Facebook has reported that they are expected to record their 500 millionth user by this month and rumour has it that Facebook has a surprise in store for the person, though what sort of surprise or celebration, we can only wait and see.

The funny thing is that most of my friends have at least two Facebook accounts; one even has more than 30 accounts because of the various games that he plays that require as many neighbours, clan, families, etc. as possible to level up.

According to this multiple-account friend, he is not even close to other players who have way more accounts than his 30+! I wonder how they manage. But the point is of this 500 millionth users, the real figure is probably just 70-80% of the number. And then we haven’t taken into account people who have already abandoned their Facebook account due to whatever reason.

If you spend a lit of time on Facebook, I am sure you would have received a lot of private messages and wall postings on many topics. The latest one is probably the one that is a link to a video on why you shouldn’t drink Coca Cola.

If you received this, then do not and I mean DO NOT click on the link. Sophos (if I remember correctly), a leading online security company has warned that this is a phishing scam and if you clicked on it, a lot of bad things could happen like you could get your Facebook log in credentials stolen or even your passwords to other websites stolen and maybe even your identity will be compromised. That’s what such phishing links do, anyway.

The rule of the thumb is to never click on links, even if they are from your closest friend, even if they come to your personal email address, without verifying with them first, especially links that have weird characters or those with too many numbers.

In conjunction with FIFA World Cup finals (just concluded a few hours ago), Google saw it fitting to give us a special doodle that depicts a stadium with the flags of the two countries that competed in the finals: Spain and Nederland. Of course, at the time of writing in, we already know that Spain won the World Cup with a score of 1-0.

I am quite surprised that Zakumi, the popular leopard mascot for this season’s FIFA World Cup, did not feature anywhere in a Google Doodle. Perhaps he did, on a Google African website or something. Well, I didn’t see it. Did you?

So anyway, now that the FIFA World Cup 2010 has concluded and the winner has been declared, I wonder if Google will be coming out with a doodle to celebrate Spain’s victory in the tournament. After all, football is such a globally loved sport.

Gmail has rolled out a new feature to the delight of most users whereby we can now, by going to the Settings page of Gmail, set a signature for all outgoing email with Rich Text formatting, for each of our email address that is linked to our Gmail account.

This means that if you have three different email addresses where you can compose and send out email from your Gmail account, you can have three signatures to associate with these three email addresses. However, you really do have to remember which address you are sending your email from so as not to confuse your recipients.

I like the fact that besides Rich Text where we could customize our signature with different font, colorful text and URL, we could also easily add in an image or logo. Doing signatures the regular way used to be a chore. Not anymore with the WYSIWYG rich formatting box.

Google China, which has been redirecting its search queries of users in China to its servers in Hong Kong, will have to stop doing that or their license to operate in China will not be renewed and they will have to pack up.

So it looks like to continue to do business in China, Google will be compromising on the essence of the internet, which should be free and unrestricted, and comply with China’s regulations.

Although China has been rather successful in blocking most of Google’s redirection to Hong Kong, they are not happy that they have to do that. If Google wants to continue to operate a commercial website, and it looks like they do, they will have to do what China tells them to do.

UK is the latest country to probe Google over the company’s “accidental” scooping of information from unsecured wi-fi connections where users’ information were stored by Google. Other countries running such probes are the United States, France and New Zealand.

Google has admitted that they have scooped such data in over thirty countries and they claimed that it’s an accident and in a blog post on their blog, understand that they have failed to earn Google users.

I just can’t believe that this is an accident. How could it be when the same thing happened in over thirty countries? The world’s governments should pressure into revealing the kind of data they have procured with their Street View project and force them to destroy whatever data of world users that they have in their database.