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.

Even while Mark Zuckerberg and company are expected to raise an initial US$5 billion from a red hot IPO, there is worry that Google will expand its offerings to target the activities that make loads of money for Facebook now.

Facebook’s 845 million active users upload 250 million photos a day, make 2.7 billion comments or “likes” a day and are part of 100 billion friendships online, according to details released for the IPO. Together, they made the eight-year-old company a neat US$1 billion  profit last year – an achievement, since users don’t always equal dollars.

Facebook’s cash cow? Advertising, which contributes 88 per cent of the company’s revenues. Yes, those little tiles on the side of the page that your friends “like” or recommend. The rest of the revenue comes from Zynga, which creates those addictive – and sometimes annoying – social games for Facebook users.

The issues? The mobile version of Facebook does not display ads, so the company could conceivably lose a stream of revenue as more users go online with their smartphones. The question then becomes one of making mobile users view the ads without irritating them enough to force them to quit using Facebook altogether.

The other issue has to do with the company’s focus on advertising, say analysts. This means it is susceptible to the fortunes of the advertising market as well as moves from rivals like Google, which has been gaining traction with its Google+ efforts of late, said Ovum’s Jan Dawson.

He pointed out: “As Google seeks to ramp up Google+, it will eat into Facebook’s share of the social networking market and with it Facebook’s share of related advertising. In addition, since much of Facebook’s revenue comes from gaming apps, as Google expands the gaming platform it is building with Google+, it threatens to dilute Facebook’s relationships with Zynga, which accounts for 12% of its revenue, and other major partners.”

Indeed, Facebook admits the threat from rivals as much in its IPO documents to the US authorities. Besides Google, it includes Microsoft and Twitter on a long list of rivals going forward.

Most industry watchers say Google+, the closest competitor, still has some way to go to shake Facebook from its deeply-entrenched position, but the search and advertising king’s alternative is ramping up fast.

Google+ already has 100 million users today after just seven months, according to one analyst, and the figure is expected to go up to 400 million by the end of 2012.

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.

But before you hit defrost, be sure to doodle something on the screen with your mouse cursor, similar to what you might do on a bus window on a rainy day.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

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.

Google will also be launching a community grants programme here in Singapore, which will provide annual grants ranging from US$5,000 to US$50,000 to organizations that focus on four specific topics: technology literacy and innovation, renewable energy innovation, access to high speed internet, and new economy entrepreneurship.

For a start, IAB Singapore will be receiving US$50,000 to conduct digital career training programmes for final-year undergraduates to equip them with the necessary digital skills and knowledge so that they will have an easier time landing jobs in the Internet economy.

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.

On the fake SMRT page, called SMRT Ltd (Feedback), people are seen pouring scorn at the transport operator.

Facebook user, Harul Fariz, asked: “If SMRT cannot handle these few existing lines without any major disruptions, can we expect more of the same to happen when more new lines appear as the complexity of the systems increases?”

Clearly angry, another user, Aaron Ang, suggested that SMRT work with the Singapore tourism authorities to build a fun ride. ”Oh wait. Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you work with STPB to come out with a ‘Uniquely Singapore’ attraction: Come experience the thrills and excitement of suffocating in a train, breaking a window, walking through tunnels in a WORLD-CLASS SMRT train!”

Over at a real SMRT Facebook page, the Ride SMRT page, commuters too were unhappy.

Said Facebook user Kenny Giam: “SMRT must be held accounted for what has happened on 15th Dec. You guys pride themselves as First World Transportation but in truth, SMRT is worst than than even third world countries.

“In your eyes, profit and money are the only things you people care about. First Increase Cab Fare and then when the mrt break down, start to send out information to all your cabs to rush down to grab “income opportunity”. This is like trying to make profit from people or country’s plight. Totally unethical!! Its like the shame of the country!”

It didn’t help, of course, that SMRT had sent out some rather insensitive-sounding advice yesterday to its taxi fleet, which it also operates along with the trains.

It is understandable that SMRT wanted to direct taxis towards MRT stations to alleviate the human jam, but coming days after highly unpopular taxi price hikes, the announcement of an “income opportunity” read like SMRT was coordinating its resources to fleece helpless commuters in a time of crisis.

To its credit, SMRT has since apologised for this particular mess-up, explaining that the message was sent from a template. While the anger is going to take a long time to assuage, perhaps what stands out amid the unhappiness on Facebook is that some commuters are grateful for the efforts of the rank and file staff who had to work overnight to restore and ready train services for today – even if this was posted on the fake page.

