According to a report in the BBC, Facebook will file papers for the IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.

The company will be valued between $75 billion to $100 billion. They hope to be able to raise about $10 billion through the public offering.

If they manage to achieve this target it could be one of the largest share offerings to take place on Wall Street, making Facebook one of the largest companies in the world, by market capitalization. Google had raised $1.9 billion through their public offering in 2004.

It is being suggested that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will be involved with this public issue.

Most of Facebook’s monetization occurs through advertising and is believed to be around $5 billion. Since Facebook is a private company so far, they have not been required to publish their accounts.

Ironically, the upcoming IPO has made the executives at Facebook extremely conscious about their own privacy. Web Pro News has reported that before a recent news conference, attending journalists were initially asked to sign a non-disclosure contract. It is a different matter that the contract was eventually called off when they objected about such a contract infringing their right to free speech and code of journalism.

Facebook has not yet made an official announcement, but the indications are all there that this announcement will happen, and the possibility of such an announcement has got the press and investors very excited.

Possibly the worst kept secret in the industry at present, this IPO filing could be what the U.S. economy and stock markets need. However, a lot of analysts and investors are also worried that such an ambitious floatation could flop just like the recent IPOs from Groupon and Zynga.

The study, incidentally, was conducted to show the importance of clean drinking water. While drinking water was ranked third, above Facebook, the results were not quite what one would expect.

Facebook was ranked fifth in the list. Clean and flushing toilets were ranked ninth!

Similarly, an Internet connection was ranked at number two, just after sunshine, which of course most Britishers are known to be quite starved of.

Ironically, another survey conducted earlier this year found that nearly 50% of men accessed the Internet on their mobile while in the toilet.

Technological advances and social networks have been given predominance over other requirements such as washing machines, showers, fresh fruit and vegetables, pain killers and even shoes. However, to give them more importance than food, clothing and the basic sanitary facility of flushing toilets, seems rather extreme.

The study polled 3,000 British residents, many of whom could possibly have been young adults, who tend to dramatise the importance of trivial things and have never had to live without the ‘comforts’ of clean toilets being available to them.

The top 10 items in the list were as follows.

1. Sunshine
2. Internet connection
3. Clean drinking water
4. Fridge
5. Facebook
6. NHS
7. Cooker
8. Email
9. Flushing toilet
10. Mobile phone / smartphone

In fact, 4 out of the 10 most important things the respondents said they couldn’t live without are completely unrelated to the sustenance of life. Even more ridiculous is the fact that 15 out of the 50 “essentials” were items such as eBay, iPods and Twitter, which didn’t even exist 20 years ago!

Are the British public really such a nation of airheads or was this just another survey with a poorly chosen sample showing “stats” that are far from reality?

A report by DisplaySearch expects that by 2014, the number of computers sold will be 500 million and one-third of these are expected to be tablet devices.

While there were only about 2 million tablets in 2009 and about 20 million tablets last year, there will be 202 million tablets by 2015 according to iHS iSuppli.

Apple’s iPad continues to hold the largest market share among tablets. However, Android-based tablets are also growing in popularity according to Strategy Analytics. During the last quarter of 2010 22% of tablets sold were running on Android OS. While Apple held 95% of the market share during the third quarter of 2010, it held only 75% of the market share in the last quarter.

Tablet sales 2009 – forecast 2015. Data source: Gartner and iSuppli

Among the Android-based tablets, the Samsung Galaxy Tab was the most popular. Android-based tablets are growing in popularity not only because of their relatively lower cost but also because of accompanying features such as YouTube and Google Maps. The planned launch of the Android 3.0 for tablets is expected to further boost the sale of Android tablets.

The entry of other companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and Research In Motion, in the tablet market will also further boost the growth of the tablet market.

The Egyptian protests, which started last Tuesday, have been gaining ground. The opposition in Egypt declared January 25 as a “Day of Rage” to end the 30 year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

People with varying ideologies ranging from Islamist to Communists and Secularists have come together for this protest. They have been gathering in huge numbers on streets and squares. They have been shouting and burning symbols of the dictatorial government.

The government, for its part, is doing all it can to subdue the protestors. They have set out the secret police as well as the riot police. They have resorted to using water cannons and even assaulting the public.

Egyptian government officials have also tried to deactivate the mobile towers and block sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which are being used for propaganda.

While they have succeeded in blocking communication channels to an extent, they have not been entirely successful in doing so. Users are still able to access Twitter in English, Arabic and French. Mobile phones are also partially functional. Photographs and videos of the protests which have been uploaded are being sent around the world by supporters of the uprising.

A curfew was imposed in the country on Friday, but it was defied. The riots have reached such proportions that the police were eventually forced to retreat and the army had to be called out to control the situation for the first time in 25 years.

Update: Google has joined in on the fray by enabling Egyptians to call a local number in order to tweet about the uprising. The new service has been introduced via SayNow, a company that Google bought just last week.

The said document has indicated that several sites belonging to Yahoo! including Delicious, Buzz, AltaVista etc. are likely to be shut down in due course, while some other sites are likely to be merged.

While Yahoo! has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the document, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving has threatened to fire the person who leaked it. That statement seems to confirm its authenticity.

The Delicious Blog has tried to reassure users by stating that while Delicious has not fitted in very well at Yahoo! the site will not be shut down. Rather, they will be looking for an ‘Ideal Home’ outside of Yahoo!

They have also asked users not to panic regarding eventual loss of their data. However, those who so desire can make use of alternative services available, to store their data. Several of these sites also have links with Delicious.

The said document is believed to have been leaked by an employee after Yahoo! confirmed that they will soon be firing over 500 employees.

While shutting down or merging certain sites may help Yahoo! to save on expenses, it may send out negative signals to users, thus doing more harm than good.

The paywall system was introduced a few weeks ago, and it was obviously expected that the number of readers visiting the site would diminish. A recent post by Robin Goad, the Research Director of Hitwise U.K. has confirmed this happened.

The study, which they conducted, shows that while The Times market share a few weeks prior to the introduction of the paywall was 4.29% it fell to as  low as 1.435% of all the News and Media – Print traffic, which means that it dropped to a third of their earlier market share.

While the drop in just a few weeks is indeed pretty steep, the market share in the next week, (week ended 17th July 2010) was 1.37%. This reading, though even lower that the previous one, indicates that the rate of fall has started to reduce, which is a good sign for the publisher.

