MOSCOW - A teenager was murdered in northern Armenia after an argument with a girl on a popular social networking site, according to a news report Thursday.

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LONDON - Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace might be a great way of meeting new people, but they are turning British people into introverts, a new survey has found. In the study led by market research company Mintel, over 50 pct of the adults revealed that they spend more time chatting online than they do actually speaking to friends and family.

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LONDON - They changed the lexicon for the word - search. Now the phrase 'I'll just Google it' has helped make the internet search giant become world's first $100 billion brand beating other household names like Microsoft, and Coca Cola to McDonald's. The analysts of the Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands by consultants Millward Brown found that the company's value of $101.4 billion puts it 25 percent more valuable than computer software king Microsoft at $77.3 billion, reported Daily Mail Thursday.

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LONDON - Comedian Ashton Kutcher has beaten American news giant CNN to become the first user to have a million people following his updates, or 'tweets' on social-networking website Twitter. The 31-year-old challenged CNN earlier this week to see who could be the first to attract a million followers and promised to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he won and 1,000 if he lost, while the broadcaster agreed to do the same, reports the Daily Mail online. But do we fail to see the real victory over a superficial one that has hypes and glories but promises of a different kind too? Wait a minute. Isn't it that a single human being won over a media industry (considering they both are popular, that adjective is carefully kept aside)?

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LONDON - Natural 'barcodes' of information, built into human faces for recognition of other people, may also help improve face recognition software, according to a study.Faces convey a vast range of information about people, including their gender, age and mood. For humans, the ability to locate a face is important as this is where we pick up many of our cues for social interactions.While recognising a person's face is a complex process, the first steps to processing visual information in the brain are thought to be more basic and to rely on the orientation of features such as lines.

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BONN - Germany's main competition agency, the Federal Cartel Office, Wednesday slapped a fine of 9 million euros ($12 million) on US software company Microsoft for imposing a retail price for its Office Home and Student 2007 software.

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LONDON - A software device developed by researchers can recognise musical characteristics and sort songs according to moods, besides blending in suitable images to the rhythm of music.

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MADRID - Spanish novelist Francisco Ayala, who turned 103 Monday, says he would like to live quite a while longer, adding what keeps him going is his active interest in the modern world, including new developments of the information age like Facebook.

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LONDON - A former supermarket worker has become Britain's first eBay millionaire, flogging an inventory of 3,700 items on the online auction site to earn his company more than three million pounds a year.

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BRUSSELS - The European Union Wednesday scaled back its monitoring of Microsoft in a case concerning the software giant's publication of key communication codes, saying that the company's good behaviour meant that full-time supervision was no longer needed.

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