Facebook’s imperial phase

There’s no shortage of global ambitions at Facebook, but the changes it’s due to make next week look set to catapult the social network into a whole new imperial phase.

It has always had a rather bullish attitude to both competitors and, somewhat more surprisingly, its own users.

New launches are designed to attack emerging threats, whether through the addition of the newsfeed (Twitter), Places (Foursquare) or by refining Friend Lists (Google+).

Twitter releases stats, looks to Asia for new users

Earlier this week Twitter announced a raft of new statistics about its users, leading on its 100 million strong base of active users.

This, as The Guardian notes, sees it approach MySpace’s peak level. It also confirms Twitter’s status as a mainstream social network (not that there was much doubt about that).

To help continue its growth Twitter has its sights set on Asia and will launch language support for Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese over the next few weeks.

Google shuts off Sidewiki – will anyone notice?

Two months after its new social network Google Plus was unveiled Google has decided to close Sidewiki in order to focus on its “broader social initiatives”.

Sidewiki, which allowed users to post comments to any website, must have increasingly seemed like an unnecessary distraction to the company as Google Plus squares up to Facebook.

“Some bets pay off and others don’t”, was how Google’s Senior Vice President Alan Eustace put it in a blog post announcing the demise of Sidewiki and a number of other minor services.