Just days before its highly-anticipated initial public offering, social networking giant Facebook has received a very public slap in the face from car giant General Motors: it has told Facebook that it will no longer advertise with it because the ads just don't work.

The loss of $10m in ad revenue is not likely to dent Facebook's market value, which is on course to sale past the $100bn mark when it floats. Last year Facebook made $3.7bn in revenue.

But the public rebuke over the effectiveness of advertising on the social network will undoubtedly sting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported GM's shift in advertising strategy, the car giant spends around $40m each year on Facebook – three-quarters going on social content and $10m on advertising.

The implication is clear: Facebook's a great avenue for businesses to connect with their customers, but spending money on adverts is simply over-egging it.

And GM is not alone in questioning the value of Facebook advertising.

According to research by online ad analysts WordStream, Facebook ads generate far fewer click-throughs than those placed with arch-rival Google. WordStream claimed the average click-through rate on Google display ads is 0.4 per cent; with Facebook it's just 0.05 per cent.

Such measures matter little when Facebook can generate rampant demand for its stock ahead of its IPO. But as a public company, it will be beholden to shareholders that demand revenues grow – so expect to see Facebook double down on its ad offerings in the very near future.

The gossip around Facebook's impending initial public offering (IPO) that's expected to take place in the coming weeks, or even days, received another juicy bit of intrigue when one of the firm's founders, Eduardo Saverin, renounced his US citizenship.

The move was immediately cited as a tax dodge by critics, as by taking citizenship of Singapore he is reported to save some $600m in tax on the cool $4bn he is expected to make when the firm's stock hits the markets.

According to the BBC, a spokesperson for Saverin explained the decision by saying he, "found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time".

While it makes good fiscal sense for Saverin, there is something slightly unwholesome about the situation, as Facebook is cited as one of the shining lights in Silicon Valley's ability to conjure up new, world-changing businesses that make the US as a world-leading tech hub.

For one of its co-creators to give up his relationship with this country for the purposes of saving a chunk of change (admittedly a rather large chunk), seems a touch rash, but as Saverin was actually born in Brazil, perhaps he doesn't have such strong ties to the nation.

It comes just a few days after founder-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg was slated for wearing a hoodie and sandals to a meeting with investors.

However, with both Zuckerberg and Saverin now expected to rake in billions, neither probably care much what the critics have to say about their living locations or sartorial style.

Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a subpoena that would require the social networking company to hand over messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protestor accused of disorderly conduct.

The social networking site is looking to quash a New York state court order which required it to hand over the deleted message history of a New York-based activist.

Twitters' urging comes following a failed subpoena attempt by activist Malcolm Harris to block the court from viewing his Twitter feed.

"The order surprisingly holds that Mr Harris has no right to challenge the District Attorney’s subpoena for his own communications and account information on Twitter," said Twitters lawyers in a motion submitted to the New York state courts.

"The analysis, based on the assertion that Mr Harris has no proprietary interest in the content that he submits to Twitter, contradicts Twitter’s Terms of Service and the express language of the SCA."

Harris stands accused of purposefully disobeying a police order which called for New York protestors not to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The court believes that Harris's Twitter feed would prove that he knew of the police decree before he took part in the 700-strong protestor march last October.

Harris, @destructuremal, originally tried to block the subpoena himself, but was denied on a technicality that stated Twitter owned his tweets.

Twitter believes that assumption is incorrect and points to its terms of service as proof. 

A company spokesperson told V3: "Twitter's Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users."

Forget 15 minutes of fame, researchers at Google have concluded today's stars don't dim quite so quickly, thanks to sites likes Twitter.

A group of researchers from Google, eBay and Berkeley University have been studying the famous and wanted to know how fame had changed over the past two and a half centuries.

They suspected that thanks to social media and 24-hour rolling news, fame today would be far more fleeting.

But how to set about measuring fame? The researchers, led by Alex Fabrikant of Google Research, alighted upon a pair of measurements: the likelihood a reader might read a news article at random and find their name mentioned in it; and the period around which that name continues to appear in news stories.

They also accounted for those that appeared genuinely famous – either by a large volume of mentions or a long-lasting series of mentions. Luckily for them, to help with this they had access to Google's digitised news archive, which stretches back 250 years.

The researchers then set about using tools to pick out people's names from this vast archive – some of which is stored as digital content, while a huge proportion is generated from optical character recognition tools being applied to microfilm.

Up until the 1940s, the researchers predictions appeared to be correct: there was a gradual decline in the length of time people stayed in the news.

But following the Second World War, the researchers detected a complete volte face.

“Over the course of 70 years, through a world war, a global depression, a two order of magnitude growth in (available) media volume, and a technological curve moving from party-line telephones to satellites and Twitter, both of our fame duration metrics showed that neither the typical person in the news, nor the most famous, experienced any statistically significant decrease in fame durations," the report explained.

What's more, after 1940, those people that were famous appeared to stay famous for a longer time than previously.

Which is great news for Peter Andre, but probably bad news for humanity.

As any ardent tweeter knows, you can pack a lot into 140 characters. Enough indeed to land you in jail for nearly two months, as Swansea University student Liam Stacey has found to his cost. Those that think the micro-blogging platform provides any semblance of anonymity should sit up and take note.

Stacey was found guilty of posting racially offensive comments on the site, relating to Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba, after he collapsed on the pitch during a recent FA Cup match with Spurs.

Police were knocking on Stacey's door to question him about the comments within days.

While there's been near-universal revulsion at Stacey's comments, the 56-day sentence imposed underscores the hard line taken by the authorities over what gets posted on social media.

