One of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings in recent history could become a reality this week. The Wall Street Journal reports via unnamed sources that Facebook could file the papers to start publicly trading its stock as early as Wednesday, February 1. The article does add that the Wednesday filing date could be pushed back with some of the company's executives thinking about holding off for a few weeks before sending the papers into the US Security and Exchange Commission.

The article also reports that Facebook is close to picking Morgan Stanley over Goldman Sachs as its lead underwriter. Morgan Stanley was the underwriter behind a number of tech-based IPOs in 2011, including LinkedIn, the Facebook-based game publisher Zynga and more.

When its stock does go up for sale the total worth of the social networking service could be as high as $100 billion.

People like to share everything on social media, and that apparently includes the crimes they commit. The Guardian reports that because of our love of sharing, the FBI is working on building a tool that will allow them to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook more effectively in order to help fight crime.

By decoding the publically posted social media messages -- “clapped him off the surfboard” is code for shooting the opposition, for example -- law enforcement is able to identify criminals. According to the report, the FBI recently arrested over “40 members of two feuding New York gangs,” and social media was a big part of the process.

The FBI has posted a 12 page Request for Information (RFI) detailing all of the requirements of the requested system.

Twitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems.

Look more closely, and you’ll find that Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently. Yet unlike, say, Facebook or Microsoft Office, Twitter’s power tools are easy to find and easy to figure out.

UPLOAD PHOTOS If you post a link to a photo from one of a long list of other sites, Twitter will automatically display the image in the right-hand “details” pane when another user looks at your post. These sites have a post-to-Twitter option on their image upload pages. There are 16 supported sites: DailyBooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, Ustream, Vimeo, Yfrog and YouTube.

MAKE A GALLERY Moreover, Twitter creates a photo gallery page that displays each user’s last 100 uploaded images. (There’s no similar feature for video.) An independent site, Hashalbum, automatically groups Twitter users’ images into separate albums based on any hashtags included in the post to Twitter. For example, hashalbum.com/aquapets displays all the images whose URLs were posted to Twitter with the hashtag #aquapets.

YouTube remains the world's number one video-themed web site and today the site's owner Google announced some new statistics that are sure to blow some people's minds. On the official YouTube blog site, the company revealed that the site is generating a massive four billion video views per day. Google says that number is up 25 percent from just eight months ago.

Ever since Google launched its Google+ social networking service, the company has not allowed people to sign up using names that were not their real names. However, Google has now realized there are a lot of people out there who are mostly known by their nicknames and other names that were not given to them at birth.

In a post on his Google+ page, team member Bradley Horowitz announced that starting later this week, " ... we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name."