Hitwise is reporting that for the week ending March 13, 2010, facebook is the most visited website in the USA, beating Google, the number one website (and services and a lot of things).  They also report that facebook has held this title before a handful of times recently for single days or a couple days (Christmas eve, Christmas day etc.). 

When people think of IT companies, they usually think of a clean industry. The reality is very different, and might surprise you.

Greenpeace International, the highly public environmental advocacy group, is currently holding an event on Facebook to raise awareness of the fact that Facebook’s data centers and backbone are powered primarily using coal power, one of the dirtiest forms of power in the world.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been sending not-too-subtle signals for a long time now that the future of Facebook won’t be happening at the Facebook.com domain. The world’s largest-growing social network will take a great leap toward that eventuality this year, beginning in April.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, that’s when Zuckerberg plans to launch a new set of Facebook tools for Web developers – who want to make their websites off the Facebook.com domain work (and even look) more like Facebook pages on the Facebook.com domain.

When Peter Chapman was arrested in October of 2009 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of seventeen year-old Ashleigh Hall, traditional print and online media were there to point the finger at Facebook and other social networks, slathering a huge serving of blame across Facebook in particular and social networking in general. When the thirty-two year-old was convicted this week of those crimes, the media again sprang into action.

One of the changes we DIDN'T like with Facebook's February redesign last month included the removal of the feature where you could create your own custom Live Feed lists of updates from your favorite Facebook applications and games. For Facebook users who use a great deal of applications and rely on keeping up-to-date, particularly users who do a lot of social gaming, it was a feature that was sorely missed.

Fortunately, you can still create a customized feed of any application you like on Facebook using a little bit of trickery and some good old copy-and-paste.

The general reaction to the news this week that Facebook has been awarded a patent for their “News Feed” technology can’t actually be printed here for reasons of decency. Let’s just say it’s a four-letter word that sounds a lot like “Fuuuudge.” Except it’s not fudge. It’s not fudge at all.

Facebook users can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Effective March 1st, 2010, Facebook has terminated notifications sent by applications, providing your notifications feed with some much-needed relief from serial spammers. But is disabling Application Notifications really enough to quell the growing concerns of Facebook users that Facebook cares more about applications than users?

With facebook growing to hundreds of millions of users and, if they have their way, they will get 1 billion users and maybe more. With such a large population on the social network, we are certain to get a percentage of bad attitudes, bad behaviour, 'bad apples' and even criminals.

Quite possibly the most common complaint among Facebook users is the huge amount of useless information that ends up in our News Feeds from applications – specifically from “spammy” games like Farmville that gain new users primarily by sending notifications out to friends walls. It’s a big enough problem that many users have left Facebook, seeking less intrusive social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.