Facebook has set up partnerships with a number of mobile network operators to provide customers with free or cut-price data access to Facebook messaging.

The reduced prices - described as a ‘promotion’ by Facebook - will be available via the Facebook Messenger iOS and Android applications as well as the Facebook for Every Phone app for Java-enabled handsets.

Mark Bridge writes:

As the final days before this year’s Mobile World Congress approach, we discover there are two types of scheduled news announcements from the wireless telecoms industry.

There are the announcements delayed until MWC begins because the company wants to be part of the buzz at Barcelona. And there are the announcements made in the fortnight beforehand because they don’t want their story to get lost.

Inq, the Hutchison Whampoa subsidiary that started life five years ago as a mobile phone manufacturer before changing its focus to mobile software, has released the beta version of its new Material application.

Material is described as a ‘content discovery service’ that creates a twice-daily electronic magazine from information from the user’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Twitter says a security attack late last week managed to gain access to information about around 250,000 of its users. It appears the hackers gained access to usernames, email addresses and encrypted versions of passwords.

The service responded by resetting passwords for all affected accounts, which appeared to include many Twitter ‘early adopters’.

Facebook has reported its fourth quarter and full-year financial results for 2012, with quarterly revenue up 40% year-on-year to $1.585 billion but net income down over 78% to $64 million.

However, the social networking company noted that its research & development costs had more than doubled from Q4 2011.