Short and convenient, micro-blogs also experienced a "big bang" in China last year, with the number of micro-bloggers at China`s popular portal sina.com.cn almost doubling in less than six months.

The official promotion campaign of the 2010 World Expo was launched in Rome yesterday by Italian and Chinese officials in an opening ceremony featuring traditional dragon dances.

A sign of how important the project was to Facebook: Facebook's director of engineering, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said 15 engineers worked on the project for 15 months.