The new social network of Google Inc, Google+, has attracted 25 million users. The feat makes it the fastest website to reach that audience size, according to data released by comScore.

Launched in late June, Google+ had 25 million unique visitors as of July 24 and is growing at a rate of roughly one million visitors a day.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

While the data show Google’s latest attempt at breaking into social networking has started strongly, it may not mean the project is a long-term success. MySpace grew to 25 million unique visitors in less than two years — faster than Facebook or Twitter. However, it’s lost a lot of visitors in the past year, comScore data show.

The United States had more than 6 million unique visitors, and India more than 3.6 million, the data show,

Canada and the UK had around 1 million unique visitors each, Germany over 920,000 and Brazil just over 780,000. France and Taiwan each had around 500,000.

Facebook, on the other hand, took about three years to attract 25 million visitors and Twitter took just over 30 months, according to comScore.

Google has recently unveiled its new social networking service — Google+ social network — to take on Facebook.

The Internet search engine giant said its social network will meet the most basic human needs to connect with others.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

Aiming to take advantage of flaws in networking on Facebook, Google said, ‘Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

Google said, ‘We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.”

It would offer options of networking, including ‘Circles’ interface for adding friends and sharing ‘what matters, with the people who matter most’ and ‘Hangouts’ interface for group video chat.

The New York Times said ‘At stake is Google’s status as the most popular entry point to the Web. When people post on Facebook, which is mostly off-limits to search engines, Google loses valuable information that could benefit its Web search, advertising and other products.’

Facebook has recently admitted that it had hired a public relations firm for highlighting supposed flaws in the privacy practices of Google Inc.

The company, however, denied it had intended a smear campaign against the search giant.

From news.yahoo.com:

Facebook, which has taken privacy missteps of its own with users in the past, hired WPP owned PR firm Burson-Marstellar to focus attention on the use of consumers’ personal information on Google Social Circles, one of Google’s less known social networking features.

The revelation highlights the growing rivalry between Google, the world’s leading Web search business, and Facebook, the largest social networking site with over a half a billion users globally.

Facebook and Google’s skirmish shows how consumer privacy, particularly around sensitive data, could be a ticking time bomb for modern Internet companies who manage an increasing amount of information about their users such as credit card and social security numbers.

Burson-Marstellar contacted several journalists and privacy experts without revealing the identity of its client. Facebook said it should have presented the issues in a “serious and transparent” way.

The company said in a statement, “We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles.”

Microsoft Corporation’s Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in an internal memo that the company is planning to broadly raise salaries and stock awards to attract and retain top talent.

The company is presently losing top employees to hot upstarts like Facebook.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

“Through our history, we have been THE place people came when they wanted to make a difference in the world through software, hardware and services,” the chief executive said in a memo sent to all employees on Thursday morning.

“This is as true today as it has been at any time in our history, and the changes we’re rolling out today will help ensure Microsoft continues to be the place that top talent comes to change the world.”

The action follows Google’s 10 percent increases this year. Microsoft plans, among other things, “important” compensation increases for divisions with fast-moving markets, including research and development and certain geographies.

All employees will have a portion of their stock awards shifted into base salary, according to the memo. Microsoft’s shares are at the same level as 10 years ago.

Ballmer said Microsoft needs to retain talent by improving the way it rewards and support its most talented staff.

New search algorithm updates have been introduced by Google for weeding out low-quality content from its site results and help users find more high-quality sites.

The company said in a blog that the updates will be available for all English-speaking Google users and will incorporate new user-feedback signals.

From Media.cbronline.com:

It said, “Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms.”

“In addition, this change also goes deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before,” the company said.

In the US, where the changes were launched in February, it was found that both users and publishers were happy with them.

Google employee Amit Singhal said in the blog, “We’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.”

Those who are unhappy with the search results should evaluate their websites using quality guidelines of Google and send their feedback, Singhal said.

Google Inc is planning to introduce an online music service in India, which would enable users to search for legal music streams and downloads, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Google could not immediately be contacted for comment by Reuters outside regular US business hours.

From Timesofindia.indiatimes.com:

Google would soon add a music feature in its search service, which will allow users in India to search for songs. The top search results would be from Google’s partners, according to the Journal.

The US web search giant will partner with three digital music providers, who hold rights to hundreds of thousands of Indian tracks — ranging from Bollywood hits to Indian classical music — the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

If the music service gets introduced, music lovers across the country will surely find some more reasons to embrace Google and its development plans.