A further indicator that The Times may soon see a recovery in their market share is the fact that visitors are spending between 21/2 to 3 minutes per visit on the site.

However, The Times has yet another hurdle to cross. They have provided an introductory offer of ₤1 for the first 30 days to their readers. It remains to be seen, if readers will continue to visit the site once that offer period is over, or if they will simply switch loyalties and move on to some other site, which offers its services for free.

The Financial Times, which has also started a paywall system, before The Times, has already received praise for the model which they have set up.

The Wall Street Journal has also started a paywall system, but their transition seems to have been less painful.

The probable reason for the different response between these publications, could be the fact that while The Times is a general information site, the other publications offer specialised services which may not be found so easily in other publications.

Prime Minister, David Cameron, was accompanied by his Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Jeremy Hunt. Nobody has actually disclosed what they discussed in the course of the meeting.

Jeremy Hunt, however, sent out a tweet stating that Zuckerberg was a really smart guy with some good ideas. Mr. Hunt’s press office did make it known that the meeting had been organised by the Prime Minister’s office itself.

Mark Zuckerberg later praised the U.K.’s open data initiative, which had been launched by Tim Berners-Lee under the previous Labour government. He also found that the Prime Minister and his team were very “insightful”.

While Facebook’s social networking prowess is unchallenged, their record on consumer privacy is rather poor, at best. The Conservative government would need to tread with extreme caution when taking on any serious initiatives based on Facebook in order to avoid any privacy faux-pas akin to the Labour government employee losing CDs containing personal data of 25 million citizens.

On the whole, though, Cameron and his government’s intention to involve the public and open themselves and the workings of the government up a bit more is definitely commendable.

Apart from referring to traditional news sources such as newspapers and television, people are now increasingly relying on blogs and social networks to receive news.

In fact, news is fast becoming a shared social experience. However, the type of news that is popular on these different sources varies widely.

The Pew Research Center has carried out a study on the top news stories carried by different sources and analysed the data collected. The study was carried out between 19 January 2009 and 15 January 2010 on blogs and YouTube and from 15 June 2009 to 15 January 2010 on Twitter.

The study not only found that the lead stories on social media channels varied widely from traditional news media, but it also varied substantially from one channel to another.

It was found that during the course of the study the top story on blogs, YouTube and Twitter coincided only once, during the Iranian Presidential elections held between June 15 2009, to June 19 2009.

Bloggers, in general, were found to be more interested in emotional stories or issues that related to individual or group rights or similar ideologies. Stories that could be personalised and shared attracted a lot of attention. Political news, however, tended to be both pro-liberal as well as pro-conservative.

On Twitter, there was a very different tendency – stories concerning technology, in general, and Twitter, in particular, gained more prominence. However, even here, the Iran elections were the most popular lead story and topped the charts for 7 weeks in a row.

In contrast, on YouTube, the news is usually shared through videos and often does not even contain any added comments. There is also a tendency to pay more attention to international news.

One common factor among all the social platforms studied, was that the stories did not stay on top of the charts for long.

Also it was not uncommon to find that the news stories on all these sources, differred considerably from the top stories on the traditional news channels.

Blogs are more likely to borrow information from the traditional media, but the reverse trend rarely occurs. Bloggers might face a tough time once their main sources, such as The New York Times and The Times go behind pay walls. It has already been announced that the New York Times will start charging for the use of some of their news content from January 2011.

According to the findings of the survey, a large number of Americans (92%) make use of various platforms to collect their daily news.

The most popular sources of daily news are local and national TV channels, followed in third place by the Internet. National and local newspapers and radio have not surprisingly fallen behind.

On an average day, almost 60% of Americans will access various online and offline sources of news.

Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and mobile technology, the new multi-platform media environment is now portable, personalised and participatory.

33% of mobile phone users access the news through their mobile phones, thus making it portable. 28% of Internet users access news on topics that interest them personally via news feeds on their homepage, while 37% of Internet users participate in the act of dissemination of news by posting it on sites like Facebook and Twitter, with or without their personal comments.

People are also using their social networks to filter and assess the news. They also exchange stories through email. 75% of online news receivers, do so via email or social networking and 52% of them share the news with others in the same manner.

Most online news consumers do not have a particular favourite news site, and access a variety of sites to collect their daily news.

While 55% of Americans say that it is easier to stay up-to-date about news and information than it was 5 years ago, 70% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by the number of news sources now available to them.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

Yahoo! now incorporates information from tweets, photos and videos posted on Twitter. They have revamped the Yahoo! News Shortcut result, that shows at the top of the organic results for queries on breaking news topics, into a horizontal tabbed form, which links to three or four news categories.

The first tab in the new Yahoo! News Shortcut result shows news sites with snippets from articles. The next tabs link to photos and / or to videos and the last one to Twitter.

Searches on certain popular news stories currently bring up the Twitter tab, which then takes users to the Twitter search results page for that query. Screenshots provided by Yahoo!, though, show the Twitter tab loading with a couple of selected tweets and associated videos.

According to Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf on Yahoo! Search blog, “Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Although both Google and Bing have already started incorporating Twitter feeds into their search results, Yahoo! claims that they are the first to integrate Twitter with news, which actually makes a lot of sense since Twitter is growing into a rather popular source of breaking news round the world.

They are hopeful that this will make Yahoo! News the first choice of users looking for current information on any breaking news stories. Yahoo! will also run a separate algorithm to filter out any irrelevant information that is present on Twitter.

Yahoo!’s Larry Cornett said that they were very pleased with user reactions they saw during initial user testing of this feature.

The study was conducted over a period of three months tracked 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs, and a total of 90 million articles in order to arrive at their conclusions.

Twitter’s speed of news propogation has led to a feeling among the public that the days of the traditional media might now be numbered, and may soon become useless.

The Cornell University study has revealed that most of the time it is old or traditional media, represented by professional journalists, that first notices and reports a story, which is then eventually filtered down and propogated via the Internet.

In fact, the study finds that the mainstream media usually reports a story 2.5 hours before it shows up on blogs, in most cases. The graph below illustrates the fact plainly.

Source: Research from Cornell University Department of CS

There are a few exceptions to the rule, of course, when a story is first reported on the net and later through the traditional media. That happens only about 3.5% of the time though, according to the findings of the study.

