Facebook set for hiring spree

Facebook is about to confound the recession with plans to enlarge its staff by 50 per cent this year.

The social networking giant, which already has around 1,000 employees, is hoping to benefit from a surplus of engineers made redundant in the recession, according to a Bloomberg report.

"No one else has been hiring," Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying. "It's been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out."

The site is the most popular social networking site in the UK, with 23.9 million visitors recorded by research firm comScore for May, a 57 per cent increase on the same period a year ago.

Facebook's expansion is the latest in a series of bold moves. The firm announced earlier this month that it will purchase content aggregator FriendFeed, appointing its four founders - all former Google executives - to senior roles within the company.

However, Facebook has also been blighted by privacy and security issues. Just last week several rogue applications appeared on the site, stealing user credentials and spamming users' networks of 'friends'.

And the firm has long been criticised over its privacy settings, which many users find overly complicated, and for the difficulty users have in getting the company to completely remove their personal details from its servers when they cancel an account.

Earlier this month five users from California began legal proceedings against Facebook, claiming that the site v iolates state privacy laws and misleads people over how it uses their data.