Said Facebook user, Ryan Joseph: “Kudos to the engineers and all the other men and women on the ground. As for the senior management .. enjoy your jolly good salaries in unique little Singapore with no competition.”

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.

There are sights and sounds of crowds – recorded from the place itself – which come alive once you visit the website with your Web browser.

That’s right, you don’t need to install any application, other than a browser plug-in, which admittedly takes a bit of time to download and which, fortunately, only needs to be downloaded once.

Like a tourist guide, 3rd Planet offers virtual travellers snippets of information and pictures of the place itself. Right now in beta stage, it offers only the brief tour in Nepal and other snippets of data on other places on the planet, like Singapore and India, for example.

To be sure, what the company is doing here is not all new. Microsoft, for example, offered photographic fly-throughs for several cities in the past, while Google Streetview now lets you explore neighbourhoods as if you were walking through a street.

The main difference is that 3rd Planet comes with interactive sights and sounds. For example, the birds really “fly” in the sky, as opposed to a static photo in Google Streetview.

Why not try it yourself by heading to www.3rdplanet.com

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.

In September, Google announced that it was pulling the plug on a number of services that haven’t had the impact the company had hoped for. Apart from Google Wave, Google is also shutting Bookmarks List, Friend Connect, Google Gears, Search Timeline, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

Hailed as a groundbreaking technology, Google Wave had the potential to change the way we communicate online by mashing up e-mail, photo and video sharing, instant messaging (IM) and document editing features. It was launched with much fanfare in May 2010 but only gained a million users in over a year.

In contrast, Twitter rival Google Buzz gained tens of millions of users since it was launched in February 2010, though that service was also shuttered last month, along with Jaiku and Code Search.

There are several reasons for Google Wave’s demise. Chief among them is the lack of integration with Google Docs, where users could potentially benefit from Wave’s collaboration features such as IM and live editing. Moreover, the learning curve was so steep that Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani produced an extensive guide on the service.

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.

In the past year, Yahoo! Southeast Asia has been publishing stories that often cite articles that have first appeared in SPH newspapers, from The Straits Times to Chinese dailies like Lianhe Wanbao.

By reporting what has been published in the dailies, Yahoo! does not have to employ the same amount of journalists as the hundreds in the newspool that SPH does to cover the news in Singapore. Despite being slightly late to the news, Yahoo! keeps costs low by not having as many roving reporters pounding the streets.

Yahoo! still creates original stories, but often, it can avoid one of the most expensive costs of running a news operation and still get lots of eyeballs for its stories on, say, the Singapore general elections or the bodies found at Bedok Reservoir, by reporting on what its writers have read in SPH newspapers.

This means Internet users can read stories on Singapore without having to fork out money for them on the paid version of The Straits Times website, which offers full stories instead of the snippets that appear on SPH’s free site.

This, however, takes away traffic from SPH sites as well as readers from SPH newspapers. By diverting paying readers away, Yahoo! is a direct challenger to the SPH business model.

Readership in SPH newspapers has been falling for the past two years, and even if this is not as bad as what is happening to counterparts in the the United States, the slight decline is set against a fast-increasing population in Singapore that includes the import of skilled, literate migrants to the country in the past 10 years (read SPH’s 2011 annual report here).

As media consultant and former newspaper editor P N Balji put it in a Yahoo! news story, the drop in readership, if not arrested, could impact advertising revenues for SPH.

To be sure, there is nothing illegal about reporting on what is already in the newspapers. Indeed, if you follow the news on most online sites today, you’d see that the reputable ones often do cite their sources, especially when it comes to news articles that originate from other news outlets.

The question now is in the 23 articles that SPH alleges that Yahoo! had “reproduced substantially” without permission. The Singapore publisher is asking the High Court to stop Yahoo! from further reproducing its articles and pay damages for infringement.

While the case is ongoing, it would not be fair to comment on the claims. But when it goes to court, this could be one of the first such cases of old versus new media, and possibly a landmark one for years to come.

Disclosure: The writer is an SPH shareholder and occasionally contributes articles to The Straits Times. Techgoondu is a content partner of Yahoo! Southeast Asia.

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.

To create a feecha, users take a photo or video of the activity – such as a plate of mouth-watering char kway teow at an less-known hawker centre – and upload it to the map. A one-eyed monster will then pop up over the location for others to see.

