Who would bet against Facebook today, as it readies for the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the United States in the coming months?

Yet, amid the excitement, one thing that investors will read about is this troubling reminder of the threat coming from rival social networking efforts from the likes of Google, which can take away key advertising dollars.

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Google is spreading some Christmas cheer this holiday season with an “easter egg” that will unleash snow flakes on the screen right after you enter “let it snow” in a Google search box.

Once the screen has been filled with snow, there’s a button to defrost the screen, though snow flakes will continue to make their descent on the first page of the search results. …

Google started the building of a new data centre in Singapore on Thursday, a US$120 million facility which represents the Internet giant’s expansion of operations in the region.

“More users are coming online in Asia than anywhere else in the world,” said Julian Persaud, head of Google Southeast Asia at a launch event. Projected to go online in 2013, the new data centre promises to serve this growing demand by delivering fast and reliable access to Google services.

In addition, the data centre will boost the local job market in a small way, as Google is hiring a small team of full-time staff as well as a number of contractors in a variety of roles, including computer technicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and catering and security staff. …

From the angry to the sarcastic, Singapore’s frustrated train commuters have taken to Facebook pages – real and fake – to vent their unhappiness at the massive train disruption yesterday. Thousands of commuters were left stranded when train services on segments of the North-South line were disrupted during yesterday’s evening peak travelling  hours.

Folks on one particular train, trapped in a tunnel between stations, resorted to smashing a fire extinguisher at a window to get fresh air, after power came off and the air conditioning went offline. They then hiked to the nearest station in a dimly-lit tunnel, during the latest but one of the most serious disruptions to the city’s train services.

Today, Internet users were fast to vent their anger at SMRT on the social media space, whether this was through a fake SMRT Facebook page set up by online pranksters or on SMRT’s own page. …

If you’ve always wanted to visit Nepal but never got on the plane for some reason, here’s a way to visit one of the most beautiful places on earth – virtually in 3D.

A Singapore company has come up with an online tour, called 3rd Planet, that takes a user on a visit to places like Nepal’s Patan Durbar Square. Here, you can get a virtual fly-through or walk-through in a high-resolution 3D world complete with temples and other places of interest like in a game. …

Google will retire its Wave collaboration platform for good next year in an “off-season spring cleaning” exercise.

In a e-mail to Google Wave users yesterday, the search giant said all waves will be read-only by January 31, 2012, followed by a complete shut-down of the service on April 30, 2012. Users can continue to export individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. …

Singapore is set to see a rare face-off between old and new media, after news emerged yesterday that Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) had sued Yahoo!, claiming that the digital media company had reproduced 23 of its articles without permission from November 2010 to October 2011.

Yahoo! has since denied the claims, with managing editor for Southeast Asia Alan Soon saying yesterday that the company intends to “vigorously” defend itself and that its editorial business model is proven.

The case pits the old against the new. In one corner is SPH, one of the most profitable media companies in the world that publishes a 166-year-old newspaper called The Straits Times; in the other, Yahoo is a “grandfather” of dot.coms but still a relatively young company when it comes to media and content.

More importantly, it highlights the increasingly tough competition facing the online content business in Singapore, especially as established media giants like SPH, which just reported S$1.25 billion in revenues, seek to defend their turf against “over-the-top” or online challengers with leaner operations.

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Twitter may already possess a large portion of the pie serving up bite-sized pieces of information, but a bunch of developers based in Singapore is taking square aim at the micro-blogging service with a location-based twist.

Like Twitter, the app lets users feature – or feecha – an event or an object that’s close to him/her, which friends of that user can discover. Unlike Twitter, however, these feechas are all visualised on a map, and are colour-coded based on popularity.

It is currently possible to add your location to a tweet, but Twitter treats that as a secondary and optional feature. Feecha seeks to highlight that very feature and make it central to the app’s experience. …

The Health Sciences Authority (HSA) has asked the developers of Lobangclub to remove information on tobacco products and prices from its iPhone app that offers information on deals contributed by shoppers.

In an e-mail to users, Lobangclub founder Shen Guyi said he was contacted by a HSA officer who warned him that it is illegal to advertise tobacco in Singapore.

As Lobangclub has up to today to remove all tobacco related material from the app, Shen urged users to stop contributing tobacco related deals. …

Google has launched a dedicated YouTube site for Singapore in a bid to grow its inventory of localized video content. Prior to this, the search giant has been offering localized YouTube services in 34 other countries including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and more recently, the Philippines.

Users can visit the localized site by choosing “Singapore” as the location setting at the bottom of the YouTube.com homepage, or by heading directly to youtube.com.sg. …