A British gangster is Facebook to threaten people who he says he will target after his release, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Colin Gunn, serving 35 years for conspiracy to murder after ordering the execution of two people, said he was allowed to set up the account by prison bosses, the Sunday Times said.

“I will be home one day and I can’t wait to look into certain people’s eyes and see the fear of me being there,” he wrote in one posting.

“It’s good to have an outlet to let you know how I am, some of you will be in for a good slagging, some have let me down badly, and will be named and shamed,” said another post by the 42-year old.

Gunn operated his gang out of Nottingham, central England, the location of several high profile gun murders in recent years. The paper said his account was shut down on Friday.

A spokesperson for Britain’s Ministry of Justice said that prisoners only have access to the internet “for educational purposes” and are banned from using social networking sites.

“We will not hesitate to refer to the police any published material that appears to breach the law,” added Justice Secretary Jack Straw.

Yahoo! has posted a 10% quarterly lift in revenue for the last three months of 2009, driven by a significant increase in demand for its premium display advertising.

The global internet company achieved revenue of $1.73bn in the fourth quarter, still down 4% year on year, but its best performance of 2009. It also achieved profits of $153m.

Much of the growth was generated by display ad sales, up 26% from the third quarter, marking its biggest quarter-on-quarter increase in three years.

Yahoo!’s search revenue was also up 4% quarter on quarter but down 15% year on year.

The results were seized upon by Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz as a sign growth is returning to online advertising.

Speaking little over a year after being appointed the company’s chief executive, Bartz said: “Our business has positive momentum and we feel good as we head into 2010.”

The internet services giant forecasts revenue will rise 3% in the first quarter of 2010 to $1.63bn (£1bn).

Yahoo! hinted at ambitious expansion plans this year when Bartz said: “For us, 2010 is about acquisitions and investments to make Yahoo! even stronger.”

Yahoo!’s better than expected fourth-quarter results follows rival Google reporting revenues up 17% over the same period.

Manchester United has banned players from using social networking sites, which has led to the Twitter accounts of stars Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs disappearing from the web.

In an official statement on the Manchester United website last night entitled “Player websites warning” the club said all official news relating to the club would appear on its official website ManUtd.com.

“The club wishes to make it clear that no Manchester United players maintain personal profiles on social networking websites. Fans encountering any web pages purporting to be written by United players should treat them with extreme scepticism.

Any official news relating to Manchester United or its players will be communicated via ManUtd.com,” the club said in its statement.

Along with Twitter accounts for Rooney and Giggs, Darren Fletcher’s Twitter account has also been removed.

Some reports have said that the Facebook accounts of Giggs, Wes Brown and Rio Ferdinand have had their content removed, but this morning the official pages of those are still up and running on the social networking site despite the apparent ban.

Social networking sites and Twitter in particular pose major problems for football clubs trying to closely manage their communications as stars use them as a direct avenue to talk to the fans and more importantly the press.

Coca-Cola has unveiled a new flavour for its Glaceau Vitaminwater drink called Connect, after a promotion run on social network site Facebook.

The drink, available in the US from March, carries Facebook branding and descriptive text, using references to untagging, friend requests and photo stalking.

Connect is the result of a competition run on Vitaminwater’s Facebook site, where consumers were invited to design their own flavours. The activity was promoted by a YouTube ad featuring NBA star Steve Nash, a brand ambassador for Vitaminwater in the US.

The promotion launched in September, with Facebook users invited to vote for their favourite flavour in a “flavour creator lab”.

Real Madrid’s Portuguese international striker Cristiano Ronaldo is the most popular sports star on popular social networking site, Facebook.

The flamboyant footballer could count 3.2 million fans on his social network site on Wednesday, putting him ahead of Swiss tennis star Roger Federer with 3.18 million and US swimmer Michael Phelps, 2.86 million.Ronaldo, 24, arrived in Real Madrid from Manchester United last summer in a world record 94-million-euro deal.He is also the most profitable player ever in a club which had such stars as Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham, generating 80 million euros in advertising revenues per year.

Google has unveiled a tool that lets scientists and protectors of the environment use the Internet to track what is left of the Earth’s forests.