What actually causes the misconception, that the web is faster than the traditional media, could be the fact that news once received, spreads much faster through the Internet than it does through the traditional media.

Read the full Cornell University study (PDF 527 kB)

The indexing function by Twitter Search will be on a much smaller scale than Google Search, but should be very interesting, as it will be a true real-time search engine.

Twitter search is still in the process of figuring out the best way to grade or filter the search results. In other words, they want to make sure that the most reliable and authentic results get a higher ranking.

Jayaram says that tweets should be graded by a reputation ranking system, so that the more credible and informative tweets are placed at the top, as compared to the tweets that are less informative or have been sent by relatively unknown sources.

To achieve this, Twitter will have to change the credibility ranking of Twitter users, depending on the subject that is being discussed.

Follower counts of each Twitter user may be considered, but should certainly not be the only criteria for a high ranking – notching up large numbers of followers is no indication of reliability, as is evident from the fact that Ashton Kutcher obtained 1 million followers before CNN did.

Google continues to top the list, growing in value from $86 billion last year to $100 billion in 2009, which represents a growth of 16%. Google is followed by rival, Microsoft, which climbed up one position from last year with a current value of $76.2 billion – also up 8% over last year.

Yahoo! has fallen from number 62 last year to number 81 this year, and its value has also fallen, from $11.5 billion to $7.9 billion.

Other technology brands in the top 10 are IBM at number 4 with a value of $66.6 billion, Apple is at number 6 and is valued at $63.1 billion. China Mobile is placed at number 7, with a value of $61.2 billion, and Vodafone, which is a new entrant in the top 10 list, is at number 9, with a value of $53.7 billion.

Mobile operators have seen brand value rise, for the most part. O2 and AT&T have especially benefited from the launch of the iPhone, both seeing double-digit rises in brand value. The top 10 mobile operators by brand value are:

Among the non-technology-based companies, General Electric (GE) has taken quite a beating, as the brand’s value has fallen from the number two position last year, to number 8 this year.

Ten of the companies in the top 25 list are from the technology sector. Further down the list is Amazon at number 26, AT&T at number 28, Cisco at number 30 and eBay at number 54.

Quite surprisingly, the value of some of the brands has gone up substantially this year, in spite of the effects of the worldwide recession, which only goes to show that good companies can do well even in tough times.

In the UK, brand value for some of the brands in the list has fallen. Marks & Spencers, in particular, has seen a 48% fall in brand value over the past year.

The 10 most valuable brands in the UK are as follows:

This new technology ‘keeps track of’ the websites that users visit, if their ISP has signed up with this service.

Feedback: The representative says, “Phorm does not view or store the sites users visit. Phorm uses technology that has been built from the ground up to avoid any information that might identify a customer personally. Phorm’s system stands out from other online advertising systems in that it does not store your browsing history, IP address, or any personally identifiable information. The unique design of Phorm’s technology ensures that consumer privacy is protected and that, even under compulsion, no personally-identifying data or detailed browsing data can be retroactively provided to anyone.”

While it is a good thing that Phorm does not, at present, identify users individually, that does not change the fact that it tracks user activity, which many would consider to be spying.

But this is being done without the express consent of the users. BT admitted to using this technology without asking for its users’ consent initially. The BT trial, called Webwise, ended in 2008.

Feedback: According to them, “Phorm offers a clear consumer choice. Before any ISP launches Phorm’s service they will evaluate several different approaches to opt in and opt out and decide what best suits their customers. Whatever the format, users will be provided with clear details on what the service offers, and how it works, so that they can make an informed choice as to whether to participate. The most recent BT trial was conducted on a completely opt in basis.”

Tracking user interests helps the service provider to serve better targeted and more relevant ads to the customer in future, thus keeping the customer happy and helping the service provider to generate more revenue.

Phorm’s service is not very different from Google’s own ad and organic search results delivery service. Google can track a lot more sensitive information, including content not found directly through a Google search. However, Google is a much loved brand and hence gets away with a lot more “evil”.

According to the BBC, the UK Home Office has been accused of ‘colluding’ with Phorm.

A spate of messages have been exchanged between the Home Office and Phorm since August 2007, in which Phorm asked the Home Office if they have no objection to this technology, while the Home Office asked for more information about it, ostensibly to better understand public safety considerations and legal obligations. They have denied giving any advice to Phorm about possible criminal liability.

Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Spokeswoman on Home Affairs however, says, the Home Office was interested in this technology to help with their agenda of counter terrorism.

Phorm’s Chief Executive, Kent Ertugrul however, says, the Home Office has only given an ‘informed opinion’ on the matter.

In the meantime, the BBC reports that the European Commission has started legal action against Britain, for allowing the use of this technology, following complaints about this service being used on BT, without user consent.

Feedback: Their spokesperson points out, “Phorm’s technology can be operated in a manner that is legally compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives. This has been confirmed by BERR and by the UK regulatory authorities. Consistent with UK and EU legislation, and in anticipation of any changes that may be made to the law in the future, our system offers unmissable notice and clear and persistent choice to consumers, a choice that is head and shoulders above current internet standards. The EU Commission announced infringement proceedings against the UK Government concerning the alleged failure of UK legislation to conform in certain respects with EU e-privacy and personal data protection rules. This is a matter for the Commission and the UK Government to discuss.”

The results of this matter, of course, remain to be seen.

British officials had said, last year, that Phorm conformed to European data laws. As can be seen in their feedback above, Phorm says its technology is “fully compliant with U.K. legislation and relevant E.U. directives.”

EU’s Telecom Commissioner, Viviane Reding however said, “Britain needs to change its laws to ensure proper sanctions to enforce E.U. confidentiality rules.”

If the UK does not voluntarily do so, Reding could take matters to the European Court of Justice, which would then have the final say in the matter.

Several individuals and organisations that advocate user privacy have approved of the European Commission taking an active interest in the matter.

To tell their side of the story, Phorm has created a website that attempts to rebuild its reputation, demistify the technology and clarify rumours that are currently being spread against the company.

Stop Phoul Play

Vine will only be available on Windows PCs for now and may be offered on Macs and mobile phones later. Vine could be a great tool for keeping in touch and spreading information among family and friends and also in communities.

Microsoft Vine

This new service is essentially a personalised messaging and alert system that can be especially useful in times of disaster and crises.

