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Facebook has been accused of deceiving developers after it emerged that the social networking site did nothing to verify the security of applications it was paid tens of thousands of dollars to review, and which it assured users had been checked.

It is believed Facebook was paid up to $95,000 (£60,600) by developers whose applications were entered into its verified apps scheme.

The system gave a green tick of approval to apps that passed what Facebook described as its "test for trustworthy user experiences".

An investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed that Facebook took no steps to review the applications in its now-closed scheme. Facebook awarded the verified badge to 254 applications, according to the FTC.

Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn't need to worry: Google's own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.

The penalty - which SearchEngineLand dubbed the Emanuel Update - impacts Google's web search results. If someone has reported a web search listing as being a copyright violation, using the DMCA takedown mechanism, that's a strike against the entire site.

Accumulate enough strikes (how many, Google's not saying), and a publisher may find their entire site hit with a penalty. Every page, whether it was reported for copyright infringement or not, will have less chance of ranking well.

Microsoft isn't exactly known for its underground hacker culture, but a recent effort to give its employees more slack is generating some wild experiments.

In 2009, Microsoft  came up with a concept called "The Garage." It's essentially Microsoft's answer to Google's famous "20% time" -- the longstanding Google initiative that lets its employees work on projects unrelated to their primary jobs in their spare time.

Microsoft's Garage does that too, only in a physical space. Last summer, Microsoft completed a redesign of one of its original buildings on campus -- Building 4, where Bill Gates' office used to be -- into a laid-back workshop where staff can tinker with things. It's open to anyone, anytime, and it's got everything from a hardware workshop to an actual working garage door.

Twitter has done a bit of work to improve the overall performance of their site. So you shouldn't see much more of their "fail whale".

Their upgrade moves rendering back to the Twitter servers which has allowed them to drop page load times to 1/5th of what they previously were.

The Twitter blog goes into further technical details on how they intend to speed up performance on the site. They also describe how they will remove the "hashbang" (#!) from twitter.com URLs.

While these improves are being rolled out there has been no word of when they will be fully implemented.

Source: Twitter.com Blog