Rapid online growth in Asia Pacific means that now three-quarters of the world's population are accessing social media websites, according to Nielsen. The Asia Pacific Social Media Report has found that internet users now spend as much as six hours per month on social media services.

Social network service Facebook is turning to emerging markets, such as China and Russia, to maintain its push to one billion users worldwide. Speaking to internal blog Inside Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerburg recognised the importance of markets such as Japan, Russia, China and South Korea in allowing the website's rapid growth to continue.

AOL has offloaded Bebo to a US private investment firm for less than $10m.

Twitter is launching a new location function with the introduction of Twitter Places. The new offering is being introduced to coincide with the World Cup; users can tag stadiums in South Africa and see other Tweets coming from the stadium.

The Lahore High Court has directed the government to lift its ban on Facebook saying there should be free access to information, provided no one hurt religious sentiments of others, according to a report in Pakistan's Daily Times .

Social networks have continued their global dominance with record breaking numbers of people logging on to them in March of this year. According to Nielsen, the total number of minutes spent online globally rose more than 100% year-on-year. The average time per person spent on social networks grew to over six hours per month.

More Australian brands are planning to use social media despite difficulties measuring effectiveness, a Nielsen study has revealed. The Nielsen-Community Engine 2010 Social Media Business Benchmarking Study found that 70% of all respondents said they planned to conduct some social media activity in the next year. This figure is 30% higher than figures gathered in 2008.

Orange provider sixth Digital Media Index , has shown that male users account for 64% of unique users on social network websites while also viewing a third more pages on average. However, women over 60-years-old were found to send 48% more multimedia messages across their mobiles than their male counterparts.

Twitter has announced that it plans to offer advertisers the chance to put paid-for ad messages into twitter feeds. To start with, the "promoted tweets" will only be visible when users search for similar products or services on the Twitter site, but eventually the site plans to expand the service to allow ads deemed relevant to users to appear in their Twitter feed.

Initial reaction among Twitter users has been mostly negative.

Yahoo! is set to boost is social offering with the acquisition of San Francisco-based Citizen Sports.

Citizen Sports has a network of popular applications across Facebook, MySpace, hi5 and iPhone and Android platforms, and has 39 million monthly unique users in the US.