Facebook members' who've yet to master the social net's privacy settings can soon look forward to public embarrassment on an even grander scale. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, has confirmed that its search deal with Microsoft's Bing is expected to launch within two months. "We should have our public updates integrated into a Bing beta within a couple of months," she tells the Telegraph, before conceding that, "Unlike Twitter 's data stream, which is already totally public, we have to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed." Right, and we have to be very careful …

We smell possum. MySpace chief executive Owen Van Natta tells the Financial Times that the once reigning social network is no longer interested in competing with Facebook. Positioning MySpace solely as an online hub for music and entertainment, Van Natta says, "Facebook is not our competition ... We're very focused on a different space." Granted, Facebook represented more than 58% of US social network traffic in September, according to Hitwise, while MySpace saw its share slip from 66% a year ago to just 30%. But MySpace is no Friendster (the first popular social net, which, …

Yahoo is launching a new project that sounds very similar to HuffingtonPost.com, which is to be run by respected online journalist Andrew Golis. "The site will be a combination of curation and original reporting," Golis, who comes from Talking Points Memo, wrote on his personal blog. "With gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing," he said, "I'm going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy." Golis is currently the Deputy Publisher of political news site Talking Points Memo.

Heralding the advent of smarter, cheaper, and less energy-demanding smartphones, ARM has announced its newest microprocessor that will be the brains of smartphones and various other other gadgets. ARM designs microprocessors that are licensed by chip makers, who customize them and put them into their gadgets where low power consumption is important. The company's designs are used in most cell phones and have been used in 15 billion devices in the past few decades. ARM hopes to ship another 15 billion in four years, and the new chip will be important in that quest. The new Cortex-A5 microprocessor will have …

Under the inflammatory headline, "Apple declares war on the entire PC industry," Beta News insists that Apple's latest product launch -- along with its strong earnings report -- are in fact preemptive marketing strikes against "Microsoft, Windows 7 and the entire PC industry." Furthermore, Apple isn't playing fair by exploiting a position of strength "against an industry weakened by low-margin, low-priced netbooks." Sound a bit wacky? Perhaps, but BusinessWeek senior writer Peter Burrows did report recently that Apple was trying to capitalize on the launch Microsoft's forthcoming operating system by hitting millions of PC shoppers with a …

Either consumers really love Windows or they just really hated its last version, Vista. According to Amazon UK, the latest iteration of Microsoft's operating system, Windows 7, is the biggest grossing pre-order product of all time. Yes, ever bigger than Harry Potter. "The launch of Windows 7 has superseded everyone's expectations, storming ahead of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the biggest grossing pre-order product of all-time at Amazon.co.uk, and demand is still going strong," said Amazon UK's managing director Brian McBride. Mashable says consumers won't be disappointed, and describes Windows 7 as feeling faster and leaner, …

Take that Google! Microsoft on Wednesday is expected to announce separate nonexclusive partnerships with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate the two services' real-time feed of status updates into the Bing search engine. Google, meanwhile, has been in talks with Twitter and Facebook about similar deals. Boomtown reports that Microsoft digital head Qi Lu will announce the deal onstage Wednesday afternnon at the Web 2.0 Summit. Despite all the hype around Twitter, Facebook has the largest pool of status updates around. The top social network previously stated that it has 40 million updates a day on average. The …

Oh, that Google. Its sweeping ambition never ceases to amaze us. This time, according to various reports, it's building a music service, which the search giant has spent the last month or so bolstering with content from major music labels. What else is known and not known about the service? It might be named Google Audio, according to TechCrunch (which broke the news). Also, it's nothing like the music download service that Google China launched in 2008, but it's not clear whether it will based on downloads, streams, or both. According to …

Yahoo has issued an official apology over a lap dance show organized during a brainstorming meeting for Internet engineers in Taipei over the weekend. The move came after girls wearing bras and miniskirts performed in front of male participants seated on stage during an event that was part of a Yahoo Hack Day, when developers work on creating new Web applications. "This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended," Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network, said in a statement posted on the company's Web site. "As many folks have rightly pointed …

If at a glacial pace, Apple seems to be slowly warming to social media. Back in March, the company started tweeting from its first official Twitter account, iTunesTrailers. They even highlighted the account on their Apple.com Trailers page. The account now has well over 1 million followers. Apple also added a bit of social media to iTunes 9 recently, by including the ability to share items on both Facebook and Twitter. More recently, it appears as though Apples added a few more Twitter accounts, a couple of which have just over 1,000 followers. One account you'll notice that …