place, commanding 11 percent of the market.
The newspaper reckons its dominance is down to a rise in the number of people using Facebook. Apparently the number of people visiting the site in Q310 is 60 percent higher than just one year earlier, with each user visiting a third more pages, filled with 50 percent more adverts.
It is thought canny advertisers particularly love Facebook as they can target people pretty accurately based on their ‘likes', profile info and even relationship status.
And finally a survey has discovered that over one in ten of British adults have slept with someone they met on Facebook, according to The Sun, in an article they wittily entitled ‘Facebonk'.
According to a survey of 2,000 adults for a new TV show on Really called Sex Rehab, almost half of the respondents said they'd sent naughty ‘sexts' or pictures to someone other than their partner, while one in three treated recipients to sexy/dirty pictures of themselves.
The TV channel's chief Clare Laycock told the newspaper: "This has transformed the image of Brits from prudes to sex bombs."