The Vine application must be downloaded and is then available as a widget on the desktop. It shows a map of the user’s friends’ and contacts’ locations, and will also indicate their status. Users can send and receive alerts and reports on the computer or as text messages on their mobile phones.

Unlike Twitter, Microsoft Vine will have a basic service available for free and a premium service that can be accessed by paying a subscription fee. This will make it seem a bit more official to government officials and executives. Microsoft hope to market the service to disaster management officials for receiving and sending information.

Hillman Mitchell, an emergency management coordinator in the Seattle metro area said in an interview with the Seattle Times, “I think, long- term, this is probably going to be a very valuable tool to help people keep connected.”

Emergency management professionals are already trying to use Twitter and Facebook during crises, but these services offer only limited streams of text and important messages can easily get diluted by unofficial, rumour-driven user input.

Users can already download and print an emergency contact card from the Vine website.

Microsoft Vine emergency card

Tammy Savage of Microsoft thought of building this product after the confusion caused by Hurricane Katrina. She expects Vine to be useful at such times. One wonders, however, if electricity and mobile networks would remain functional during a period of flooding.

It is not yet clear what the cost of this service will be per user, but if it becomes popular, Microsoft could earn significant revenues by charging a nominal subscription fee.

While Vine appears to be similar to other communications services, Microsoft will offer government agencies a direct means of communication with the public during important events and disasters. It also collects information from 20,000 news sources.

Vine could eventually turn out to be big competition for the likes of Twitter and Facebook, especially in times of an emergency, when people want facts rather than wild rumours.

Microsoft has released Vine in limited beta within the Seattle metro area. Current users can invite their friends and family to join them on the beta test by printing a postcard from the Vine site.

Over the past few months a number of celebrities including Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Barack Obama, to name only a few, and mainstream media companies such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times and many others have joined Twitter and are trying to out-do each other by collecting the most followers.

A few months ago, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama’s PR team led the most popular Twitter accounts, with a couple of hundred thousand followers each. Until yesterday, no single user account on Twitter had crossed the magical figure of one million followers.

The three hottest contenders for the million-follower mark were Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Britney Spears. The race actually started off when Ashton Kutcher announced, through a video, that he intended to beat the popular news channel CNN and be the first to have one million followers on Twitter.

Kutcher had started out on Twitter in a very modest way, but later he was joined by his equally famous wife Demi Moore and that really helped to generate a huge fan following. He also posted photographs of her bending down in her underwear on popular Twitter photo-sharing site, Twitpic, which brought a lot of public attention to his Twitter account.

Ashton has now succeeded in being the first to have a million followers on Twitter, and to celebrate his victory he has announced that he will donate $100,000 to the ‘Malaria No More’ fund, to help fight the rampantly prevalent disease in Africa.

While this gesture is definitely commendable, it seems quite silly that celebrities and the media are trying to beat each other at this game of winning more and more followers on the network. Other celebrities and media publications will reach that target soon enough, and each of them will probably make it sound like they have created history.

Twitter does not seem to mind. In fact, they were reported to have created a special position in the company to cater to their celebrity users.

This obsession with celebrities could destroy the original essence of the site, which had been started by a group of computer geeks, to keep in touch with each other.

Today, Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet ever, and she already has 100,000 followers, more than double what the most popular geeks acheived after 3 years of using the service! Ellen DeGeneres posted her first Tweet only last month, and is already close to having a million followers.

With Twitter quickly turning into the average person’s hotline to the stars, the number of spam accounts is bound to rise. If the company does not handle its growth and the growth of associated spam on the service appropriately, the original users that helped bring up the service could leave and find greener social media pastures very quickly.

mobile.accuracast.com

Given the recent growth in mobile Internet usage, a number of businesses are now looking to tap into this growth. This new sub-domain allows business owners and marketing professionals to order simple, straight-forward, sleek mobile websites that suit their requirements.

tools.accuracast.com

Our four main tools – the Search Ranking tool, PPC Cost Estimator tool, Monthly Ranking Report and International Search tool – all now have a new home in this sub-domain.

AccuraCast France

The French section of our site has now been moved to its own dedicated .fr domain, and has a slightly different design from the English website. Warning: The website is written only in French (of course!)

AccuraCast India

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Middle East will now be served from our Indian office. The Indian site is markedly different from the UK and French sites, and so are the service bundles we offer in the sub-continent. Please note that the service bundles offered on this site are not available to European and North American customers.

AccuraCast Mobile

Unlike the mobile sub-domain, AccuraCast Mobile is a lone-standing mobile site that provides a quick introduction to our business and our services, in a mobile-friendly format. This is just a (relatively) static, information site targeting our mobile audience. It is also one of the best ways to view the Search Daily News headlines from your mobile phone.

SEO-London.info

Perhaps the least obviously related site, SEO-London.info was launched last year to cater to small businesses and start-ups. The site provides bare-bones SEO and PPC services for companies with extremely limited budgets – sort of like a no-frills SEO / PPC agency.

As always, I welcome any comments and feedback from our regular readers, clients and visitors to the site. You can either drop a note in the comment box below, or tweet me directly @AccuraCast on Twitter.

Best wishes,
Farhad Divecha

Latitude works with Google Maps on mobile handsets as well as on a desktop. Users who add this service on iGoogle or download the latest version of Google Maps on their mobile phones can join Latitude and then invite their friends to join. If the friends accept and share their location, they can see where they are, in real time, on the map.

The system makes use of a digital map, where the coordinates of the handset being used are plotted by triangulating the location of the nearest mobile communications towers. This is merely an extension of their My Location service that was launched in December 2007.

The service has its benefits above and beyond the obvious social aspect of knowing where one’s friends are. For example, people can keep track of each other in a very large gathering, or parents can keep an eye on their childrens’ whereabouts.

There are concerns that using such a service would allow Google to invade an individual’s privacy. As David Perez of Arete Consulting put the point across succinctly, “I do not want my mother to know where I am!”.

Users have the choice to accept or refuse an invitation to join the service. A user’s location is revealed only to those members whose invitation has been accepted. Moreover, one can also choose to change the privacy settings for individual contacts in their friends list. Users can also manually input a fake location if they wish to hide their true location from a particular contact.

While Latitude is free to use, Google will most likely start serving location-based advertising to monetise the service.

