After more than six months of government scrutiny, it’s official: The Google mothership has finally absorbed mobile ad platform AdMob. More than six months ago, Google announced that it was acquiring AdMob for $750 million. However, a prolonged review by the FTC delayed the acquisition

After more than six months of government scrutiny, it’s official: The Google mothership has finally absorbed mobile ad platform AdMob.

Facebook is starting to roll out a new Q&A feature to challenge a slew of sites, from newcomer Aardvark to long-standing sites such as Yahoo Answers and Wiki Answers. It’s also interesting to note that this app competes with Mahalo, owned by prominent Facebook-quitter Jason Calacanis, and with Quora , which was founded last year by former Facebook employees

Mobile advertising network AdMob has released its mobile metrics report for April 2010 , which takes a closer look at the geographic distribution of unique iPhone and Android devices.

By a vote of five to zero, the Federal Trade Commission has unanimously approved Google’s $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising platform AdMob. In a statement issued moments ago, the FTC declared that it find the transaction “not likely to harm competition.” While it has serious antitrust concerns over combining the two powerful mobile ad networks together, Apple’s launch of iAds was the tipping point that got the deal approved: “As a result of Apple’s entry (into the market), AdMob’s success to date on the iPhone platform is unlikely to be an accurate predictor of AdMob’s competitive significance going forward, whether AdMob is owned by Google or not,” the Commission’s statement explains

Google’s known for changing its homepage logo to celebrate special occasions, but today marks a new first: a playable game in the logo’s place –- specifically, a game of Pacman to mark the its 30th anniversary. The game is just as addictive as the original, and as Google’s Marcin Wichary says, “[We] made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980s masterpiece.” The company even changed its “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to “Insert Coin” in honor of the occasion. And with that, the world’s collective productivity takes a sharp plunge on this Friday.

AdMob’s Mobile Metrics report for February focuses primarily on smartphones, a category of mobile phones that has seen tremendous growth in the last year. In February 2010, smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009. The really big news, however, is the stellar rise of iPhone OS and Android.

Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile & Business Search for Whitepages.com, a Top 50 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter , and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local search, and social media.

When Google formally announced their plans to acquire mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million, they didn’t expect any regulatory interference to impede upon the processing of the deal. Unfortunately they were wrong. Today Google has released a statement on their Public Policy Blog admitting that they’ve been in ongoing talks with the FTC for weeks.

It’s the end of the year, traditionally a time for self-reflection. While many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions and looking back on what we accomplished, a lot of social media companies are sifting through their data and sharing what was hot in 2009. Yahoo , Bing , Twitter and Facebook have already revealed their top searches and most-discussed trends and stories of 2009.