Facebook Credits, Orkut is 7, Nokia and strategy – and China

Over half of Facebook’s 500 million registered users regularly play games on the network and FarmVille, one of the best known, has over 60 million active monthly users.

So it’s no wonder that Facebook wants carve out a larger slice of this action for its virtual currency. Already available to buy for actual money on the high street from the likes of Game, Facebook Credits are set to become the defacto system social game developers must use to process payments from July.

Credits are already accepted in around 350 apps, including Zynga’s FarmVille, as well as those from Playfish, CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, PopCap and Arkadium. Seeing that Facebook takes a 30% cut of transactions made with Credits, they’re starting to look less and less like Monopoly money.

The iPod as an app, Facebook raises $1.5bn, Google does Offers

Say what you like about the evils of illegal downloading, but all those people with enormous music collections they probably didn’t pay for don’t seem to care about actually listening to it, certainly not on the move.

I’ve come to this somewhat hasty conclusion after looking at Apple’s latest quarterly figures, which show another step in the iPod’s relegation to mere app status. Sales of the once-revolutionary music player dropped 7%, not its first nor its steepest decline in recent years, but over half of the 19.5 million iPods sold in the three months to 25 December 2010 were for an iPod Touch.

But the iPod Touch (whose capacity goes up to 64GB),  iPad (64GB) and iPhone (32GB) pale next to the iPod Classic’s 160GB’s worth of storage, suggesting that the music junkie’s dream of having your whole record collection in your pocket no longer cuts it in today’s app-fuelled world. Clearly the power of Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Doodle Jump are not to be underestimated as Apple’s App Store celebrates its 10 billionth download.

Happy birthday Wikipedia, EC parental controls, MySpace slims down

Wikipedia, once a byword for inaccuracy and half truth, has reached its first decade online, in the process becoming the world’s fifth most popular website with more than 400 regular readers.

Recent years have even seen its accuracy, if not readability, praised in several studies and founder Jimmy Wales’ recent claim that it’s a “temple of the mind” is looking increasingly hard to dispute.

The challenge it faces as it pursues further growth is embracing other languages now that versions in English (3.4 million articles), German (1.18m articles) and French (1.06m articles) are so well established. Last year’s decision to open the first Wikipedia office outside the US should be a major step towards this.

ReadWriteWeb drops Digg, Google Buzz and Delicious

ReadWriteWeb's new AddThis options

A recent change at ReadWriteWeb provides an interesting look at the social networks its tech-savvy readers are most likely to use.

The popular technology blog last week changed the social sharing options it offers on each article page, and a quick before/after comparison adds weight to a number of ongoing social media stories.

Namely, the re-launched Digg is on the way out, Delicious hasn’t got long to go and Google Buzz hasn’t managed to become the next Twitter.

Mac app store, European browser wars, Facebook buoyant as MySpace sinks

The Mac App Store launched this week offering over 1,000 desktop software programs but, once the hype settles, the question is will it be a game-changer like the iPad or a dead duck like Ping

Initial interest was predictably high, with one million downloads in less than 24 hours even though for now the Mac App Store is only open for business to Macintosh owners, so long as their computers are running the latest version of OS X. But Apple has another operating system in its sights.

“The App Store revolutionised mobile apps,” chief executive Steve Jobs said back in October when first announcing the App Store. “We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun.”

A is for Argos – Google Instant live in the UK

Google’s latest innovation in search is now fully live in the UK, bringing with it the promise of whole seconds shaved off search times.

Google Instant shows results as you type, altering them the more letters you add to your search querry – the idea being that because you read quicker than you type this will lead to faster search results.

More importantly though it also throws a peculiar light on the British psyche when you look at what Google thinks are the top search results for each letter of the alphabet. So, in a feat of no small amount of pointlessness, I bring you the Google UK alphabet.