At present, the service is available on Android phones like the T-Mobile G1, iPhone and iPod touch devices, most colour BlackBerries, Windows Mobile 5.0+, Nokia Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones in 27 countries including the USA, most of Europe and India.

Studies conducted by The Pew Internet and American Life Project have found that only 65% of teens use social websites nowadays, as opposed to 78% who play online games.

Not too long ago, social networks were the hot favorite among this age group, along with email, which was used by 89% of teennagers at that time.

The latest trend, however, is to use text messaging and instant messaging instead of email, which is now used by only 73% of teenagers.

Significantly, young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 seem to be following the reverse trend, with only 50% of them playing games online while 67% access social networks.

Surprisingly though, it was found that only 10% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 years spend time in virtual worlds, which is almost the same percentage as was found a few years ago, and hardly 2-3% of the older generation do so.

Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy Survey found that another victim of the changing times was the good old television. Studies reveal that those between 14 and 25 years of age are far more likely to use their PC for entertainment through games, music and social networks, than to sit and watch TV. This study was conducted across U.K., U.S.A., Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Searching and downloading music was the most accessed facility on the internet with 80% of youngsters using it while 73% access chat rooms social networks and message boards. It was also found that 59% of the youth use their mobile phones for entertainment, and the amount of time spent watching television is about one-third less than that spent by other age groups.

As far as advertising power goes, however, it was found that TV is the most influential for youth, followed by magazines, online ads and newspaper ads, while radio ads are fifth in line.

• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Social Network Websites
• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Video Games

The rumors began after eBay CEO, John Donahue, said that Skype was a great stand-alone business, indicating that though the VoIP service is doing well, (its fourth quarter revenue increased by 26% over the third quarter, and it has over 405 million users worldwide with 30 million users being added every quarter) it was still not integrated into their core business, 4 years after they bought it for an astounding $2.6 billion.

eBay, on the other hand, is not doing too well during the current economic crisis. Their net profits fell to $367 million in the last quarter of 2008, compared to $531 million during the same period in 2007.

Jack Murphy an analyst for investment bank William Blair says “It’s important that eBay has opened the door to a buyer by talking about Skype as a stand-alone business. It would be best for eBay to get whatever cash they could for it and focus on their struggling core market business.”

According to Jim Friedland, senior Internet equity analyst at Cowen and Company, the highest offer eBay can expect for Skype is $1.6 billion.

According to industry sources companies such as Google, Yahoo!, AT&T and Verizon could all be potential buyers as they can easily integrate the VoIP service with their core business.

It is especially believed by some that buying Skype could be the logical next step for Google, as it already has various communication facilities such as Gmail, Google Chat and the Android mobile platform. Owning Skype could enable Google to offer a cheap VoIP-based mobile solution.

There are others who feel that Microsoft may be more likely to buy Skype as they are looking to increase their user base to boost search.

eBay, however, has neither confirmed nor denied any of the rumors.

Rumors about the launch of GDrive have been appearing periodically since March 2006.

Blogger Brian Ussery found an official description of the GDrive within the code for Google Pack – the software utility download from the search engine. The description says:

GDrive Category = Online file backup and storage
GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents
GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, any time and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or mobile phone.

All user information could potentially be stored on Google’s server itself, rather than on a hard drive. This has led a lot of speculators to start talking about the demise of the PC, which seems highly unlikely, considering the fact that online storage solutions have existed long before the rumours of GDrive and none of them have caused any users to stop using a PC!

Google has already started promoting this product of theirs by telling people about the possible benefits of what they call “cloud computing”. They are doing so through their various services such as Google Mail, Google Apps and Picasa Web Albums. GDrive will also enable users to make use of all these services at the same time.

This free service is bound to attract a lot of companies as they are already on the look out for means of cutting operational costs due to the economic recession.

According to one technology news website, the GDrive could “cause a paradigm shift in how we use computers and bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop”. Luckily, though, Microsoft Live Office already allows users to process and store data online.

One major obstacle which Google will however have to deal with, is that of user privacy. The proponents of privacy are already saying that it is dangerous to store all personal data on the Web, rather than on a hard drive, as it can be easily accessed by service provider, especially in a situation where the government may ask for user details, and Google’s track record on privacy has not been very clean.

The co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, has said that they make a lot of effort to protect user privacy. As of now Google has refused to comment on when they plan to release GDrive.

A recent story run on TechCrunch says that according to trusted but anonymous sources, AOL is planning to sell Bebo as its performance has been far below expectations.

Both AOL and Bebo have denied this, saying “there is no truth to this rumor”.

According to sources, when AOL bought Bebo last March, Bebo was marketed as a clever startup that was able to win over ad agencies and clients by presenting itself very well. Ad agencies convinced their clients that they must get on to Bebo, which was growing more popular by the day in the relatively new social network market.

When AOL saw this, they obviously felt that it would be a wise move to buy Bebo, and accordingly they did so on March 13 2008 for $850 million.

Time, however, proved that Bebo did not perform as well as expected. While Bebo is popular in the U.K. with 10.5 million users, its worldwide user base is just 22.6 million.

Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity is the biggest factor contributing to Bebo’s failure. That, and the fact that singular social networks are no longer as popular as they were, due to the growing popularity of the open social platforms is partly responsible for this. The current economic climate makes the performance of the company look even poorer. While Facebook is believed to have earned $250 million last year, and MySpace much more than that, Bebo has managed only $20 million.

A spokesperson at Bebo, however, rubbishes the rumors of a possible sell off by AOL, saying that Bebo has launched a new tool, Social Inbox, just last month. It is doing very well and will allow users to read emails from various sites and also access other social services like Twitter and Flickr. It will also integrate AOL’s instant messaging service. AOL is also reportedly planning further expansion with Bebo.

Only time will tell whether the rumors turn out to be true or not.

While CNN.com relayed the event live through its video player, status updates from Facebook users watching the video were streamed in the sidebar.

The integration between the broadcast on CNN.com and the status updates from Facebook was enabled through Facebook Connect, their equivalent of OpenSocial that was launched last month. Facebook Connect allows users to port their online identity across third-party websites that use the platform.
The relay of President Obama’s inaugural speech by CNN.com along with status updates by Facebook users is a great success for Facebook Connect, which has raced ahead of its rival Google Friend Connect, with this achievement.

