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It's official. People are spending more time on Facebook than on Google - a total of 41.4 billion minutes - making it the first time the social network has surpassed the search engine in this category.

A report released by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney does not take into account last week's sharing changes, or the Thursday Timeline announcement.

Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.

The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

Monster.com launched an iPhone version of its BeKnown app on Tuesday but the app offered more frustration than help for job seekers or professional recruiters and showed how out-classsed Monster is in the networking sector.

The app, which builds off of a Facebook app Monster launched in June, looks more like a marketing department's effort to get more Facebook users to use the job search site rather than "a solution for job seekers and recruiters looking to manage just one network of contacts," as it bills itself.

Groupon's Chinese joint venture Gaopeng is not doing so well. It has apparently closed 10 offices and fired at as many as 400 employees over the past three months.

Executives of the Chicago-based daily deals company, which is planning an IPO at some point, say changes are part of a shift in strategy and that that the company will now concentrate on middle-tier and upper-tier cities rather than the smaller cities in more distance reaches of the country.

Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

Forrester Research just released its annual survey of American technology adoption, this time focusing on the generational divide. The findings, which arose from a survey of over 37,000 participants, reveal that when it comes to the adoption of digital tools and technology, the generation gap still exists, with Generation Xers and Yers far ahead of both Boomers and Seniors.

The report delves into everything from mobile use to media consumption and PCs to social networking. The takeaway, says Forrester, is that Gen Y "lives and breathes" a digital social life, Gen Xers are masters of the functional benefits of technology, but those older are much more reserved in nearly all areas.

We are all aware of the floundering print industry that has seen a steady decline in revenues over the last several years. Newspapers that once thrived on the cash-cows that were classifieds and print advertising have had their lunch eaten by the disruptive forces of Craigslist and online advertising, which have slowly chipped away at print ad sales. Soon, however, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising revenues will surpass those of print advertising to become the second largest segment of advertising in the U.S. behind television.

The New York Times confirmed today that beginning in early 2011 the company will adopt a paid model for its Web site, NYTimes.com. The move comes at a time when much of the newspaper industry is searching for a way to stop the bleeding brought on by the Internet and the accompanying smaller revenue streams that online advertising produces.

Many fear that putting content behind a paywall will just drive readers to other sources, but perhaps the Times' approach will help to combat that issue.

For the overworked, underpaid masses of highly competitive journalists, there is no salve for the battered ego that can match the healing power of the official, professional accolade. At San Francisco's Online Journalism Awards tonight, a select few received their hero's laurels.

Although the "literature on a deadline" aesthetic of journalism is not hard-wired for nostalgia and hasn't often the leisure for back-patting, several individuals, stories, and websites stand out for their achievements in the field and their contributions to our collective knowledge and engagement this year. Read on for the list of honorees and our assessment of their contributions.

Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.