Twitter, Facebook ‘cost British economy £1.38bn’

October 26th, 2009 LONDON - A recent survey done in the UK has revealed that the cost to the economy due to use of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook by office workers during office hours could be over 1.38 billion pounds per year. The survey on 1,460 office workers commissioned by Morse, an IT services and technology company, found that more than half of office workers used these social networking sites for personal use during the working day, and admitted to wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

March 5th, 2009 After it's failed attempts to acquire Twitter, Facebook has come up with new strategies. It has incurred a number of changes to the homepage/newsfeed.

March 30th, 2009 Now this was the last thing to happen and it has now. Much to your joy, now date while you study and study while you make friends online.

February 9th, 2009 LONDON - British police Tuesday warned women against communicating with a Facebook user suspected to be a killer. Police said women should not meet up with Facebook user George Appleton after the badly burnt corpse of 36-year-old Clare Wood was discovered last week in the bedroom of her home in Salford, Greater Manchester.

May 1st, 2009 White House joins FaceBook, Twitter, MySpaceWASHINGTON — OMG. The White House is joining the popular social network sites of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

November 25th, 2008 Facebook offered to buy Twitter for $500 million of overvalued Facebook stock, Kara Swisher says. Twitter rejected the offer for several reasons: And they can be, At Facebook's real valuation, $5 billion or so, the offer only amounted to $150 million (not bad for two-year old company with no revenue, but a far cry from the billion-dollar dream) Twitter has high hopes for its own secret revenue model which will be announced next year.

July 8th, 2009 Incoming Alaska governor to tweet less than PalinANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska's incoming governor isn't the tweeter that Sarah Palin is. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell says he "may or may not" use a new Twitter account his staff established for him this week.

July 29th, 2009 LONDON - A decision to recruit at least 100 Indian workers, if not more, to fill finance and IT posts at the British Council in New Delhi and other parts of India has infuriated unions, who fear that this could be the blueprint for Whitehall. Final decisions about which jobs will go to India will be taken in the next few weeks, but they are expected to include 58 finance posts, up to 40 IT posts and 15 posts for a new centre of excellence, The Times reports.

April 9th, 2009 MELBOURNE - A new British study has revealed that some people log on to social networking sites Twitter or Facebook and chat over the Internet while they are driving. In a survey of 1,000 people conducted by British insurance company Esure, one in 10 admitted to "tweeting" or updating their Facebook profile while behind the wheel.

July 10th, 2009 British royal family joins TwitterLONDON — Britain's royal family has extended its kingdom further into cyberspace and joined Twitter — but don't expect Her Majesty to tweet. Buckingham Palace, which already has a significant online presence, said Friday that it has set up a Twitter account to alert royal watchers to what's happening with the family.

August 25th, 2009 UK Chinook choppers languish after software errorLONDON — A British newspaper says eight high-tech military helicopters have been out of service for eight years because defense officials tried to save money by installing homemade software in the aircraft. The Times of London reported Tuesday that the eight Chinook Mk3s cost 259 million pounds but have been in storage since they were delivered to Britain in 2001.

May 15th, 2009 LONDON - While most ladies her age prefer to sit quietly, 103-year-old English lady Ivy Bean loves to Twitter, something that has made her the oldest user of the social networking site. Bean, a great grandmother, decided to join Twitter after she got bored of using Facebook, where she had made 4,800 friends.

May 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Social networking site Twitter suffers security breaches, an expert has warned. According to Graham Cluley of antivirus firm Sophos, the microblogging site is prone to viruses created in the Javascript web-programming language.

June 24th, 2009 UK retailer Habitat sorry for Iran tags on Twitter LONDON — British homewares retailer Habitat apologized on Wednesday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis. Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

October 3rd, 2009 LONDON - Had he been alive today, Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India, may have overcome his aversion to technology and embraced the mobilizing power of software such as Facebook and Twitter to organize massive pro-democracy protests, claims George Paxton of the London-based Gandhi Foundation. Gandhi, who advocated a return to a simpler way of life, "at times sounded very anti-technology," National Geographic quotes Paxton, as saying.andhi's view was that technology was often used at the expense of the poor, Paxton said.