According to reports, over 18.8 million individuals viewed the speech and recorded 1.3 million status updates during the speech. Obama’s Facebook fan page now has over 4 million fans and over 5,00,000 wall posts.

CNN broke its previous record of election day coverage, when they had 5.3 million streams. They relayed over 8 million live streams this time. In fact, some users on CNN.com actually had to wait for others to sign out before they could access the site.

One of the first event videos to feature this service, was Barack Obama’s speech when he was sworn in as the 44^th President of the U.S.A. Users who visited the Change.Gov channel on YouTube were allowed to play as well as download the proceedings of the day, from a “click to download” link on the bottom left hand corner of the video.

Obama at the Lincoln Memorial

At present, the service only allows downloads from YouTube but not from videos embedded on other sites. This could change in the future though.

By officially allowing downloads from the site, YouTube will be able to further fortify their position in the video-sharing market. This facility will, of course, be free of charge.

In the last few weeks, the subsidiary of Google has gained in importance as Google’s own online video portal Google Video has announced that they will stop accepting new uploads.

Google is also trying to further augment their income through the video-sharing site, and in order to achieve this they have just launched a series of revamped home page ads and will also expand the library of videos available to download. Last month YouTube had also launched a new High Definition section on their site.

The decision to allow downloads of their videos will give a lot of portability to YouTube, or in other words, users will be able to access these videos on all types of screens including computers, televisions and portable media players, even in the absence of an Internet connection.

During the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas this month, all the major television manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and LG introduced modified TV models with Web built in access. Different sets contain different facilities such as Yahoo! Widgets, MySpace or other social networking capabilities, built in Netflix and so on.

Samsung is likely to be the first company to introduce the Connected TV by this summer.

Manufacturers are hopeful that having the components of the Web integrated into the television sets will encourage users to adopt the “Connected TV” technology.

Yahoo! Widgets, for one, will not only give users access to Yahoo! content but will also allow developers to build new widgets that consumers can add. Several new widgets are likely to be introduced in the near future.

Another interesting feature to be added soon will be a Twitter widget, which will allow users to send messages to each other through the TV itself.

The MySpace widget is also generating a lot of interest as it will enable social networking between friends, while watching a TV show. Users in different locations will be able to watch the same TV program and interact with each other via comments and pictures, as though they were sitting in the same room.

Yahoo! Connected TV widgets

ReadWriteWeb reports that most of the widgets will be funded by advertising.

The Connected TV has an Ethernet port at the back, and users can directly plug the DSL connection into the TV to access the Internet.

Since the Connected TV will be controlled with just a handy remote control, rather than the set top box and keyboard, and will have many new features to it, it is more likely that the concept will appeal to users this time around.

Screenshot from Samsung Connected TV demo

In the last few days there have been some stories doing the rounds that this deal would be revived in a round about manner. It was suggested that Microsoft would lend money to some executives and investment bankers, who would then buy out Yahoo! at the price of about $13 per share, which is just a little over the current market price, and then sell it back to Microsoft. Sources at both the companies have rubbished these stories for now.

Acquisition rumours may have been fuelled by a comment by Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said, “now is a good time for the software company to buy.”

However, in an interview with the Fox Business Network last week, Steve Ballmer told Brian Sullivan that the attempt to acquire Yahoo! was “a thing of the past”. He made it very clear that the deal would not be revived, while still keeping his options open about a partnership in any other form.

During the unveiling of the next Windows operating system, Windows 7, Steve Ballmer also admitted that the current financial crisis had affected the IT industry adversely, and it was realistic to expect that fewer people would be buying technology at the moment. While he sidestepped questions about the possibility of layoffs at Microsoft, he did acknowledge that it was important to conserve cash resources and be prudent about expenditure.

In the meantime, Yahoo! has just named Carol Bartz, who was the chairman of Autodesk, as its new CEO. This announcement has once again raised speculations that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal may go through under her leadership.

The survey was conducted across 16 countries, with over 27,000 participants, ranging between 18 and 55 years of age.

Users from China were found to spend the highest amount of their leisure time online – approximately 44%, as compared to only about 16% of free time spent online by users in Denmark, which was ranked last among the 16 countries.

While youngsters below the age of 25 spent about 36% of their free time online, Chinese users in the same age group spent nearly 50% of their leisure time online.

Interestingly, while the average U.K. user spent about 28% of his / her spare time on the net, the average housewife from the UK spent 47% of her spare time on the net, which is even higher than the average time spent by the Chinese online.

Unemployed U.K. resident spent 32% of their free time online; students spent 39% of their free time online.

British residents also revealed that the majority of them do not trust the information provided through newspapers too much. Only 23% of them trusted newspapers, as compared to 69% of people from Finland. The British feel that online news is a trustworthy source of information, second only to that relayed by a good friend.

Where social networking is concerned, the BBC reports that the survey found the average number of online contacts each user had was 17.

When the respondents were asked if they had met any of their online contacts in person, the Germans topped the list, with 76% replying in the affirmative, while China was at the bottom of the list here with only 44% saying yes.

On an average 60% of users had managed to meet some of their online friends. Users from U.K. reported that 58% of them had met online friends, while 455 of them had spoken to them over the phone.

37% of users from U.K., however, reported that they could not be sure of the true identity of their online friends.

Officials say they will ban the publication of blogs related to certain topics that they consider inappropriate.

Although government sources say they are in the process of “regulating” the system, it is obviously a way to censor information.

At the present moment, about 25% of the population of Vietnam, that is over 20 million people use the Internet, and blogs have become an important source for people to learn the latest news, as there is a lot of control and restriction on traditional media.

The guidelines being issued through a government document state that only “clean and wholesome” language should be used and bloggers should follow Vietnamese law. Users are also prohibited from discussing topics of national security, state secrets and any other subject which may incite violence.

Internet Service Providers will be held responsible for the matter published through their websites, although international service providers such as Google and Yahoo! have not yet been approached officially.

If the government gets its way, the service providers will have to report to them every six months and also provide information about bloggers on request.

The director of the state-run Bach Khoa Internet Security Center said they would manage the system through “random checks”. They would be creating a legal corridor, thus enabling the bloggers to decide what is right and wrong, and inform the government when violations are found.

If these suggestions are passed into law, violators would face up to $12,000 in fines or 12 years in jail.

Currently, Digg has 70 members on the payrolls, and they hope to expand to 150 over the next year or so.

