Oleg Teterin, president of Russian mobile ad firm Superfone claimed that he was not planning on chasing down individual users of the emoticon: “I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder”.

Teterin claimed that “Companies will be sent legal warnings if they use the symbol without his permission”.

It is unclear as to whether he plans to punctuate said letters with his new trademark.

Mr Teterin points out that companies wanting to use the emoticon can obtain an annual license: “It won’t cost that much” he said, “tens of thousands of dollars” causing some companies to feel

Teterin is not just stopping at he believes that , and look like his trademark and therefore could also be owned by him.

The BBC report that Alexander Malis, from the firm Vympelkom, plans to get back at Teterin by trademarking brackets.

Surprisingly, this is not the first time such a case has emerged in Russia. In 2005 a Russian man sued Siemens for using luckily, Siemens’ appeal was upheld.

The popularity of Twitter has grown significantly in recent times, particularly among businesses and bloggers alike. The function of Twitter is quite simple really: it operates by allowing users to post short blog posts of up to 140 characters in length in response to the question “What are you doing?”

In addition, once you have registered with Twitter, you can then receive updates from other users via the Twitter website, whilst also being able to follow any member who should post information that is of interest to you.

Apparently one of the main reasons for the breakdown in a deal was that Twitter’s executives and investors would like to continue in their own attempts to build up revenue, rather than receive help from such an established business. But, some feel that the acquisition would have been a good move for Twitter; similarly, others believe that Twitter are not as important to Facebook as perhaps what Facebook could have been to Yahoo.

It was also revealed that Twitter are not ready to sell their little innovation, maintaining a strong belief that their business will continue to grow in popularity, benefiting them in the long run. This is in addition to the fact that Facebook were offering $500 million of its stock at the $15 million valuation, with concerns being raised whether the amount offered in stock was actually worth $500 million. As such, Twitter felt the deal was slightly undervalued.

But considering Facebook and Twitter both maintain such a mutual respect for each other, it may be a case of never say never between these two growing faces in social networking.