For the feecha to grow, it must receive attention from other users, such as views and comments. A feecha which just isn’t interesting will slowly discolour and disappear from the map. This ensures that only the most updated and interesting happenings stay on the map.

The potential uses of Feecha are undeniable. Ever wondered what’s happening within those quaint shop houses as you amble down Ann Siang Hill? Ideally, you should be able to fire up the app and explore what other people are feecha-ing in your vicinity. You can then decide spontaneously to hop into a coffee shop for a book signing, for instance.

Of course, the app depends on complete spontaneity, and there’s the possibility that you’ll find zero feechas around you, especially now in the app’s early days.

Feecha also requires the user to enjoy and actively seek out serendipitous encounters. However, most Singaporeans will probably have a destination in mind, and won’t take the time to scan their surroundings for feechas. Businesses will also be unlikely to depend too much on such an inconsistent audience for their custom.

The biggest challenge, then, is to establish a large base of users as quickly as possible. To help push the numbers along, Feecha has announced that the user with the biggest feecha by 18 December will win S$8,888 in cash.

Feecha is available on the iPhone only, and an Android version will come by June 2012 (No S$8,888 for Android users, we suppose). The developers are also exploring the viability of a Windows Phone 7 version, and have no plans for a BlackBerry version.

This story first appeared on Techtalk, our technology content partners at Yahoo! News Singapore

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.

“I am asking all the members of Lobangclub, to please do not add any more tobacco/cigarette related products and prices anymore,” Shen urged.

“I know that there was a thriving community of tobacco lobang hunters who had found all sorts of lobangs on cigarettes, but from today onwards, we can no longer accept tobacco lobangs,” he said.

Lobangclub was recently named as Asia’s most valuable app in the Asia’s Top 50 Apps Awards. It includes deals on over 500,000 products in Singapore.

Tobacco advertising is banned in Singapore under the Smoking (Control of Advertisements and Sale of Tobacco) Act. Offenders are liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $10,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or to both.

Shen’s e-mail is reproduced here:

Today is very scary day.

I was working non-stop throughout the night testing some new features for the next version of lobangclub, and just as I was going home in the morning, my iPhone suddenly ran.

“Hello ahh, may I speak to Guyi Shen”, the raspy voice on the other end said.

“It is I”, I tiredly mouthed into the phone

“I am from the HSA, did you know that it is illegal to advertise tobacco in Singapore?”, inquired the man on the other end of the phone.

“errr, hmmmm, errr…” I was speechless.

“You have until the end of today to remove all tobacco related material from lobangclub”, with that, the phone call was over.

So I am asking all the members of lobangclub, to please do not add any more tobacco/cigarette related products and prices anymore. I know that there was a thriving community of tobacco lobang hunters who had found all sorts of lobangs on cigarettes, but from today onwards, we can no longer accept tobacco lobangs.

The HSA(Health Sciences Authority) is the body in charge of enforcing the tobacco control act, and they have decided that we cannot allow anymore tobacco related prices/products to be added anymore.

So from today onwards, we will have to delete any tobacco related products/pictures/prices.

I thank you for helping me with this and don’t kena get me in further trouble with the HSA.

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.

“Even though we’re only launching a localized site for Singapore today, Singaporeans have already been an extremely large and important audience on YouTube,” said Adam Smith, director of product management for YouTube in the Asia-Pacific region, in a media statement today.

“Through localizing YouTube in Singapore, the site will deliver more of the content Singaporeans want to see, and we hope the world will continue to discover the amazing culture and talent that exists in Singapore today,” he added.

YouTube Singapore features a local interface that makes it easy to find videos that are most relevant to Singaporeans, including content from global partners and local media agencies such as Refinery Media and Oak3 Films. Interactive SG, a local web design and interactive agency, is also showcasing Angel’s Gate, a new reality TV show on entrepreneurship, on the site.

According to YouTube, partners can take advantage of the localized site to distribute their content, grow their audience and generate revenue when advertisements are displayed against their videos in the YouTube Partner Program. Independent content creators can also apply for the program to monetize their work.

In addition, YouTube has signed a licensing agreement with the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass) to allow music artists to earn revenue on YouTube. Under this agreement, artistes can now receive payments for content that’s distributed through the video sharing site.

“Reaching an agreement with YouTube is a step forward that creates major new opportunities for our members and affiliates,” said Edmund Lam, CEO and director of Compass. “From now on, they will receive fair payment for the use of their works on YouTube which is a very positive step for our songwriters and publishers, and, more broadly, the Internet.”