Rumors about Facebook’s entry to China have been going around lately; in fact,reportssuggest that it is already in negotiations with Chinese partners to launch the social network in the Asian country where it is currently blocked. A lot of Western Internet companies canattestthat expanding into China, as appealing as it is, is not an easy task. It means abiding by Chinese laws that require web companies to censor any form of politically sensitive content....

It was only amatter of time: Facebook today launched an experimental Clubhouse competitor called Hotline, looking to capitalize on the increasingly popular social media format. As reported byTechCrunch, Hotline was developed by Facebook’s NPE (New Product Experiment) division, which regularlydoles out appswithnew ideas(or, in this case, not so new). That said, Hotline does have a few features to differentiate itself from Clubhouse and Twitter’s Spaces. Most notably, it supports video and will allow participants to toggle video when asking a question, although that feature isn’t live yet....

You might rememberback in Januarywhen we brought up the question ofFacebookgetting into the comments platform game. Though the idea made sense at the time, and we had the evidence to support it, it’s only now that we’ve finally gotten confirmation. In ablog postby Facebook, the new platform is laid out in detail. With a host of tools, the new platform could prove to be a welcome addition for many site owners, but there are some areas of which you’ll need to be careful....

The recently releasedFacebook Comments Box pluginhas been updated to support AOL accounts. AOL users can now comment on third-party sites using the Facebook plugin with the same account they use to access services such as AOL Instant Messenger. Users have also been able to use their Yahoo accounts to post comments, indicating that older Internet identity companies are beginning to concede defeat to Facebook and would rather work with them than oppose them and have their remaining customers leave the service....

Facebookis the leading social networking website in most countries today with over 640 million users worldwide. In fact, if theAlexasite ranking is to be believed, Facebook holds the second spot globally, just behindGoogle. Currently, it is still 360 million short before reaching its goal of1 billionFacebook users in 2011. Here’s an interesting graph fromPingdomthat illustrates the countries Facebook has left to conquer. Aside from Brazil, the red parts, which indicate countries where Facebook is not on top, are mostly in Asia....