Facebook

Trading Markets | Tue. December 21, 2010 BEIJING, Dec 21, 2010 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) — On December 20, 2010, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg was said to visit …

After months of rumours and speculation Facebook finally got round to unveiling their “Project Titan” messaging product yesterday. The new system centres around a unified inbox that deals with your IMs, SMS, email and Facebook messages, so in theory you’ll only have one conversation thread for each of your contacts.

Nice move Apple, very nice. With the uploading of one simple image Apple have stolen most of Facebook’s thunder just an hour before the social giant’s much-anticipated press conference.

On the eve of their big press conference where they are expected to announce their “Gmail killer”, Facebook has overtaken eBay in value to become the third most valuable web-based company in the US.

The talent shortage in Silicon Valley only seems to be getting worse. Following a series of high-profile departures from Google (mostly in the direction of Facebook), and talks of some big-money deals going on in an effort to retain staff. There was a story going round (completely unconfirmed, of course) that Google gave a senior engineer $3.5million in stock to stop them leaving for Facebook.

Another day, another swirling internet rumour vortex. Well, we needed something to fill the void now all that Nexus Two business is sorted out, didn’t we? A few months ago we got wind of an internal Facebook product codenamed “Project Titan”, which Facebook apparently refer to as their “GMail killer”.

We saw Google’s quarterly financial results not too long ago, and while The Big G wasn’t quite on par with Apple’s earning power, they still fared pretty damn well. So well, in fact, that the powers that be in Mountain View have reached into their deep pockets and are throwing a thousand greenbacks at each employee as a Christmas present.

At its event in its Palo Alto headquarters on Wednesday, Facebook failed to shock and awe the world with news of anything really groundbreaking, instead sticking to incremental upgrades to its mobile SDK, the predictable launch of Facebook Deals, the opening of its location based APIs and single sign on mobile login.

Speaking at a mobile event in Facebook’s Palo Alto Headquarters today, Zuckerberg fielded a question from an unfortunate Mashable Apple fanboy about when the social networking firm would come out with an iPad app, only to be told “The iPad is not mobile…next question.”

Will the social network be announcing the much-hyped-but-even-more-debunked Facebook phone? Will the big news be all about an iPad app, or other types of new mobile apps? Will developers be salivating at news of a new Facebook mobile SDK? Or will Foursquare be put into check by Facebook Places announcing special retail deals?

Lars Rasmussen, the engineer behind Google Maps and later Google Wave, has left Google for pastures new. Like a great number of ex-Googlers these days, those new pastures are Facebook.