Hi5, the third largest social networking site in the world,  has recently laid off almost 15 percent of its employees, a move to cut expenses in this gloomy economic condition where industries from all sectors including the Internet field have been experiencing dramatic financial slow down.

According to a high ranking official of the company, this move is an attempt to cut expenses in order to survive in this global economic crisis which had caused even the proud Wall Street to stumble upon its feet.

According to the latest figure, the company has also experienced low rates of unique visitors which had also forced some major sponsors to pull out their commercials and other kinds of advertisement posted in the webpage.

The reason for the financial throes experienced by most social network sites is the low advertising revenue which is just a domino-effect of a weak economic condition.  Since most companies from all sectors are tightening their belt, advertising costs have been greatly reduced to reduce burn rates and limit expenses.

In a statement released by the company’s vice-president in marketing department Mike Trigg, “the move is a pragmatic decision in order to survive in this ever-changing environment, and in order for a business to grow, restructuring should be done in the company.”

Meanwhile a source who asked for anonymity had said that most of the people who had been laid off came from HR and Design department.

According to a recent survey, Hi5 ranks third from the most popular social network sites.  The top placer is Facebook and then closely followed by MySpace, both of which have been considered as the most popular community sites in North America.

Google Trends was originally released as a tool that let you see visual comparisons between search volume of keywords. That hasn’t changed, but Google now also gives us the keys to more data about actual popularity of websites based on daily unique visitors.

This data is similar to what companies like Alexa already provides, but it’s not ready to be a complete replacement yet. There is not as much data available through Google Trends as there is in other tools. Searches are currently limited to the domain level — so blogs.zdnet.com would translate to zdnet.com before the search happens.

If you have a popular enough website to be included in these results from Google Trends, you may be disappointed to know that there is no way to remove your site if you wanted to. Google doesn’t think that rule should apply to them though, as they have removed all their web properties — searching for things like google.com or youtube.com comes back with nothing.

Internet company Yahoo said on Sunday that it was considering a “number of value maximising strategic alternatives” and would evaluate any proposal made by Microsoft Corp..Yahoo recently rebuffed a $33 a share takeover offer from Microsoft. Microsoft said earlier on Sunday it has proposed an alternative deal to Yahoo rather than a full acquisition.

In a statement, Yahoo said it had confirmed with Microsoft that it was not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of the company, but it was considering alternatives and remained open to pursuing any deal in the best interest of stockholders.

The board “will evaluate each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal, consistent with its fiduciary duties, with a focus on maximizing stockholder value,” it said.

Google has invested $1 million in Comsenz, a Chinese provider of social network software. It’s yet another move by Google to gain a foothold in China.

that Google is preparing to launch a joint music download venture in China, largely to take on Chinese search engine The investment occurred in July as part of Comsenz’s second round of venture funding, and it was recently revealed in a regulatory filing . Rumors about the investment previously pegged Google’s portion at $5 million. The news follows a reportBaidu.com, which has been beating Google by offering free music.

As for Google’s American competition, Microsoft has a direct presence in China, while Yahoo owns a large stake in Chinese online marketplace Alibaba.com.

Beijing-based Comsenz provides bulletin board and social networking software, as well as hosting services, to Chinese websites. (We don’t have any more details — not surprisingly, the company’s website is in Chinese.)

Comsenz is backed by former Google board member Michael Moritz. Moritz is a non-managing member at Sequoia Capital China, which owns more than 10 percent of the Chinese company. He left Google’s board last May.

Separately, Google revealed it acquired Peakstream, a company that makes it easier to run applications on multiprocessor systems and thus should help Google boost its internal server architecture, for about $20.3 million (see p. 39). That means Peakstream’s investors lost money on the deal. Peakstream soaked up $23 million over two years (our coverage) from venture firms Foundation, Kleiner Perkins — and yes, there’s that connection again — Sequoia Capital. Kleiner and Sequoia, both original investors in Google, each took in about one-fourth of the acquisition proceeds. Kleiner’s John Doerr also sits on the board of Google.

 February is turning out to be a busy month for Google’s corporate IT initiatives. Earlier this week, the search giant announced a new, corporate-focused, suite of security and spam-filtering software suites under the “Powered by Postini” moniker. Today, Google announced another new Google Apps bundle, known as Google Apps Team Edition. Unlike the Powered by Postini product suite, Google Apps Team Edition is aimed at enabling user and group-level collaboration without the need for approval from the IT department.Current business versions of Google Apps are linked to an organization’s Internet domain and therefore require IT approval and at least some degree of administration. Team Edition eschews this approach, and allows end-users to create sharing workgroups so long as the individuals in question have valid e-mail addresses within the employer’s Internet domain. Team Edition contains the standard core features of Google Apps, save for Gmail, as that service requires a degree of IT oversight and administration.

According to Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth, “Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement.” Signing up for Google Apps Team Edition will allow registrants to see which of their coworkers has also signed up, which, in theory, promotes additional collaboration. Google emphasizes that this type of two-way visibility will allow workgroups to begin collaborating with each other—apparently spontaneously.

There is, of course, a rather obvious fly in this particular ointment. Sheth suggests that IT departments and administrators shouldn’t be upset about discovering unplanned and unapproved implementations of Google Apps running on the corporate network because “[t]he IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this. This is a solid, happy medium.”

One problem with that: IT administrators tend to fervently dislike the sudden appearance of unapproved applications, even if said software package promises world peace, actually delivers all those free iPods, and periodically spits gold doubloons out of the CD-ROM drive.

Google’s approach seems predicated on the old adage that it’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission. One the one hand, Google Apps Team Edition could help facilitate group-level communication on projects, but the program could also engender a significant backlash from IT managers who aren’t at all thrilled at its sudden appearance. This is particularly true of companies with strict(er) IT policies, or companies already in the middle of deploying an alternative work collaboration system.

Google claims that the purpose of Team Edition is to allow users to “share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support,” are more likely to be greeted by raised eyebrows from the IT department. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, the unapproved presence and use of Google Apps Team Edition could, in fact, increase the burden on IT support staff. Google seems to be betting that if it can build enough grassroots support for Google Apps, IT departments and corporations will have no choice but to embrace it as a provider. Such an approach may work beautifully in the consumer market, but there’s no guarantee corporations will be as flexible.