The admission came during Le Web Conference in Paris where Microsoft’s senior director of strategy acquisitions, Fritz Lanman, was speaking as part of the panel.

Lanman revealed that Microsoft had attempted to acquire Facebook back in 2007 for $15 billion but this offer was rejected. The Microsoft boss added that the social network was a particularly appealing proposition as Lanman described Facebook as being reminiscent of an early Microsoft.

This buy-out attempt was first reported in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect, in which he reports that the social network founder, Zuckerberg, rejected Microsoft’s offer because he wanted to keep control of the company.

After the offer to acquire Facebook was rejected, Microsoft instead opted to invest $240 million into the social network which gave them a 1.6% share of the company, and the chance for the two organisations to cooperate in the future.

The move has been of mutual benefit to both companies with Microsoft indexing Facebook updates on its search engine Bing, and by also offering Facebook users the chance to use a web-based version of Microsoft Word, known as Docs.com.

Fritz Lanman became the first person from the Microsoft corporation to confirm that a buy-out attempt of Facebook had taken place.

The new Twitter CEO has been revelaed as Dick Costolo

Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has announced his plans to step down to allow another colleague to come forward to steer the company during its new phase.

Williams is the second Twitter CEO to step down after two years in the job. The Twitter co-founder is not leaving the company, he will instead be taking up a role in the organisation focusing on product development.

Dick Costolo has been named as the new CEO at Twitter. Costolo received a place on the board back in 2007 when he invested $5 million in the company. A year ago he took on the role of chief operating officer. Before Costolo became involved with Twitter he was the Chief Executive of Feedburner before it was sold to Google.

Twitter’s online audience has seen rapid growth during the time Evan Williams has headed up the company. When Williams took over as CEO in 2008 Twitter had 3 million registered users, two years on that figure now stands at 160 million.

Twitter is currently free to users, however the social networking site has struck deals with Google and Bing in recent times whereby tweets related to search enquiries appear in results lists. Another means by which Twitter are able to generate revenue is via a new system of promoted tweets where companies can pay to advertise on the popular social network. The change of CEO is part of the company’s strategy to focus more on generating revenue from the micro blogging site.

Twitter updates are now searchable through Microsoft's Bing and will soon appear through Google

Just after the news broke that Microsoft would start indexing Twitter updates through their newly launched search engine Bing, Google also revealed that they have plans to follow suit and will also begin delivering status updates from Twitter in the near future.

The real-time Twitter search feature was announced by Microsoft at a web summit in Australia this week. The organisation said they also have plans in the pipeline to start delivering status updates from the other giant in social networking, Facebook.

Microsoft’s Bing is already displaying the Twitter updates. The service brings the user tweets related to a topic typed into a search box taking into account, the author, content, and how many times the tweet has received comments or been re-tweeted. It is not yet known when they will begin delivering the Facebook updates as well.

One of the biggest players from the world of search engines, Google who currently command an estimated 65% of the US market, confirmed that they too have come to an agreement with Twitter and their update service will swing into action in the coming weeks.

Not ones to be left out in the dark, Yahoo! are also believed to be in the process of negotiating a deal with the micro-blogging site Twitter.