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Yahoo has named Scott Thompson- the president of online payments firm Paypal, as its new CEO.He will fill the vacancy left by Carol Bartz, who was dismissed as chief executive in September after failing to turn around the company’s fortunes.

Mr Thompson has headed Paypal, the payments division of eBay, since 2008, during which time its userbase doubled.

Yahoo is currently undergoing a strategic review as it has failed to keep up with rivals such as Google.

First and foremost Mr Thompson has to define what Yahoo should be. Technology firm? Media company? Online services provider? Search engine? Internet portal? All of the above?

Yahoo has spread itself too thin, both managerially and technologically. It tried to compete with Microsoft, Google, AOL and everybody else at the same time – and failed. Yahoo is not known for innovation anymore. Meanwhile, Facebook snuck up from behind and ate Yahoo’s most valuable asset – the time its users spend online.

Selling troubled Yahoo to some naive investor might be an option, but anti-trust challenges make the outcome of any bid doubtful – unless Yahoo’s Chinese partner Alibaba steps forward. But that in itself would be a political Pandora’s box.

The US firm’s key products, beside its search engine, include photo sharing site Flickr and its webmail platform.

However, its domination of webmail – and the ancillary services it offers its email account holders – is under threat as younger users migrate to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Markets gave the news a cool reception. Shares in Yahoo were down 3.1% at the close of trading in New York.

Shares in Paypal’s parent, eBay, closed down 3.77%. The broader Nasdaq tech index closed up 0.33%.

Yahoo’s share price has stagnated at about $15 ever since late 2008, refusing to go above $20, after it rejected an offer from Microsoft to buy up the company at $33 a share.

Revenues at the firm have stagnated, particularly compared with leading search engine Google, and Yahoo has had to lay off workers four times over the past three years.

The poor performance prompted Yahoo’s board to ignominiously turf out Carol Bartz in September last year.

Tim Morse, who had been standing in as chief executive, will return to the role of chief financial officer when Mr Thompson takes over on 9 January.

Facebook’s share of the UK online usage has fallen by more than seven percentage points in the last year- raising concerns that it may have hit saturation point.The social network – which is expected to make an initial public offering (IPO) this year – still attracted significantly more online time than its nearest competitor, accounting for 52.6pc of all visits to social networks in December.

However, Facebook has lost substantial ground since the previous December, when it took a 58.5pc share of the UK’s social networking market, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

It slipped 1.3 percentage points last month alone.

The decline has raised concerns that Facebook is running out of steam in the markets where it is best established, whilst its competitors gain ground.

“Facebook’s growth is levelling out,” said James Murray, market research analyst at Experian. “Because Facebook had such a clear lead, it was always going to be difficult for Facebook to maintain [its position]. It has probably reached near enough its maximum growth.”

The figures will come as a blow to the company, which has been investing heavily in extending its reach and enticing users to click on its adverts, ahead of its long-awaited IPO. Facebook is expected to float with a possible valuation of  £65 billion ($100 billion)- the biggest technology IPO ever.

By contrast, YouTube, the user-generated video site owned by Google, grew its traffic by 45pc last year.

It accounted for just over a quarter of all UK visits to social networks in December, putting it 7.4 percentage points ahead of the previous year.

“We’re expecting video to be even more influential as a marketing channel, and marketers will have to adapt their strategies to incorporate a multi-channel approach in order to secure customers both on and offline,” said Mr Murray.

Twitter and Yahoo! Answers also made gains, but remained tiny by comparison, with 3pc and 2pc of all visits to social networks respectively.

Google’s social network, Google +, did not register in the top 10 most visited social networks at all.

However, Google grew its share of search engine usage market in the UK, edging up from a 91.3pc share of the market to 91.8pc.

Microsoft, its nearest competitor, was a minnow by comparison. Its suite of sites accountted for 3.6pc of all search engine visits in the UK in December, whilst Yahoo!’s popularity for searches fell nearly a percentage point to 2.5pc.

It is not just humans that are growing in size- web pages are getting bigger too.

The average web page is now about 965 kilobytes in size- reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive trends.

The figure is 33% up on the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was even then a not so slim 726 kilobytes.

Keeping web pages small is vitaly important as not only are an increasing number of people browsing with smartphones, but also because Google use download times as a key search ranking determinant.

Analysis suggests the bloat is down to user demands for more interactivity, as well as the tools used to watch what happens when people visit a site.

To gather its figures, the HTTP Archive run a series of tests every month on the web’s top 1,000 sites.

These showed that average webpage sizes were trending steadily upward throughout 2011 and jumped sharply in October. Big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors quit if a page takes too long to appear.

The metrics the HTTP Archive gathered suggest some causes for the growth. Images are a big proportion of the average webpage, and the higher resolutions people expect have led these to grow.

