Top 5 headlines, for your 5 minute coffee break...

In at 1
Facebook grows and makes money

The world's largest social networking site just got bigger with the announcement it has 300 million active monthly users from around the globe.

Facebook also revealed that it had started making money ahead of schedule.

The company had not expected to start turning a profit until sometime in 2010.

"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

"We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.

"We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web," Mr Zuckerberg said in a blog post.

'Milestones'

Facebook hit the 250 million user mark back in July. It is estimated that the site is gaining about five million new users a week, or 50 million in the last 75 days.

"Passing these milestones to me means we can continue to fund our development and our innovation and be self sustaining as we grow this network," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice-president of engineering, told BBC News.

"We think 300 million is a just the first step on the way to get as much of the entire world on the social network communicating with the friends and family and the people they want to communicate with."

"That Facebook is able to continue this growth and build a "cash-flow positive" business is an impressive feat," said Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com.

"If the company can cover the cost of scaling to one billion users and still manage to break even, there's no doubt that the company will have a great opportunity to rake in billions," added O'Neill.

Schroepfer said the company had worked hard to get more money flowing in than out.

"The growth of the network has certainly helped us go cash-positive and the engineering team has done a lot of innovation on our ad products, as our business is primarily advertising-funded.

"As more and more of the world gets on the network, people and advertisers realise the power of sharing information, whether it's about a movie preview or a car," said Schroepfer.

Look out Twitter, said Ben Parr, who is associate editor at the social media blog Mashable.com.

"If Facebook continues to open up its platform and adopt Twitter's best features, it could spell trouble for the Twitterverse. The world's largest social network is on the warpath," warned Mr Parr.

In at 2
YouTube adds social media feature

Video sharing website YouTube has added a social networking feature to its homepage, which allows users to access a "You may know these people" tool.

The friend finder suggests potential acquaintances that people may want to connect or subscribe to - in a similar manner to Facebook.

Elizabeth Windram, senior user experience designer at YouTube, states on the company's blog that previous user activity will be monitored to generate the data.

"If you've logged in to YouTube and sent a video to a friend's email address, or if you have your YouTube account linked to a Gmail account, we will use this information to help identify your friends who already have YouTube channels," she explains.

However, users of the video sharing site will have the final say on whether or not their channels are made available to potential friends.

YouTube has announced a number of changes to its functions this week, which have been designed to help its partners and advertisers get the most out of YouTube Insight.

Users can now gain access to figures showing how people found their video and which devices were used to access the content.

In at 3
Ex-Google exec becomes Twitter COO

Former Google executive Dick Costolo will join microblogging website Twitter next week as chief operating officer (COO).

Jenna Sampson, spokeswoman for Google, confirmed Costolo's appointment on Wednesday evening.

It is the latest move by the internet phenomenon - which is used by celebrities across the world to keep people up to date with their daily routines - to build its management team and continue its rapid growth.

Costolo, who previously worked as the chief executive officer of Feedburner, which Google acquired two years ago, follows the arrival of Alexander Macgillivray as general counsel in July. Macgillvray was also hired from Google.

Sampson is quoted in a New York Times Blog as saying: "[Costolo's] a long-time friend of Ev [Williams] and Biz [Stone, the co-founders of Twitter], so clearly they trust and respect the work that he's done and look forward to working with him here at Twitter."

Earlier this month it was revealed that Twitter has become more popular than social networking website MySpace in the UK.

Internet research firm Hitwise indicated that it is now the 27th most popular portal in Britain.

In at 4
Yahoo! makes wholesale changes

Yahoo! has made a number of changes to its Mail, Messenger and Search results pages in order to improve its service to customers.

Ari Balogh, executive vice president of products and chief technology officer of Yahoo!, said: "The evolution you see today reflects our focus on enabling people to connect with what matters to them most."

He added that there is "much more to come" from the search company and the changes are part of a "renewed focus on providing a more personally relevant on-line experience" for its users.

Developments this week come after Yahoo! launched a new homepage recently and follows competitor Google's announcement that it is developing a new architecture called Caffeine, which aims to speed up search results.

With Yahoo! Mail, web users can now benefit from a new streamlined design, which makes it easier to manage email folders. There are also a host of new applications - including Flickr and PayPal - which will be available worldwide in the coming months.

New high-quality video calling and an updated language selector are part of the adaptations to Yahoo! Messenger, while the new Yahoo! search engine which is currently being tested offers personally relevant results.

"The test, available randomly to millions worldwide, delivers a differentiated search experience that lets people better explore the things, people and websites that matter to them most," a statement from the firm said.

In at 5
Microsoft Bing adds visual search

Software giant Microsoft has introduced "visual search" to its Bing search engine to try to further set itself apart from market leader Google.

The new feature will allow users to browse results using pictures instead of text.

Visual search will initially concentrate on four main areas: travel, health, leisure and shopping.

"The whole concept is that the world of search is going to change," said Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi.

"There will be a more graphic way people will search, and it will pivot how people search," said Mr Mehdi, the firm's senior vice-president of on-line services.

'Search battle'

Microsoft unveiled the beta, or test version of the feature, at TechCrunch 50, a conference being held in San Francisco for start-ups to pitch their ideas to investors.

"Competition breeds innovation and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is having a huge benefit to consumers," said investor Ron Conway, who has previously put money into Google, PayPal and AskJeeves.

Microsoft launched Bing in May and promoted it as an improvement over Google's "10 blue links" for tasks like shopping and travel.

New figures by net analysts Nielsen showed that Microsoft's share of US searches rose to 10.7% in August while Google remained dominant with 64.6%. Yahoo, in second place, was used for 16% of searches.

In late July, Microsoft and Yahoo signed an agreement to work together to better take on Google. It still has to pass anti-trust scrutiny.

At the launch, Microsoft claimed Visual Search allowed users to conduct certain searches faster than the "traditional image search" offered by rival Google and other search engines.

In a blog post, the company said a study it conducted found that consumers could process results with images 20% faster than text-only results.

"It's like searching through a large on-line catalogue," Microsoft said.

As users enter search terms, a link at the top of the first page of results allows users to "visualise" what Bing has found.

Clicking on the link displays a gallery of related images.

'Money maker'

At the moment only a small number of topics will return a visual display. These centre on popular categories like entertainment, famous people, shopping and sports.

"I think in those isolated cases it's going to work very well and those are the areas where there is a lot of money," Don Dodge, Microsoft's director of business development told BBC News.

"There is a lot of advertising money for shopping, for travel and so on. So not only is it a better user experience but it's a better business model too," said Mr Dodge.

Even though the TechCrunch conference targets start-up companies which come to have their ideas evaluated by a panel of experts, Microsoft agreed to have the group rate its new product.

"This is a good paradigm but should be implemented in areas where the user needs images to get into what he's looking for," said Yossi Vardi, an angel investor known for investing in software, energy and mobile companies.

The panel was also jokingly asked if they would be interested in investing in the product and the company behind it.

"Bing has a real flair and, depending what you think of Microsoft, it is a great surprise," said Jason Hirschhorn, chief product officer for MySpace.com.

"The brand and interface its fun and tactile. Yusuf, you have my cheque," he joked.

Source: BBC, IAB, NMA