I am sure we all have read of the worth of Facebook and how some web giants willingly pay a high price for their shares. Of course, with the economy less rosy, their share price must have corrected a little.

When I first joined Facebook, I didn’t want to spend too much time there but i soon log in to Facebook daily after I decided to try out some of the free games available on Facebook. I now must pay pet society, restaurant city and bejeweled blitz daily.

Quite a number of friends are hooked on farming games like Barn Buddy, Farm Town and Fantasy Farm which I installed but dare not start playing. I don’t want to end up spending the better part of my day playing games on Facebook!

Even for friends who are not into any free games on Facebook, they tell me they must log into their account every day and keep the window open. Well, they are not alone. Did you know that Facebook is currently the number one website that web users worldwide cannot live without?

Google unveiled its new version of Chrome web browser on Thursday, finally bringing it out of Beta and boasts an increase of speed by more than 30% compared to Chrome 1.0. Chrome 2.0 is also said to offer better web security.

I haven’t tried Google Chrome 2.0 yet, because I am never someone who jumps right in to try something that has just been released in case of bugs and stuff, but if it’s 30% faster than the original Chrome, I definitely would like to give it a try.

I don’t know, it must be my computer or something because I never felt that Chrome is faster than Firefox or IE. To me, Firefox isn’t even fast enough. IE is the fastest. But like I said, Chrome 2.0’s 30% increase in speed is definitely something to see.

Oh yes, faster or not, I do not see myself making Chrome my default browsers unless it offers auto-reload function for individual tabs. I can’t live without auto-reloads!

Yahoo!, like Google, will move away from giving web searchers just ten links to ten different websites like they used to all along. Google has been incorporating Maps, People, Images, Videos and other possible things that link to the search term all in one page. Yahoo! is planning to do the same, so is Microsoft.

Soon, no longer will we just be shown a page of blue links pointing to different websites in our search results, we will be getting links that will point to other pages and media related the keyword or term that we searched.

This new Yahoo! Search will only be rolled out in 2 – 3 months after extensive testing which I guess I will try out. In any case, I do anticipate myself sticking to Google Search, probably because it is still the only search engine that provides us search results without frills, though I do see more sponsored links right now.

I am sure many people have already written about Google’s Outage yesterday. You know, when I couldn’t access my Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and even Google News, some of the sites that I have logged on as long as my computer (or laptop) is switched on, I thought there was something wrong with my browser. I cleared the temporary internet files and cookies A FEW times when the pages just wouldn’t load.

When the pages just wouldn’t come, I thought that I would restart my system. You know, I hate to restart it. If I could, I would keep my computer running and have always done so for days on end, unless absolutely necessary to reboot.

After doing so, I still had problems with those websites, but it still didn’t dawn on me that Google was the problem. See how dependant I am on Google sites?

I then went to Facebook and Twitter just to while away some time with some social networking and then realized that Google was suffering an outage, for 1.5 to 2 hours, I estimated. GGrrrr… if only I knew earlier, I wouldn’t have to go through all those steps just trying to load a few websites that was down!

Craigslist has tried to compromise with US authorities who are calling for a close of Craigslist Erotic services category which is said to encourage illegal prostitution which placed women who offered such services in a vulnerable position. This has been a long standing issue and Craigslist has come under fire more than once, but climaxed in the recent “Craigslist Killer” incident.

Craigslist has said that they will clean up the website and deleting “Erotic Services” category next Wednesday and replace it with an “Adult” category instead. Apparently, this new category will be reviewed by Craigslist staff.

I actually have to spend a minute to wonder if there is any difference at all between these two categories. Surely they are one and the same. Staff may review listings diligently but for how long? Why don’t the owners of Craigslist just shut this category once and for all and give us a clean website to us? Frankly, it’s all these “rubbish” that has put me off using Craigslist even though there may be many valid listings.

I guess one answer to my question is that they don’t want to lose the traffic, hence revenue.

While some people are lauding the new Gmail lab feature which allows us to search Google within Gmail itself, I really fail to see what is so special about it. Don’t we already have the search bar at the top of Gmail? I use that all the time and it functions exactly the same, if not better, than the Gmail lab that searches Google within Gmail.

There was once when Gmail took off its search feature from the top of the page and we could only search our mail from the search box, but the search came back soon enough, possibly because of complaints by users. Why did they take that off in the first place?

Now, with this new Gmail lab feature that allows us to search Google within Gmail would they be taking that search box off our Gmail once again? I really hope NOT. I used the new Gmail lab just now and have to say that I prefer the default search bar!