However, the statistics reveal that the category showing the biggest growth is that for Javascript.

This scripting language is widely used to make webpages more interactive and responsive.

The growth in the amount of Javascript on webpages may be down to the growing use of HTML5.

This is the latest version of the formatting language that defines how web pages should be written.

Mozilla has announced that it had “negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement” with Google for the next three years.Some people had wondered whether Google would back out of the deal as it tries to grow the market share of its own Chrome browser.

Mozilla relies heavily on the income generated by search partnerships.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, Mozilla’s chief executive.

Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice-president of search, said: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

The foundation said the exact terms of the deal would not be disclosed.

In its accounts for 2010, the Mozilla Foundation said it earned £77 million ($121.1 million) from agreements with Google, Microsoft and others. The Google agreement was thought to make up about 85% of that amount.

The previous deal, which ran out in November, was signed before Google’s Chrome browser had gained a presence in the so-called “browser war”.

Some internet monitoring organisations suggest Chrome has overtaken Firefox to become the world’s second most widely used browser, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Many put this down to lavish advertising campaigns undertaken by the search company across the world.

Chrome’s launch and subsequent growth has now put it in direct competition with Firefox, yet Google remains financially responsible for Mozilla’s survival.

Firefox 9, the Mozilla browser’s latest incarnation, was launched last month.

Mozilla said it was “30% faster” than previous versions – a problem that has been cited by many users switching to Chrome.

Google was the most visited website with US users in 2011 but Facebook was not far behind according to market researchers.Nielsen suggests more than 153 million visitors clicked onto Google branded pages each month, as Facebook attracted close to 138 million visitors.

Yahoo came third with about 130 million visitors each month.

But analysts warned Yahoo’s tally might be at risk if young people continued to turn away from web-based email.

The study is based on data collected between January and October and included visits from home and work computers. It involved a sample from a global panel of 200,000 people.

Website                                  Unique visitors per month
1. Google                                        153,441,000
2. Facebook                                     137,644,000
3. Yahoo                                         130,121,000
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                 115,890,000
5. YouTube                                     106,692,000
6. Microsoft                                      83,691,000
7. AOL Media Network                        74,633,000
8. Wikipedia                                      62,097,000
9. Apple                                           61,608,000
10. Ask Search Network                     60,552,000

Source: Nielsen

Although Google trumped Facebook as the most popular web brand, the search giant’s Google+ network came far behind Mark Zuckerberg’s site in Nielsen’s ranking of the most popular social networks and blogs.

Google+ came eighth in the list with 8.02m unique monthly visitors.

That also put it behind Google’s weblog publishing tool Blogger, as well as Twitter, Wordspace, Myspace, Linkedin and Tumblr.

Google’s YouTube was identified as the most popular destination for online videos, attracting more than three times the number of monthly visitors as the music video service Vevo.

While Yahoo maintained its position as one of the top three web brands, an earlier study cast doubt over its ability to retain the position over coming years as it’s email system faces a declining market share.

TalkTalk remains the most complained about UK broadband service provider according to regulator Ofcom.The ISP has “topped” the list for four consecutive quarters, although it has been reducing the number of complaints over the past six months.

In the same period, Ofcom found that 3 was the most complained about mobile operator, driven by disputed charges and customer service issues.

Virgin Media also saw an increase in mobile complaints over the past year.

Ofcom bases its data on complaints sent to the regulator rather than to individual operators. In general, mobile services are less complained about than fixed line or broadband.

The regulator’s quarterly report aims to inform consumers as well as incentivise telecoms providers to improve their performance. Ofcom only monitors complaints against telecom providers with a market share of more than 4%.

Complaints about TalkTalk’s broadband service peaked for the first three months of 2011 with an average of 0.81 per 1,000 customers. This fell to 0.55 by the third quarter of 2011.

LANDLINE COMPLAINTS Q3 2011

• TalkTalk – 0.77 complaints per 1,000 customers
• BT Retail – 0.29
• BSkyB – 0.28
• Virgin Media – 0.19

A lot of the problems experienced by TalkTalk are blamed on billing errors following its amalgamation with Tiscali in 2009.

As a direct result of the 1,000 complaints it received last year, Ofcom fined TalkTalk and its Tiscali UK subsidiary £3 million  for incorrectly billing more than 65,000 customers for services they had not received.

It was the largest fine that the regulator has given to a telecoms firm.

TalkTalk has since paid more than £2.5 million in refunds and goodwill payments to affected customers. Last month it admitted that it had lost more than 43,000 customers as a result of customer service issues.

The ISP was also the most complained about provider when it came to landline services, with 0.77 complaints per 1,000 customers in the third quarter of 2011, again driven by billing and customer services issues.

