With all of the focus on the economic downturn and the troubles in the retail sector, it’s easy to forget the continued growth of social networking in the UK. Christmas is traditionally the busiest time of year for social networks, and this festive season the sector achieved three significant new milestones.

Wired magazine just announced their picks for top 10 technology breakthroughs of 2008, a list which includes lots of cool stuff like flexible displays and Michael Phelps high-tech Speedos. However, their top two picks can be seen as somewhat controversial: #1. Apple's App Store and #2. Google’s Android. While Apple’s App Store certainly is an improved environment for third party developers (as compared to anything the traditional mobile operators currently offer), it still represents a “walled garden” school of thought. Google’s free, open source smartphone operating system is designed to work best with Google’s web-based email, contacts and calendar programs. While both products represent steps in the right direction, it can be argued that their two top picks are designed to benefit their creators more than the consumers…

I thought I had written our final blog post before Christmas, but I thought this data was too interesting not to share! As the chart below illustrates, last week traffic to E Cards websites was up 11.8% on the equivalent week last year.

Los Angeles - More than one billion digital song downloads have been sold so far this year, an increase of 28% from 2007, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures cited by Billboard. SoundScan projects that a total of 1.04 billion digital tracks will have been sold by year's end. The top digital track of 2008 so far is "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis, which has racked up 3.3 million download sales.

London - Phorm, a controversial U.K. firm that monitors ISP subscribers' Web surfing in order to serve them targeted ads, this week saw its U.K. CEO Hugo Drayton and CFO Lynne Millar resign from the company, Wired.com reported. The news comes less than a month after the departure of four board members, and days after the company announced that U.K. ISP BT, having completed two trials, will deploy the company's technology across its network. Plans by U.S. ISPs to deploy similar ad targeting systems from companies like NebuAd were sidelined after complaints from U.S. lawmakers.

Los Angeles - Universal Studios and director Gore Verbinski ("Pirates of the Caribbean," "The Ring") have acquired the rights to a 2007 Wall Street Journal article about the online virtual world "Second Life," Variety reports. The article centered on the detrimental effect that hours spent in the virtual world had on the real life of a 53-year-old man and his family. Verbinski is also slated to direct a film version of the game "Bioshock" for Universal.

Mountain View, Calif. - Meebo, the provider of a Web-based messaging and chat service, announced this week that it has added support for the instant messaging platforms on MySpace and Facebook. The company's platform already supports interoperability between AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ.

Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. - The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said that it plans to utilize several new technologies this Christmas to help people follow Santa's journey from the North Pole.

San Francisco - An Egyptian engineering student at the University of South Florida was sentenced this week to 15 years in prison, after pleading guilty to uploading a video to YouTube (NASD: GOOG) that demonstrates how to make a bomb detonator out of a remote-control toy car, Wired.com reported.

San Francisco - Major record label Universal Music Group is generating "tens of millions of dollars" from Google's YouTube, the company told CNET News.com this week. "(YouTube) is not like radio, where it's just promotional," Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of the label's eLabs digital division, told News.com. "It's a revenue stream, a commercial business. It's growing tremendously. It's up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category."

Washington - Shareholders of Sirius XM Radio (NASD: SIRI) have approved two new measures aimed at bolstering the company's lagging stock price and paying down debt.

Los Angeles - PixelFish, a provider of online video ad services, announced on Friday that it has acquired the assets of now-defunct online video production tools firm Eyespot for an undisclosed sum.

Redwood City, Calif. - Two months after unveiling plans to trim its workforce, video game publisher Electronic Arts (NASD: ERTS) announced on Friday that those cuts will be broader than originally expected. The video game developer and publisher said that it plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce. That's up 4% from the company's announcement on Oct. 30.