(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Facebook has taken down an app developer’s ads promoting this Google+ account and promptly banned his other ads on the social networking site, as the tussle for control of the Internet heats up between the online giants.

According to reports over the weekend, Michael Lee Johnson had put up an ad telling fellow Facebook users to visit his Google+ page, where he claimed to be an “Internet geek, app developer (and) technological virtuoso”. But a few days later, Facebook yanked his ads out, saying that he had flouted their terms and conditions. …

Everybody is looking at social media as the next gold rush.

It’s not surprising, given that social media has moved beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise.

At a press event last week, infrastructure software company TIBCO showed off Tibbr 3.0, an social media platform for enterprises that will be available in August 2011.

Tibbr was launched in January this year after being in development since 2009.

It may be a little bit late to the game though, and gaining mindshare will be difficult as the market is quite crowded.

There are a ton of niche companies who specialize in this space like Yammer and Socialcast.

Not to mention all the big IT companies, who all have solutions or are looking at this space, like IBM (with Connections and Lotus Live) and Microsoft (with Office 365 and Officetalk) and Salesforce.com (with Chatter).

So what makes Tibbr different?

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This is it, folks. No more half-hearted and half-baked social products. Google has revealed their trump card in the war for your online social life and gone all in with their chips.  Google+ is an amalgamation of all of Google’s efforts to penetrate the social sphere thus far.

Although initially open only to a select number of users, the service has since expanded into the hands of quite a good chunk of people. But how will this latest foray into social networking fare for Google?  I spent the last few days playing with Google+ and messing around with it, so here’s my verdict, for what it’s worth.

Google+ is no Facebook killer, but it’s nothing to scoff at either. …

Google has secretly unveiled a new service called “What do you love?” (or, wdyl.com) to help you find out, well, what you love. Think of it as something like a search engine, but instead of searching the Web for “something”, you actually search across various Google services for “something”.

For example, searching for “shoes” gives you the option to translate shoes into 57 languages via Google Translate, find books about shoes via Google Books, watch videos of shoes via YouTube, read the latest news about shoes via Google News, and more. …

The Web is buzzing with Google’s newly announced addition to their search engine. Called “+1”, it works like Facebook’s “like” button, except that you use it on search results from Google search.

For example, when you try searching for “strawberries” on Google, a bunch of results come up. You feel that one of the results is the best and would like to let other people know about it. With +1, you can do so with just one click, and it’ll appear as one of your recommendations the next time somebody else searches for “strawberries”. …

Fortune published its list of the Most Admired companies in the world earlier this month, and BrandFinance just followed suit with its list of the 500 world’s more valuable brands, measured with a different methodology. Surprisingly, this list is rather different from Fortune’s; more technology companies made it into the top ten, and (gasp!) Microsoft is ranked higher than Apple! …

Does a new logo herald the launch of the new Chrome OS soon?

Google unveiled a new logo for its browser yesterday, and gone are the shiny metallic plates and the shimmering blue light in the middle. Instead, Google adopted a design which abandons the robotic look and flattens the logo into a more 2D aesthetic.

This could mean more than a simple re-design. Google has always been a brand-conscious company, and they don’t often alter designs without a reason. The Google homepage, for example, looks almost identical to its original one more than a decade ago.

Looking closer, it seems that the new Chrome logo is closely aligned with the individual app logos for Google Apps. This could be a coincidence, but could this point to a launch of Chrome OS soon? Maybe Google is simply unifying the visual aspect of its products before the launch.

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Fortune magazine has released their list of Top 50 Most Admired Companies for the year 2011, and Apple tops the list for the fourth consecutive year. Other technology companies in the Top 10 are Google (No. 2), Amazon.com (No. 7), and Microsoft (No. 9).  …

Some 100,000 to 150,000 Gmail users had their messages, chat logs and other personal settings wiped clean early today, due to a serious glitch that would likely cast doubt about the reliability of similar cloud-based services.

Google acknowledged the issue at 4:09am local Singapore time and started investigations into one of the most serious outages to hit the Web mail provider so far. More than 7 hours later, the service was said to have been restored for some users, while others can expect a resolution “in the near future”. …

In the few hours after technology behemoths Microsoft and Nokia unveiled one of the most dramatic partnerships in years to take on rivals Google and Apple, terms like MicroKia, Noksoft and NoWin have quickly become popular sarcastic phrases for tech pundits predicting a doomed marriage.

As if the two new allies needed reminding, the jokes are a measure of how uncertain the future is for two companies playing catchup in the smartphone game, despite a deal that seems, on paper, to be joining their still considerable powers to crawl back their rivals’ leads. …