MOBILE COMPLAINTS Q3 2011

• Three – 0.14 complaints per 1,000 customers
• Orange – 0.07
• Virgin Mobile – 0.07
• Vodafone – 0.07
• T-Mobile – 0.06
• O2 – 0.02

The least complained about provider for the fourth quarter in a row was Virgin Media with 0.19 complaints per 1,000 customers.

But in mobile, Virgin Media saw its complaints rise from 0.03 complaints per 1,000 customers from of 2010 to 0.07 by the third quarter of 2011.

It has some way to go to catch 3, which was the most complained about operator over all four quarters. Its complaints have been on the rise, up from 0.09 per 1,000 customers from October to December of 2010 to 0.14 by the third quarter of 2011.

O2 remained the least complained about mobile operator over the year.

Independent estimates suggest more than 6.8 million Android or Apple iOS smartphones were activated on Christmas Day – more than double last year’s number.More than 3.7m Android devices were activated over the Christmas weekend, Google has revealed.

Industry experts believe the rise is partly because entry level smartphones have become cheaper.

The statistics, from Flurry Analytics, suggested 242 million apps were also downloaded on the same day.

The peak time for downloading new apps on Christmas Day was between 7pm and 10pm, the company said.

It gathered its data via its analytics tool which monitored downloads and usage of 140,000 apps in both Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store.

Flurry Analytics did not break down numbers for the individual operating systems.

It said the figures showed an increase in activations of 353% when compared to the daily average between 1 and 20 December. App downloads were up 125% over the same period.

The Android operating system can be found on a wide range of models produced by many different manufacturers, whereas Apple’s iOS is only found on iPhone, iPad and certain models of its iPod music player.

Demand for the iPhone has reached such a level that China based manufacturer Foxconn is looking to double production to 400,000 units per day, China Daily reported.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, has been awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours list.Mr Ive, who can now call himself Sir Jonathan has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE).

Raised in Chingford, Mr Ive began working for Apple in 1992 and since then has been the brains behind many of its products.

He described the honour as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful”.

Mr Ive added: “I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making. I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design.”

Mr Ive has been lauded for the tight fit between form and function seen in Apple gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone.

Born in February 1967, Mr Ive inherited a love of making things from his father, a silversmith, and reportedly spent much of his youth taking things apart to see how they worked.

From the age of 14, he said, he knew he was interested in drawing and making “stuff” and this led him to Northumbria Polytechnic – now Northumbria University – where he studied industrial design.

On graduation he started work as a commercial designer and then, with three friends, founded a design agency called Tangerine.

One of the clients for the agency was Apple which was so impressed with the work he did on a prototype notebook that it offered him a full time job.

Mr Ive was apparently frustrated during his early years at Apple as the company was then suffering a decline. Everything changed, however, in 1995 when Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped found.

Mr Jobs described Mr Ive as his “spiritual partner” in the recent biography of the Apple co-founder written by Walter Isaacson. However, it also said that Mr Ive was “hurt” by Mr Jobs taking credit for innovations that came from the design team.

Mr Ive’s eye for design combined effectively with Mr Jobs’ legendary attention to detail and the products that have emerged from the company since the late 1990s have turned Apple into the biggest and most influential technology company on the planet.

The knighthood is the second time Mr Ive has been recognised in the honour’s list. In 2005 he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year.Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year in 2012.

It’s been a very busy year with growing use of the internet to boost businesses’ ecommerce activities.

And lots of new marketing initiatives from technology companies to develop their investments.

Onwards and upwards into 2012!

Yahoo shares rose on speculation that the company is looking to sell its stake in China’s Alibaba Group and also Yahoo Japan.Yahoo rose 6% on the Nasdaq stock exchange after the New York Times reported the firm was aiming to cut its Alibaba stake to 15% from 43%.

According to some estimates, the deal will value Yahoo’s Asian assets at £11 billion ($17 billion).

Yahoo bought its stake in Alibaba for £675 million ($1bn) in 2005.

Despite being one of the biggest brand names, Yahoo has seen its market share tumble amid growing competition.

The likes of Google and Facebook have not only surpassed it in the amount of users but have also seen advertisers flock to them, hurting Yahoo’s revenues.

Dwindling fortunes saw the company fire former chief executive Carol Bartz earlier this year and launch a strategic review of its operations.

There has been growing speculation about a takeover bid for Yahoo, with companies including Microsoft, Alibaba and private equity group Silver Lake being linked to a possible deals.

The main focus of Alibaba’s sale of its Asia assets will be on what developments take place with regards to its stake in Alibaba Group.

Alibaba is China’s biggest ecommerce group and Yahoo’s stake in it is considered by many as one of its most prized assets.

However, relations between the two firms have deteriorated reaching a tipping point earlier this year after Alibaba spun off its online payment business, Alipay.

Yahoo accused the Chinese company of hiding the move from it, saying the change had been made in August 2010, but it only found out about it in March this year.