Earlier this week, a cross-party committee of MPs published their report into privacy and injunctions, in the wake of numerous online breaches of court orders, often by people posting under a pseudonym on Twitter.

As the MPs noted, Twitter will readily unmask its users and hand over all account information when presented with a court order.

Stacey isn't, of course, the only person to appear in court because of comments made on social media.

Last year, two men, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, were jailed for four years for inciting riots on Facebook.

And Paul Chambers' case has become something of a cause célèbre, after his tweet about blowing up Robin Hood airport landed him with a hefty fine.

Anyone viewing Twitter as just a repository for throwaway comments should think again.  

While the world worked itself into a frenzy over Facebook's IPO earlier this month, the other social media giant Twitter has said it will postpone plans to go public for years because it is not ready to disclose its earnings to the market, according to reports.

In an email obtained by CNN, Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo told staff last year that the firm will not be taking the same path as Facebook in making an initial public offering (IPO) anytime soon.

"We don't want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth," Costolo wrote in his August email, according to CNN.

"We're not ready to be a public company for a couple years."

For the last year, Twitter shareholders have been banned from selling more than 20 per cent of their shares.

The reason for this is that if companies have more than 500 shareholders owning one class of equity shares the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates the business to disclose financial results.

Twitter told V3 it could not comment on the email.

The firm has been discussing possibilities of an IPO route to revenue growth since 2009.

In related news French president Nicholas Sarkozy has joined Twitter. The president has not always shown a liking for emerging technologies and the social web, particularly when the new technologies come into conflict with traditional media establishments.

It remains to be seen if he proves as sensational as some of the other recent converts to the micro-blogging service, most notably Rupert Murdoch who has already hit out at Google on the service.

One of the most interesting things about Facebook filing its $5bn initial public offering (IPO) is that it finally provides some hard evidence into the company's success and operating strategies, having for so long been a private company with closed books.

Mostly notably, the firm is already making some strong returns on its advertising model, with revenues up to $3.7bn for 2011, an increase of $1.7bn from 2010, showing the company's advertising-led model is paying off.

However, it is not just advertising that is driving this income, with the firm revealing in the filing that Zynga was responsible for 12 per cent of this income, as Facebook takes a cut of any purchases made by users in the games that run on the site.

Away from the financial figures, the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), also highlights some of the ways in which the company is setting itself up to deal with having to appease Joe Public once they get their greasy mitts on shares in the firm.

The most interesting of the caveats Facebook has placed within its IPO relates Mark Zuckerberg's right to appoint the company's successor in the event of his death.

"In the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor," the filing notes.

However, Zuckerberg clearly has no intention of handing control over any time soon as he's made sure that the share structure of the company works in his favour.

Each share of the 28.4 per cent stake he controls in the firm has a 10 times greater power than normal shares on any issues shareholders vote on, ensuring he retains overall control of the firm.

"[This] provides Zuckerberg with the ability to control the outcome of matters requiring stockholder approval, even if he owns significantly less than a majority of the shares, [...] including the election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or its assets," it reads.

Zuckerberg has also committed to only draw a salary of $1 a year from 1 January, 2013, similar to Steve Jobs during his time at Apple. He probably expects to eek out a living via bonus schemes and share grants.

The firm will also likely be forced to start providing regular updates on the number of active users on the site, which has now been revealed as 845 million, so it may even be the case it can tout one billion members in the run up the firm going public in May.

No doubt that will send already rabid investors into a full-blown frenzy. All this from its inception in a dorm room in Harvard. Amazing.

ORLANDO: As one of the technology industry's biggest spenders on research and development, it was no surprise to find IBM showing off a range of projects that staff in its Center for Social Business are busy working on behind the scenes.

The project that most caught V3's eye was its Gamification Engine for the Enterprise product that looks to offer organisations a way to provide staff with a more engaging way to share knowledge or learn new skills.

The interface is heavily reminiscent of geo-location service Foursquare, with users able to acquire badges if they complete certain tasks or goals, as well as comparing their ranking with other users in a certain group or division on a public leaderboard.

The tool lets users earn badges, rewards and compete with co-workers.

Yaniv Corem, a software engineer at IBM, explained to V3 that, thanks to services like Foursquare, staff in organisations are "no strangers to gamification" and that the tool could have several uses within the business community.

"With this tool you can build databases of knowledge on key topics by allowing staff to share information in a competitive and playful way," he said.

Corem added that the firm is considering adding the tool to its Connections platform at some point in the future, but that nothing was guaranteed as yet.

Another tool the firm is working on is its "time-based storytelling" offering Historio, which it has already used itself to gather together information on its 100th anniversary celebrations that took place in 2011 (see image below).

Each blue dot represents a key moment in IBM's history, which links to more information on that topic, including text, images and video.

Jamie Rasmussen, another IBM software engineer, explained the tool could have uses for businesses to document their company’s history to the public, as IBM has done, or for staff to share knowledge of a product's history internally.
 
Another interesting tool the firm was showcasing was a Twitter analysis platform that attempts to gather 'human data' on users of the site to analyse the likelihood of them responding to a question or their interest in a given topic.

"This will help a brand know if it is worth trying to engage with a user, the best questions to ask and whether they should offer an incentive to encourage feedback," IBM research staff member Jeffrey Nichols told V3.

Such projects show that, after 100 years of being one of the biggest technology firms in the world, IBM has no intention of resting on its laurels and is keen to place itself at the heart of the social business revolution taking place in the market.