They are reported to have about 16 million worldwide unique monthly visitors and 58 million page views according to Comscore.

Quantacast on the other reports about 22.6 million unique monthly visitors.

However since Digg does not have any editorials, the main job at this site is to moderate the content being posted by users and to concentrate on community affairs. It is believed that the site can be run efficiently, with much below half the present number of employees.

So then, why the plans to expand at a time when the financial position is so poor? In fact if they reduce the staff significantly they can turn the losses into profits.

This point leads us to wonder, if Digg is secretly up to something.

Unnamed sources, associated with the company have said that development and operations engineers are working on a product, which would be similar to Google AdWords, but would allow Digg to insert relevant ads into their news stream.

Users will be able to vote on these ads, thus “ranking” them. Ads which get a higher ranking, will be placed on a higher level, and will be charged a lower rate per click.

If this product is a success, it could definitely help to generate profits. For now Digg has refused to confirm or deny the story.

At the start of the year itself, they had enough problems to have to undertake a major reorganization of the firm.

This was followed by Microsoft’s offer to take over Yahoo, in February, which led to a rebellion by the shareholders, after the board rejected the offer. The rebellion was quelled only after investor Carl Icahn and two of his supporters were given a place on the board of the company.

This was followed by the failure of the Google Yahoo ad deal, which could have helped Yahoo!’s sinking fortunes.

Add to this the present economic crisis, and it looks as though Yahoo!’s troubles are never ending.

Now at the fag end of the year, they have had to announce about 1,500 layoffs, which is about 10% of the total staff strength. These layoffs have been spread out across the country and the world, and even include some employees from their subsidiaries like Flickr and Brickhouse.

They expect to save around $400 million in costs, by this action, and it is possible that further layoffs will be announced next year according to Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen.

In the email he sent to Yahoo employees, Jerry Yang says that they “must take actions to better perform in today’s turbulent global economy…laying off employees is unfortunately unavoidable.”

It is possible that the downsizing will help the company to some extent. However, it is terrible news for the employees who have been affected by it, and with the holiday season fast approaching, the timing probably could not have been worse.

On the night of November 26, ten well trained, motivated and heavily armed terrorists landed in Mumbai by boat and went on a killing spree, in and around some of the extremely well known and crowded places in the Southern part of the city, creating mayhem and killing over 170 people over the next 60 hours.

A lawyer, Amit Karkhanis has now filed a public interest litigation in the Bombay High Court, against Google, because it is believed that the terrorists used maps provided on Google Earth to study their targets. He has demanded that Google should be made to block images of sensitive places in the country.

Google has issued a statement condemning the attacks and said that they “stand by the citizens of India and the city of Mumbai as they recover from the attacks.”

They however defend themselves saying, that theirs is not the only source from which such information could be made available. It is easily available to anyone who is willing to pay for the purchase of these images from public or commercial sources.

They also believe that advantages of easy access to such tools and technology are far greater than their potential misuse by a few misguided minds.

This certainly seems like a genuine argument, as the same Google Earth has been used in the past to coordinate relief operations in times of floods, cyclones etc.

It is also obvious, that those involved would have found some other means to achieve their devious objectives, even if Google Earth had not been available to them.

One must also bear in mind, that apart from making use of Google Earth, they also made use of other technological facilities such as, satellite phones, cell phones and internet phones to stay in touch with each other and their bosses during the course of their operation.

As the saying goes, ‘there are two sides to every coin’. So also, all forms of technological advances can be abused when in the wrong hands.

Does that mean, that we must decide to ban any further technological advances in the future?

Wikipedia users have not taken very kindly to this action. The page in question, was the cover of an album by the Scorpions, a German heavy metal band. The album had been released way back in 1976.

The decision to block the page was taken after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) warned the service providers that the picture might be illegal. They said it was a “potentially illegal indecent image of a child” less than 18 years of age.

Users, who have strongly objected to the move, say that the IWF was not meant to censor popular sites such as Wikipedia. They also stated that the photo in question was available in several books and had never been called illegal.

The IWF however, stands by their decision, saying that they had even consulted the police before issuing the warning.

Since ISPs such as BT, AOL and News International are members of the IWF, this picture is now inaccessible to about 95% of internet users in the U.K.

What is annoying a lot of users is that along with the photograph, even the text on that page has been blocked.

David Gerard a volunteer at Wikipedia, said on BBC’s Radio 4 that the picture was still available on the album cover on the band’s box set and also on several other websites.

When asked why the same picture on Amazon had not been blocked, IWF said that it was a “pragmatic” decision, which has led users to believe that the educational site Wikipedia is being bullied, while Amazon, which is a relatively cash rich site has been left alone as they may sue the IWF.

The spokesperson of the IWF, Susan Robertson however defends the action, by saying that they only act on the reports they receive, and the only report received so far had been of Wikipedia. She said that the analyst team and police partners would be consulted, regarding the image on Amazon.

The IWF has been requested by the Wikimedia Foundation to remove Wikipedia from the blacklist, as it is one of the best educational sites and even has better information than many encyclopedias.

Update: The IWF has reversed its decision on Tuesday, after invoking its own appeals procedure. They issued a statement saying “in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.”

A few days ago, the President of the local branch of the youth wing of the main opposition party in Dubrovnik, Mr. Niksa Klecak, was imprisoned for setting up an anti-Sanader forum. He had started a group called “I bet I can find 5,000 people who dislike Sanader”. He was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, under the cover of an old law that had been laid down in the then nation of Yugoslavia.

The police also said that he had put up a photo of Mr. Sanader wearing a Nazi uniform.

A few days later, another man was called in for questioning in the city of Zagreb, for sending out posters through Facebook for an anti-government protest that was being planned. The BBC reports that these posters were received by almost 60,000 members of the opposition.

The Prime Minister has been reported to have said that he deplored the use of Nazi symbols for the purpose of political satire.

However, he asked his Interior Minister, Tomislav Karamarko, to conduct an enquiry along with the Police Director Vladimir Faber, regarding the above mentioned incidents.

He said, “No one should be detained or arrested in Croatia for expressing different views. This is not about this or that government or party, but about freedom.”

The country is being closely watched by members of the European Union for changes in their justice system, as Croatia hopes to be included in the union soon.

