This rumor is spreading all across the web that facebook would shut down its operations on March 15, 2011.

This news initiated from Twitter and later on got published on various blogs and news websites. The source mentioned everywhere is a press conference conducted by March Mark Zuckerberg outside his Palo Alto office.

Zuckerberg was quoted as “Facebook has gotten out of control, and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness.”

Zuckerberg went on to explain that starting March 15th, users will no longer be able to access their Facebook accounts.

Not only this, there are comments of Vice President of Technical Affairs at Facebook “Mr. Avrat Humarthi” as well saying “After March 15th the whole website shuts down, So if you ever want to see your pictures again, I recommend you take them off the internet. You won’t be able to get them back once Facebook goes out of business”.

The news quite obviously seems a rumor, since Mark himself is fond of posting such astounding things on his Facebook page, as last time we saw the Time Magazine update on his page.

“I don’t care about the money,” said Zuckerberg. “I just want my old life back.”

The way different sources have posted his “I Don’t Care attitude” about the billions of money he is earning from Facebook does not give a very realistic picture. The truth on the other hand is that it is not at all easy to wind up such immensely growing business. The website with over 500 million active users no doubt looks difficult to manage, but instead of shutting it down every sane would definitely think of selling it out to get max benefit possible.

Anyhow, The Facebook Corporation suggests that users remove all of their personal information from the website before March 15th. After that date, all photos, notes, links, and videos will be permanently erased.

More on Google News

How many servers does Facebook have? For some time now, the stock answer has been “more than 10,000 servers,” a number the company began using in April 2008. Facebook has continued to use that number, even as it has soared past 300 million users and dramatically expanded its data center space.

We now have an update: Facebook has 30,000 servers supporting its operations. That number comes from Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, who discussed the company’s infrastructure in a presentation last week at UC San Diego.

“Today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” Rothschild said during the Q&A session following his talk, adding that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis.

That places Facebook among the largest Internet companies that have publicly discussed their server counts, but still well behind hosting providers Rackspace, 1&1 Internet and OVH, which each house more than 50,000 servers in their data centers. See Who Has The Most Web Servers for more date on the largest infrastructures.

20,000 Servers In 18 Months
It also suggests that Facebook has added about 20,000 servers since early 2008, which explains why it borrowed $100 million in May 2008 to fund server purchases.

Rothschild also shared some huge numbers associated with Facebook’s photo storage operation, which now stores 80 billion images (20 billion images, each in four sizes). Rothschild said the real challenge isn’t storage, but delivery. ”We serve up 600,000 photos a second,” he said.

25 Terabytes of Log Data – Daily
The amount of log data amassed in Facebook’s operations is staggering. Rothschild said Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data, which he said was the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

Rothschild also discussed the effectiveness of the company’s engineering operations. Facebook currently has about 230 engineers on staff, who manage data for more than 300 million users. Rothschild said that having one engineer for more than 1 million active users has been a consistent historic ratio at Facebook. ”We believe engineers at Facebook have a dramatic impact.”

The 1-hour, 10-minute presentation discusses the company’s commitment to open source technologies and the importance of memcached and Hadoop in their operations.

Just a few tidbits of Facebook news to report here. Reuters is reporting that the social networking site paid a hefty $8.5 million to acquire the domain fb.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation. Last year, Facebook launched its revamped messaging service, offering its users facebook.com email address in the process. The alternate domain fb.com was purchased by the company for internal employee email addressing. The Farm Bureau now calls fb.org as its home.

In conjunction with this new messaging service, Facebook also announced a new profile layout designed to easily present and share more information with friends. For the past month, users have been able to voluntarily opt-in to the new design by visiting www.facebook.com/about/profile. Now, it seems as though the update will be pushed out to all users over the next several days, like it or not.

Dhaka, Hackers have broken into the Bangladesh site of leading search engine Google, internet service experts said Saturday evening.

The site is inaccessible from some ISPs, as their DNS settings have been hacked.

Visitors to the site are seeing a defaced landing page rather than the usual search site.

Users can at times view the google.com.bd homepage due to the cache on their browser, but the page entertains no search.

Attempts to access the site by users are rebounded with message reading, “Google Bangladesh OwN3D by TiGER-M@TE.”

“The site has definitely been hacked,” said Pradip Dey, chief technical officer of ADN, a leading ISP.

“A couple of other ISPs have also got similar complaints from their clients,” he said.

Earlier, privately managed International Internet Gateway operator, Mango Teleservices, said they can enter google.com.bd.

“I can access it from here. But, many are calling us about this problem.”

LONDON: A woman from Tenby is thought to be the oldest member of social networking site, Facebook.

A BBC News report highlighted Lillian Lowe, who is 103-years-old, and now thought to be the eldest member of the site after Ivy Bean from Bradford, 104 (who was also a big tweeter) passed away this summer.

Lillian used to run a hotel, but unsurprisingly has retired now, so has plenty of pottering time. Unlike most pensioners, however, her pottering is done on an iPad (which she finds easier to cope with than a laptop due to the touch interface).

The technologically aware great-grandmother has just a small collection of friends, and uses Facebook mainly to keep in touch with family. Although since she’s been handed the crown of Facebook’s oldest user, she has been inundated with congratulations, and something in the order of a thousand friend requests.

She told the Beeb: “We’ve had messages from all over the world. I’d like to say thank you very much.”

Local paper the Tenby Observer dubbed Lillian “Superhighway Gran.”