Brad Shimmin

In a possible sign of the sea change that social networking has brought to the Internet, new industry data show that U.S. visits to Facebook last week exceeded, for the first time, those to the former top site, Google. While the difference was relatively small for the week ending March 13 -- 7.07 percent of all visits for Facebook, compared to 7.03 percent for Google -- the trend could point to the growing strength of the social Internet.

What do you get when you combine 600 million searchers with 50 million daily tweets? A new Yahoo-Twitter tie-up. While consumer privacy organizations continue bashing Google about its Google Buzz service, Yahoo and Twitter are partnering on a more benign social-networking play -- content sharing.

On Thursday, Facebook won a victory for social-networking users everywhere. The U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., awarded Facebook $711 million in damages against Sanford Wallace, aka the spam king.

Facebook said Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw broke the law by sending unwanted messages and wall posts to people on Facebook, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Anti-Phishing Act, and the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).

The technology platform that makes possible your reading this sentence is having a birthday Thursday. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born.

On that date, engineers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) sent a message to their counterparts at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in San Francisco, a distance of about 400 miles. In a modern-era equivalent of the legendary first telephone message -- "Watson, come here" -- an engineer named Charley Kline at UCLA tried to log in remotely.

"L," "O," ...

Soon, the only tweets that don't have ads might be from birds. On Thursday, microblogging site Twitter announced it will allow advertisements in the tweet streams sent by its more than 45 million users.

The two-year-old company revised its terms of service so that short, 140-character messages may now "include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information."

'Door Open'

A new service to publish your location to Facebook is among the news from Nokia World in Stuttgart, Germany, along with a variety of new handsets. Lifecasting is the name of the service, which will automatically transmit your position and status updates to the popular social-networking site.

Lifecasting "goes beyond just publishing your status," Nokia said in a statement, adding that "it triggers new kinds of communication patterns," which could include not only sending updates but navigating to a friend's place. With your position known instantly, the friend can help guide you.

Location, location, location. That's a running theme in technology these days. After witnessing TomTom launch a $100 GPS application for the iPhone and Garmin introduce its much-anticipated Nüvifone series, Twitter is now stepping up to the location plate, rolling out broader support for developers working on geolocation software.

According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time, despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support.

Google on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire a video-compression technology developer. The stock deal for On2 Technologies is valued at approximately $106.5 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will be converted into 60 cents worth of Google class A common stock.

Bing is now doing Twitter. The recently launched Microsoft search engine is now allowing users to search for various kinds of real-time data, including tweets from Twitter.

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Search Technology Center, wrote on the Bing blog Wednesday that the search engine is "unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real-time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitters from a variety of spheres."

Gore, Seacrest, More

Social networking site LinkedIn is one of the few firms benefiting from the recession. The most obvious metric? Membership, which, at 34 million, is up from 8 million just two years ago. And as unemployment looms, LinkedIn users are apparently ramping up their networking efforts -- the number of member recommendations on the site reportedly surged 14 percent between September and January.