Although Google's famous for being one of the world's best employers, Facebook has been able to lure workers away on a regular basis, and the social network's starting to get quite aggressive about it. Indeed, the latest switch involves Alexandre Hohagen, Google's )former( top-ranking exec in Latin America. Hohagen's exact title at Google was "Latin America Managing Director," according to his LinkedIn profile , and he held that position for two and a half years.

Google's attempts to "do no evil" and defend Wael Ghonim may have raised the Russian government's ire. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has been quoted blaming more than one executive for contributing to the Egyptian revolution. According to a new Reuters article , Sechin said, "Look what they have done in Egypt, those highly-placed managers of Google, what manipulations of the energy of the people took place there.

Yahoo Japan's approach to online video technology will soon change a great deal. Indeed, the company's partnered with Ooyala, an online video specialist, and its tech is supposed to be incorporated into just about everything Yahoo Japan owns. A quick note/reminder: Yahoo Japan is not exactly the Yahoo most Americans know. Yahoo only owns 33 percent of the organization, while Softbank controls a 41 percent stake. And Yahoo Japan's also on a different path in other respects,

Depending on your perspective, Twitter's recruiters have either succeeded or struck again. After luring employees away from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, they've now also brought Rita Garg, Director of Business Development at MySpace, onboard. Garg has a rather impressive resume . For starters, she attended both Stanford )getting a BA in Economics( and the Harvard Business School )earning an MBA(. As for her work history,

Anyone who would like to invest in Russia's most successful search engine may want to start saving pennies and talking to his )or her( stockbroker. Reports indicate that Yandex, which has had little trouble fending off Google in its home market, will go public and try to raise $1 billion this summer. A post on the Quintura Blog stated today, "The leading Russian search engine and contextual advertising company, Yandex plans $1 billion IPO on NASDAQ in June - July 2011,

Five months ago, Microsoft announced that Hotmail users in Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. could begin to chat with their Facebook friends while checking their email. Now the integration of Hotmail and Facebook Chat is complete in every place where Facebook is available. We'll admit: this may not sound like a big deal insofar as it's pretty simple to toggle between a Hotmail tab and a Facebook tab.

Pretty much everyone knows by now that Watson, the Jeopardy -playing supercomputer that was able to cream two human champions, was created by researchers at IBM. And IBM's made clear that Watson doesn't work its magic by searching the Internet. But apparently Yahoo tech did play a role in the creation of the machine. A post on Yahoo's official Yodel Anecdotal blog highlighted the connection by stating, "[W]hat makes Watson's genius possible? A whole lot of storage,

A partnership between Facebook and Chinese search giant Baidu - long the subject of rumors and speculation - might be closer than ever. An unconfirmed report indicates that Baidu execs are visiting Facebook in California for the sake of discussing a deal. Bill Bishop , who's bilingual and thereby able to read the original story, wrote yesterday,

Starting today, Gmail and Google Docs users should run into many fewer problems when it comes to opening different types of existing files. Google launched support for 12 new file formats this afternoon, and several of them are pretty common. Here's the full list of formats in the order Google itself presented them: Microsoft Excel ).XLS and .XLSX(, Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 ).PPTX(, Apple Pages ).PAGES(, Adobe Illustrator ).AI(, Adobe Photoshop ).PSD(,

Anyone who's interested in what Bing will do next can perhaps relax. Rather than make onlookers fight for every scrap of information, the organization seems to be tending towards openness, announcing today that it will back a sort of multimedia series called "The Future of Search." A post on the Bing Search Blog explained, "Here at Bing we don't claim to have all the answers - but we know that together we can dream up something big and different. To that end,

Last month, something called "World View" began when YouTube users were asked to submit questions for President Obama. Now, the series is continuing, as YouTube users have been asked to submit questions for Prime Minister David Cameron. This is a big deal for Google's video-sharing site. Many different politicians have been happy to use YouTube at various points, making the development something other than a breakthrough,

Social gaming company Zynga, which is the force behind sensations like FarmVille and CityVille, continues to be a hit with investors. Days after rumors indicated Zynga would raise $250 million at a valuation of $7 billion to $9 billion, a new report's claimed it will actually raise twice that amount at a valuation of $10 billion. Kara Swisher - who's pretty much always right about these things - broke the news, citing multiple sources.

Facebook )along with a few other social media sites( exerts a strong pull in many countries all over the world, and new stats from comScore confirm that one of them is Australia. comScore's found that Australians dedicated almost 22 percent of their time online in December 2010 to social networks, versus 16.6 percent a year earlier. A quick note with regards to the timing of this report: don't blame us. comScore released it today )or actually tomorrow,

Ever hear of the term "YouTube famous"? It relates to a person who isn't a household name, but might be familiar to frequent visitors of the site. Only soon, YouTube may redefine the expression )and become much more popular( by paying genuine celebrities to create new channels and content. Claude Brodesser-Akner reported,

Mark Zuckerberg may not have planned to achieve a sort of global domination while he was coding away at Harvard, but his social network continues to get closer all the time. A new illustration showing the countries in which Facebook doesn't rule has been released, and there aren't a whole lot of them left. Take a look at the diagram )based on Alexa stats and constructed by Pingdom ( for yourself below.

In 2003, Google opened its first office in Ireland, and following a rapid expansion, it doesn't look like the company intends to reverse course anytime soon. Google's now purchased the tallest office building in Dublin for about $136 million. The Montevetro Building, as it's known, is 15 stories high and offers 210,000 square feet of office space. It's located in Dublin's Grand Canal Dock district, is currently unoccupied, and even has its own rail station to boot.

Mobile purchases - which were already becoming much more common - may soon really increase in frequency in the UK. eBay and Telefonica have struck a two-year deal that will see eBay apps and/or links preloaded on most of the phones O2 sells in the region. This move's rather significant. For starters, eBay's already one of the first sites many people visit when shopping for something online, and with 22 million customers,

Facebook, with its 500 million active users and )unofficial( movie and books, is also quite the hit with small businesses, according to a new report. MerchantCircle found that Facebook is the favorite online marketing service of small businesses, and Facebook Places is doing quite well, too. To sort of set the stage: the Merchant Confidence Index survey involved 8,456 U.S. local business owners, and was conducted between January 22nd and February 3rd.

No one could have expected that YouTube's decision to allow lengthier, higher-quality video clips would come without a price. Specifically, it only made sense that it would take longer for the clips to go live. But YouTube's made great strides in improving the processing and publishing speed for videos. A post on the YouTube Blog explained late yesterday that one technique "is to overlap uploads and video processing without waiting for the upload to finish.

Film students, movie buffs, and people who are simply budget-minded now have more reason than ever to join Hulu Plus. A new deal will see hundreds of Criterion Collection movies become available through the service without commercial interruption and at no extra charge. The Criterion Collection is legendary in some circles. Since 1984, it's specialized in high-quality editions of rare, critically acclaimed films. Prices can top $100 per movie,