Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other such sites are - in general, anyway - doing quite well on a global basis, according to new stats from Nielsen. Nielsen revealed this afternoon that people all over the world are dedicating a lot more time to social networks. A report stated, "On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year.

It may sound painfully dumb to point out that Yahoo's technology is important to the company, but there you have it. Unfortunately for the organization, that connection also makes it seem somewhat problematic that Yahoo's Chief Technologist has moved on. Benchmark Capital announced today that Sam Pullara, who was Yahoo's Chief Technologist, has joined it as an Entrepreneur in Residence. That means Pullara, EVP Ash Patel,

Google may end its search operations in China very soon, according to a new report. A local employee supposedly told a Chinese newspaper that Google will announce its plans to leave on Monday, March 22nd, and then actually pull out on Saturday, April 10th. It's hard to judge the accuracy of this information. On the one hand, there have been no shortages of rumors and hoaxes surrounding the situation in China. Also,

An undersea cable that Google helped finance is almost finished, according to a new report. Indeed, the completion of the Unity fiber optic cable, which will connect the U.S. to Japan, is supposed to be announced next week, and then Google and the company's Asia-based users should start seeing the benefits soon after. Tom Krazit wrote this afternoon, "[T]he Pacific undertaking will allow the company to link its data centers in the U.S.

Almost exactly three years ago, Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement, and since then, neither side has been able to say much in public. But today, 108 pages' worth of court documents were released, and YouTube also issued a more comprehensible, 865-word statement. In the statement )which was posted on the YouTube Blog (, Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel, raised several interesting points. One group of claims made Viacom sound like an absolute villain, too.

Here are a few facts about Telefonica: it's a huge telecommunications company. It's based in Spain. And it's a good friend of Yahoo's, considering that Telefonica has named Yahoo the exclusive search and search advertising provider on its mobile portal in Spain. The Telefonica-Yahoo relationship actually goes back a couple of years, since in late 2007, Telefonica made Yahoo oneSearch the main search service on 15 other mobile portals.

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour will leave the agency next month, but that's almost surely not soon enough for Google. Today, Harbour criticized Eric Schmidt and the rollout of Buzz, and also asked her colleagues to adopt a tougher stance on some privacy-related offenses. In fairness to both Google and Harbour, other companies and products, including Facebook, Flickr, and Hotmail, were identified as problematic. Plus, the commissioner could have been much harsher.

Legend has it that St. Patrick performed a miracle by driving all the snakes out of Ireland. Now, it seems that YouTube's accomplishing an amazing feat of its own just by functioning. A director of product management revealed this afternoon that a whopping 24 hours of video are now uploaded to the site every minute. Hunter Walk )who, we must note, once worked for Conan O'Brien( wrote on the YouTube Blog , "Today, we're announcing that you've done it!

Australians who study computer science now have an added incentive to accomplish impressive things. Today, it was announced that a certain search company will give away $10,000 once per year in the form of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. Like many of Google's contests, this has the potential to be both a nice gesture and a smart business move.

It's common knowledge in the U.S. search industry that Google has a market share of about 65 percent. Lots of people know )or at least know how to check( the search giant's market cap, too )it's currently at $180 billion(. But another measure of Google's size was presented yesterday, and it turns out that Google is on par with all but the biggest ISPs. Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist of Arbor Networks, stated on his company's blog , "If Google were an ISP,

Facebook's search suggestions are about to get significantly better. Rather than just suggest the names of people, events, groups, and Pages a person's already connected with, suggestions are going to draw from users' networks of friends and the entire site. It is, of course, nice not to have to type out your closest pal's 17-letter last name multiple times a day. But this change overcomes a significant flaw in Facebook's existing approach to making suggestions,

In a move that investors and marketers alike should applaud, Google's figured out another way to make money off the site it bought for $1.65 billion three and a half years ago. Today, Google explained that it's come up with a tool to help small organizations advertise on YouTube. Emily Williams, a member of the Inside AdWords team, explained on the corporate blog ,

Investors and online advertising experts may want to consider for a moment what, exactly, has contributed to Google's stupendous financial success )current market cap: $180 billion(. Now consider this: Google thinks mobile ad rates might surpass what's come to be deemed the industry standard. According to Reuters , Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google, announced during a webcast,

The clash between Google and the Chinese government appears to be coming to a head. Various sources have reported that Google ignored a cut-off date to reregister as an Internet content provider in China, and more importantly, that the company has stopped censoring search results. Let's get the paperwork-related story out of the way first. Charles Arthur wrote this morning, "Google missed a deadline to re-register as an 'internet content provider' )ICP( in China last night,

There's good and bad news for Google this morning with respect to Android and the mobile market. In terms of how many units were sold during their first 74 days of availability, it seems the Droid beat the iPhone to the million-unit mark, but the Nexus One is lagging far behind. That's the state of things according to Flurry , which claims that applications using its analytics tools have been embedded in more than 80 percent of iPhones and Android devices.

Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web. Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout. Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address. You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here .

Although the "thud" wasn't verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week. The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear )blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise(. What's more,

Joanne Bradford started at Yahoo about a year and a half ago, assuming the title "Senior Vice President, U.S. Revenue and Market Development." Now, a fresh report's indicated that the high-ranking exec is on her way out again, ready to take a position at Demand Media. Kara Swisher wrote earlier, "According to several sources . . . Bradford is planning on leaving the Internet giant to take a new position as Chief Revenue Officer of online content upstart Demand Media.

Today, Tim Bray started working for Google, and had the search giant just put out a one-sentence press release stating this fact, the development would be worth reporting. But what makes this move especially noteworthy is that Bray announced it in a 1,260-word blog post mentioning an absolute hatred of the iPhone. Bray is a rather important person in a lot of tech circles. Two interesting details regarding his accomplishments: he's the co-inventor of XML,

The odds of Google keeping its Chinese search operation running are starting to seem quite small. The Chinese government has started advising Google's partners to prepare contingency plans, and one anonymous person who's supposed to be close to Google even said the company is 99.9 percent likely to shut things down. The "99.9 percent" comment, which we first mention ed over the weekend, comes courtesy of two Financial Times reporters. One of them, Kathrin Hille,