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Microsoft has one-upped its rival Google, as the company everyone loves to hate continues to transform itself from a desktop to online platform. The corporate juggernaut announced Wednesday night that it would take a $240M equity stake in the social networking site Facebook.com.

Facebook’s new round of financing has the youthful, online darling valued at $15 billion. As part of the deal, MS will expand their existing ad sales relationship with Facebook.

This investment venture came just days before Microsoft releases their own financials for 2008 first quarter.

Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $13.76 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, a 27% increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.92 billion, $4.29 billion and $0.45, respectively.

Apparently Microsoft is thriving with-or-without Facebook, with-or-without the industry and consumer criticism over Vista, and with-or-without ramped up political discussions over their compliance with the anti-trust suit.

The latest reports cite the California wildfires have forced more that 500,000 people to evacuate with two confirmed deaths. The dozen or more fires have burned roughly 500 square miles stretching from LA to San Diego, and 1,000 houses have been lost.

My thoughts go out all those driven from their homes by the California wildfires.

Resources for tracking the crisis:

• Government
  • San Diego County: Emergency Information
  • City of San Diego: Emergency Fire Information
  • State of California Consolidated Report on Fires
  • National Interagency Fire Center
  • AIRNow: Air Quality Overview
• Google Maps
  • LA Times managed Google map showing fire locations and relevant information
  • KPBS managed Google map with detailed San Diego area information
• Traditional News
  • CNN: Wildfires Updates
  • SignOnSanDiego.com fire blog
  • KPBS (San Diego) updates via Twitter
  • The San Bernardino Sun & Inland Valley Daily Bulletin fire blog
  • The Orange County Register Fire Central

With relatives in southern California, I’m a bit distracted following the paths of the wildfires and determing which have been handles and which run rampant.

CenterNetworks post “Firestorm 2.0″ investigates how the most popular social media services are being used to report and inform. What Allen found is that together, the sites form a fairly complete view of the crisis in real-time, but they are without anything to pull them together. The thought of a “crisiscenters” to properly aggregate this data is a start one.

For me the google maps mashups prove to be the most useful from a top level down perspective.

• The LA Times has a Google Maps mashup showing where the fires are burning
• Another mashup of San Diego allowing GPS and coordinate submissions

Any sites that trump those listed at CenterNetworks? Or is anyone already aggregating the data?

Google News released its own Facebook app today. Users can track and read feeds, topics and keywords through a full canvas page. They can share stories with friends, add notes, and view stories shared by friends via tabs.

At the end of the day, although it is great to have Google entering an “experimental application” into the Facebook arena, calling its home on a dedicated canvas that updates the users profile simply seems like the least effective means of getting any attention.

This is simply not how people interact on Facebook.

Not quite sure of the timeline, but Haochi at Googlified reported an increase in GMail storage estimations with confirmation coming from the Official Google Blog somewhere within the same window.