The world’s largest online social network, with over 400 million registered members, has announced it would end its advertising partnership with Microsoft.

Microsoft has been serving cost-per-click advertising on Facebook to users located in the United States for the past three-years. During the partnership, Facebook would sell its own advertising from it’s in house advertising division to users outside of the U.S.

The Microsoft deal was scheduled for renegotiation this past week, prompting Facebook to drop the software giant in order to sell advertising directly to advertisers.

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Facebook today released its latest version 3.1 of its mobile iPhone app, bringing a key heavily requested feature to the device: push notifications.

iPhone users no longer have to obsessively manually refresh their Facebook app for new messages or activity. They can just let it run in the background, and get the notifications pushed to them as they happen, in almost real-time.

The Facebook 3.1 app now lets users get push notifications from Facebook messages, wall-posts, friend requests and confirmations, tags, events, and comments, with a pop-up message and a sound.

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Microsoft and Sony are set to add new features to their respective gaming consoles, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.

On November 17, Microsoft will let users update their firmware via Xbox Live that will include many useful and much anticipated new features.

The most important Xbox updates include new Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm (with support for only the U.S. and the U.K. users for Last.fm) integration, on demand 1080p 5.1-channel HD video streaming via Zune Video, and a new News section that streams content from various content partners including MSNBC.

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The popular video game maker, Electronic Arts (EA), has confirmed rumors that it would acquire the online game maker Playfish for a reported amount of up to $400 million.

Right now, EA is set to pay $275 million in cash for the company, in addition to $25 million in equity. EA has added performance covenants through December 31, 2011, were assuming Playfish continues to grow, EA will pay up to $400 million for the company.

The acquisition will help propel EA into the online social gaming realm.

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Twitter has raised a new round of financing at a $100 million dollar valuation.

Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners are returning investors and were involved in the new offering. There were also two new shareholders added to the mix, T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners.

The terms of the deal will not be disclosed, including neither the total amount Twitter has raised (except to say it was a significant sum) nor any indication as to the investment weights from each investor.

We just know that Twitter was valued at $1 billion after internal people familiar with the matter confirmed the valuation to the AP.

The new funds will be used to fund company operations, and could include purchasing new equipment to grow the service and even expand the current 60-strong workforce.

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The world’s largest social network Facebook has hit an important milestone.

The company founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post that Facebook was cash flow positive in the last quarter ended in June.

The company previously forecasted it would become cash flow positive sometime in 2010.

However, many material costs were not considered in the analysis. Only costs required to keep the site operational, such as server costs and other capital expenses, were considered. Acquisition costs, such as the most recent $50 million FriendFeed acquisition were not considered. Facebook also said that private investment cash was not considered. Other costs that can have a material impact are not considered as well, such as accounting charges, interest, and taxes.

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According to a new blog post by Twitter founder Biz Stone, Twitter will begin to include native support for geo-location based information via a new API. The new feature will now give users the option to include their GPS location from each tweet.

The feature will be available directly from Twitter and it’s mobile site. Third party applications will also begin to add the GPS support from the API.

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Canada’s Privacy Commissioner has concluded (see the complete findings report) they’ve found significant privacy “gaps” on what is now the largest online social network in the world, Facebook.

The report finds significant privacy issues on Facebook relating to: terminating existing accounts, management of accounts of deceased users, disclosing information to third-party developers, and collecting personal information on the site of people who are non-users.

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Facebook today announced it has launched Live Stream Box, a new feature that allows Facebook users to share information via status updates in real-time on any site using the feature.

Live Stream Box is mainly ideal for site owners to add the feature to pages hosting live event coverage, live video streams, live webinars, among other content where people could benefit from sharing information in real-time.

The feature was previously used on CNN during the live online coverage of President Obama’s inauguration to keep people connected.

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Facebook Usernames are now live. You can now register your “facebook.com/username” to easily share your Facebook profile with friends. This was one feature Facebook was missing that other services offered that made it easy to share your profile, such as Twitter.

Your Facebook profile has went from a complicated URL structure of http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=111111111 to http://facebook.com/yourname

The feature has just gone live, and in about 15 minutes after the launch, there have been over 500,000 registered usernames, so grab yours before it’s gone.