Internet

The efforts of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration to streamline and improve the government's IT systems aren't proceeding as quickly as officials have suggested, however, government auditors note steady progress as departments and agencies transition to the cloud and consolidate data centers.

Microsoft's social networking experiment, So.cl, a site designed around sharing Web content pulled from Bing searches, is now available for all users. Launched in December and aimed at students, So.cl is not meant to compete with popular social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. So.cl isn't a place to connect with friends and share moments from your lives.

If you listen to the growing chorus of online chatter about the company, Google's now-infamous "Don't be evil" slogan is becoming increasingly inaccurate by the day. The company's most recent move--a sweeping change that consolidated most of its privacy policies under a single umbrella--immediately drew umbrage from critics who felt that Google was on its way to taking all the data it has collected from its users through its dozens of services and building an exhaustive dossier on each of us that would be used mercilessly in efforts to sell us things.

With the world's largest social networking website, Facebook, going public it is quite obvious that comparisons with Google will crop up. We have collated some figures and here is a list of numbers comparing the two giants.

After all the attention, clamor, and expectations Facebook is now a publicly traded company worth $104 billion. With shares trading at a hundred times earnings, Facebook is under a lot of pressure to increase the profit that it brings in. In other words, now the fun begins.

Yahoo is rolling out Axis, a new searching and browsing tool that syncs between your Web browser of choice and your iOS devices.

Intuit's Quickbooks Online service suffered an outage this week that left "a small subset" of customers unable to access their data, but the company says the problems with the on-demand accounting software have now been fixed.

The Executive Branch of the Minnesota state government had its 40,000 end users on a mishmash of e-mail systems when in 2008 its IT group, the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), decided to tackle the problem.

IBM says a study it did of some 1,700 Chief Executive Officers worldwide found that many indeed - or should be -- grasping social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation.

One of China's top Twitter-like sites, Sina Weibo, is working to attract Japanese companies to advertise on its platform by helping the firms open and use accounts on the microblogging service.

Service-level agreements and legal standards for cloud offerings will become more customized to individual customers and vertical industries as the cloud market continues to mature and providers look for ways to differentiate their offerings, researchers at the University of London predict.

Facebook introduced its own mobile photo app, Camera, on Thursday, bringing richer photo-sharing features to the platform even before the company closes its deal to acquire the popular photo-sharing app Instagram.