“We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world’s rapidly-disappearing forests,” Rebecca Moore and Amy Luers of the US Internet giant’s philanthropic arm Google.org said in a blog post.

The technology lets scientists analyse raw satellite imagery data and extract information such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of forest.

The system is hosted in the Google “cloud,” the technology firm’s Internet-linked data centers, and has the potential to reveal in seconds when forests are being chopped down, burned or bulldozed.

“Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening,” Moore and Luers wrote.

Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

Google demonstrated a prototype of the technology at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

The forest-tracking system is being tested by a small group of Google partners and will be made available as a not-for-profit service, according to Moore and Luers.

FamVille has more users than the whole of Twitter, the social networking website said.

FarmVille, a Facebook application allowing people to be virtual farmers which was not developed by Facebook, lists almost 70 million monthly active users.

The game, from developers Zynga, allows users to plough, plant and harvest crops to earn money to expand their farms.

Micro-blogging site Twitter does not give directly comparable figures, but data from research firm Nielsen said traffic fell 27.8% between September and October to 18.9 million unique visitors.

Facebook’s strategy head Trevor Johnson told TechRadar: “Applications make up a huge part of Facebook. There are over 90,000 applications on Facebook.

“Sixty-nine million active users are using FarmVille alone, that’s more users than Twitter.”

There has been speculation about the impact of the rapid growth of Facebook’s upstart rival Twitter on its user numbers.

But Facebook as a whole, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, has 350 million users around the world.

The site said that worldwide it was achieving 200 billion page views a month, with 1.6 billion messages are sent daily through its chat tool.

In the UK, Facebook said it had 23 million unique users a month, with each of those logging on spending around 25 minutes on the website per day.

The word Twitter has been voted the top English word of 2009, beating ‘Obama’ and ‘H1N1′, the scientific name for the latest Swine Flu strain.

In The Global Language Monitor’s annual survey of the English language, “Twitter” was said to “stand above all the other words”.

Twitter was followed by “Obama”, “H1N1″, and “stimulus” — referring to the $800bn aid package for the US economy.

“Vampire”, the near-ubiquitous suffix “2.0″, “deficit”, “Hadron” — the object of study of Cern’s new atom smasher, “healthcare”, and “transparency” rounded out the Top 10.

Paul Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor, said: “In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words.

“Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters. Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds.”

The Global Language Monitor examines the internet, the media and an electronic database to estimate how many times certain topics are brought up.

The Monitor’s top words of the decade include “global warming” at number one, followed by “9/11″, “Obama” and “bailout”.

The top words of 2009:

   1. Twitter
   2. Obama
   3. H1N1
   4. Stimulus
   5. Vampire
   6. 2.0
   7. Deficit
   8. Hadron
   9. Healthcare
  10. Transparency

The top words of the decade from 2000 - 2009:

   1. Global Warming
   2. 9/11
   3. Obama
   4. Bailout - The bank bailout
   5. Evacuee/refugee
   6. Derivative - Financial instrument or analytical tool that engendered the meltdown
   7. Google
   8. Surge - The strategy that effectively ended the Iraq War
   9. Chinglish - The Chinese-English hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands
  10. Tsunami - Southeast Asian tsunami took 250,000 lives

Twitter is planning to launch paid-for commercial accounts which would provide corporate users with additional services to those that are freely available.

In an interview with the BBC, Stone said Twitter will begin offering the commercial services this year as he addressed critics who have questioned whether it has a plan to make cash.

Stone reassured users that the service would always remain free to corporate and personal users alike, but he said Twitter would offer companies additional paid-for services.

“One of the first things we’re going to do is explicitly is commercial accounts and that is providing a special layer of access, Twitter will always be free to everyone whether it is commercial or personal, but you’ll be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account to get some freed back to get some analytics to help you become a better twitter,” Stone said.

He said that the move would take advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter that has been witnessed including airlines and large retailers.

eBay Inc said on Sunday it had restored a search function on its website overnight after a glitch led to searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day.

The technical issue on eBay.com resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramped up for the holiday season, the global e-commerce and payments company said in an e-mailed statement.

It also said it has more than 200 million live listings, or 33 percent more than at this time a year ago.

The technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed and implemented across the site’s servers on Saturday afternoon and evening, eBay said.