Hong Kong billionaire and chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Li Ka Shing has increased his stake at online social network Facebook to more than $100 million.

Li, 79, who invested $60 million in Facebook last November, brings his total stake in the online company up to .8 percent.

According to news reports, the new investment was made through the Li Ka-Shing Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to nurture a culture of giving in our society.

“Facebook is doing very well and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones,” Li said during a news conference, according to MarketWatch. “I may raise my investment in Facebook– anything is possible.”

Other large Facebook investors include Microsoft, which put up $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company in October.

Li, whose net worth is estimated at $26.5 billion, is the world’s 11th richest man according to Forbes.

A keynote talk with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg descended into chaos as the audience heckled the interviewer for failing to get to the point. Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old billionaire, was the keynote speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy took the stage to question Zuckerberg, but the audience quickly grew tired of the topics she focused on, claiming that the real issues were being ignored.

“Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview,” claimed audience member, Jason Pontin, via Twitter.

Lacy finally allowed the crowd to take over, and Zuckerberg was subjected to an enthusiastic barrage of questions about the real issues facing the social networking site, such as privacy and data portability.

“The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did,” said former Microsoft blogger, Robert Scoble, via his Twitter feed.

When asked about Facebook’s Beacon advertising system, which he said last year was the beginning of a new era of advertising, Zuckerberg admitted that his claims may have been premature.

“We probably got a little bit ahead of ourselves. We came
across as knowing more than we really knew… We have a lot of things we need to build before we get there,” admitted Zuckerberg.

Questions about the possible emergence of a rumoured Facebook music download service, following talks with record labels, were met with denial. “What’s going on there is we talk to a lot of companies all the time… there are [already] music applications on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “As a company we are out building relationships, but at this point I can say we have nothing to talk about right now.”

Another popular topic from the audience was data portability and privacy. In recent months several scandals have emerged over security vulnerabilities in the site and the company’s practices when dealing with users’ personal information.

“Almost all of the mistakes we made, we didn’t give people enough control. We need to give people complete control over their information,” said Zuckerberg. “The more control and the more granular the control, the more info people will share and the more we will be able to achieve our goals.”

Another revelation was that recent management changes at Facebook may have been due to a disagreement over a potential takeover bid from Yahoo. The company offered $1 billion for Facebook last year, but the deal was turned down, with most staff opposing the offer.

“We made some management changes,” said Zuckerberg, when asked what happened to those that didn’t.

Social networking site Facebook has approached major music labels about launching a music service, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The talks were described as “preliminary” and come after sources familiar with the discussion told Reuters last week that the major labels had held similar talks with MySpace, the leading social network site owned by News Corp

“Lavenderblu” was a young girl when she got her first taste of domestic violence. After suffering at the hands of her father and witnessing repeated attacks on her mother, she ended up in a violent relationship of her own before finally managing to leave and find refuge with a women’s support group.

Now, at age 40, she is one of many mentors on the new social network Horsesmouth which has been set up to connect mentors with those who are looking for advice.

Launched only about a month ago, the site already has over 20,000 users and offers up mentors to discuss a wide variety of topics, form how to set up a business to how it feels to wear the Muslim hijab for the first time.

In launching the service, the site’s creator, MT Rainey, set out to bring a sense of public purpose to the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, which allows users to contribute their own content to the Internet.

“No one was creating a social network for a public benefit or for the public good,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I wanted to create somewhere that was safe and somewhere that was fit for purpose, for meaningful interchanges online.

“If you’ve accomplished something, if you’ve been through something and if you’ve got over something, then you have wisdom,” added Rainey, who previously worked in advertising.

She said that people going through a difficult process need to talk, often to someone familiar with the situation, who has been in their shoes before.

“I found that people wanted to give something back,” Rainey said. “You don’t have to be middle-aged or retired to feel that way.”

The Horsesmouth is one of many mentoring sites to spring up recently and the phenomenon could become more important as once-powerful traditional bodies such as the church or unions start to lose their sway in certain countries.

“Physical geographic communities are breaking down and people through the Web are creating communities of interest,” Rainey said.

A HELPING HAND

In the creative industries such as music, advertising, media and the arts, many are turning to the new social network set up by The Hospital Club group.

The private club opened in 2003 in a former London hospital and was based on the vision of musician Dave Stewart, who wanted a “creative melting pot” in the center of the British capital where members could give something back to the industry.

Five years on, it has also launched a social network at thehospitalclub.com, where users from those industries can post ideas, blogs and their work to communicate with others on the site.

“The key was to create a low pressure environment where people could interact with one another based on their own expertise … and where it is acceptable to approach people to ask for assistance,” said David Marrinan-Hayes, the club’s online manager.

He said the site would allow those entering the industry to post profiles and examples of their work online, meaning the potential mentor would be able to make a qualified decision on whether to provide advice or not.

“Also, we often find that people … need different pieces of advice from a number of different people,” he said.

“For a musician, they could need production advice or legal advice or marketing advice, and that very often doesn’t come from the same person. So three or four people could work together and we’re trying to create a space to manage that whole process.”

There is no charge for using Horsesmouth and TheHospitalClub, but some other mentoring sites like Imantri offer a choice as to whether you pay for the mentor or not.

Other sites offering mentors or advice include American-based score.org, micromentor.org and the business network linkedin.com.

Like Horsesmouth, Marrinan-Hayes said people were happy to help and impart their knowledge. And it can be rewarding for both sides.

“It just makes them feel good,” he said. “They feel like they have something to contribute.”

Facebook is now taking user privacy and improving the user experience very seriously. As part of its ongoing improvement program the rules for allowing publication of a story have been updated. Henceforth they will only allow actions that have been actively taken by the user to be published to the news feed.

At present applications can publish alerts to the news feed whenever a user profile gets updated, whether this is done by the user themselves or due to a third-party action via an application on the user’s profile. For example, if a user receives a virtual gift from a friend, the application can publish this to the news feed, even though the user has not done anything themselves.

In a month’s time, passive events, or third party reporting of an act will not be allowed to be published to the news feed. This is because Facebook wants to reserve its most valuable feature, which gets the most user eyeballs, to maintain the highest standards and only publish stories that are relevant to user activity, rather than publishing poorly masked promotional activity from third-party providers.

Technical details about the change in policy can be found on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook expects all developers to discontinue usage of the old, passive format of reporting, at the earliest. They may contact their users or use other means to enforce the necessary changes if they think it appropriate to do so.

Ultimately, this is good news for users. It will not only improve their experience on Facebook, but also shows that Facebook has been listening to user feedback provided via the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘x’ rating icons alongside every news feed item.