In the first incident, a blogger reported that Apple was launching a laptop for just $800. This was a lie, of course, but was inadvertently repeated by the New York Times, giving far too much credibility to that lie.

What one blogger wrote may not have carried much weight by itself, but something written in a reputable publication such as the New York Times, which has a huge circulation, was read by a very large number of people and also believed to be true.

Given the present market conditions, most readers thought of this as a very good offer, and rushed to buy this new laptop. This initially raised the price of Apple’s stock, but when the truth came to light, the prices dropped sharply.

Only two weeks later, a young 18 year old blogger reported that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, had suffered a heart attack. This not-so-innocent lie was again unwittingly repeated by Henry Blodget on the CNN website and soon Apple stock holders were running for cover, thus causing another dip in the stock prices.

An investigation is being conducted, to see if the blogger was trying to make some money by manipulating the stock prices. So far no evidence has been found to prove it. While those in favour of non-censorship of blogs, have so far maintained that blogging is a harmless activity, and allows one to express ones thoughts and feelings without interference, these incidents will force free speech proponents to look at another aspect to blogging, wherein lies can be intentionally spread and eventually cause untold harm.

The more important lesson, though, should be learned by so-called “journalists” at the major news channels who print any random gossip without even investigating how true it is.

Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.

Google believes that it is possible to change to cleaner energy sources in a realistic time frame – by 2030 – while balancing the costs incurred in doing so with economic and social gains in the long run. They plan requires an investment of $4.4 trillion, which is about 40 times their current market capitalisation.

The leader of the team for this project, Jeffery Greenblatt, believes that it is possible to wean the U.S. away from coal and oil and more or less replace them with greener fuels like electricity by 2030, while also reducing the use of petroleum products for cars by 40%.

With a new administration set to take charge shortly, it is the right time to act on this important issue. Google believes that this project will not only save billions of dollars in years to come but will also generate several green jobs, even in states rich in coal and oil.

The search engine company has outlined 3 ways to achieve these lofty goals for an industry they have no experience in:

1. Implement new technologies and methods by which more can be done using less fossil fuel. This basically involves designing equipment to run more efficiently and raising energy efficiency of electrical and electronic gadgets such as personal computers and servers, which usually waste nearly half of the energy they consume. It is also imperative for governments to enforce and aid this effort set by implementing better policies to minimise the use of energy and providing smart meters and real-time pricing to consumers to create awareness and thus reduce unnecessary consumption of energy.
    
2. Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal. This goal is even loftier than the first. Google is trying to develop new forms of renewable energy at prices that are competitive with coal. At present, they believe that wind, solar thermal and geothermal energy have great potential, and since they are easily and abundantly available, it should be possible to use these all over the U.S.A. Google has already invested $45 million for this development, but that is peanuts compared to the investment needed. The government can help by increasing and encouraging research and development and giving long-term tax support to such initiatives.
    
3. Electrify transport and re-invent the electric grid. With manufacturers like Toyota, GM and Ford, working to introduce electric cars over the next 2 years, this should soon be a reality. However, it will also be necessary to install a new smart grid that will allow users to recharge their cars when needed. Google is partnering with GE to help this development.

The Institute for 21st Century Energy has also tabled a “Blueprint for Securing America’s Energy Future”, with 75 policy recommendations, which if implemented would prove be very useful.

The reason for their normally hands-off approach could be that Google has a great variety of people in its work force, and they would obviously not like to have to take sides on social issues such as political alignment and religion, as making a stand could disturb the equilibrium in the workplace.
Any form of discrimination, especially against their employees, is something Google will not stand for, and the company has therefore decided to take a stance on this issue and oppose it.

Proposition 8 is an amendment to the California constitution that will take away the right of gays and lesbians to marry. The bill will be up for ballot in November this year.

If this amendment is passed, it will tantamount to discrimination against gay individuals. Google has a number of gays and lesbians in its work force whom they wish to protect from discrimination. As one individual rightly said, “It is the duty of the majority to protect the rights of the minority”.

While the founders did not wish to hurt the feelings of people on either side of the fence, they believe that it is the fundamental right of people to decide whom they wish to marry, irrespective of whether it is a person of the same or opposite sex. Co-founder Sergey Brin said, “it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8.”

Hopefully the electorate in California will prove that they are a cut above the uneducated rednecks that form the majority in the socially backward nation that is the U.S.A.

The bras were from the well known couture brand Victoria’s Secret, and were collectively valued at $80,000.

The seller used various user IDs to sell his goods through eBay and PayPal. He sold around 2,000 bras in this manner. The goods, originally priced between $40-80 each, were sold for just $25 each, which is certainly a very tempting offer for shoppers.

Apparently, Mr. Tutaya must have provided excellent services as well. Satisfied customers left good reviews on eBay. One of which said, “Honest person to buy from”, and another one said “Excellent Service, Honest, Will do business again, Thank you!”

Investigations reveal that the man did not steal the bras from the stores himself, but was involved with a ring of professional shoplifters. During raids on his premises, records proving 2,000 transactions on eBay and another 650 unsold bras valued at $26,000 were found.

The Supreme Court in Queens has arraigned him on charges of criminal possession of stolen goods. If the charges against him are proven, he faces a maximum sentence of up to 7 years in jail. He will have to return to the court on November 18.

Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown says, “Trafficking stolen goods on the Internet will no more be tolerated than fencing stolen property would be anywhere else.”

Barack Obama and John McCain are now making good use of the wide reach of the Web 2.0 sites and also search and social networking sites to reach out to their electorate.

Barack Obama had announced that while he had decided on who his Vice President would be, he would only declare that name via email and SMS. This was a great idea, as it meant that he would be able to collect a huge database of email addresses and mobile phone numbers, which would then become an excellent means to reach out to the common man.

This is also a clear indication that the methods of communication used by the White House are likely to change in times to come.

Already several sites are available through which ordinary U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens as well can gain information about various subjects such as laws and legislation, discuss policy matters, learn about where the tax payers’ money is being spent and so on.

Even the Libertarian Presidential candidate, Bob Barr, went online on August 21, to talk to the public about his policies and answer their questions to him.

One of the major disadvantages of online campaigning, however, is the ease with which politicians and campaigners can use dirty tricks and spread malicious gossip about their opponents. While this is nothing new in politics, the use of the Internet, will make it easier to spread such false information, while making it more difficult to catch the culprits.

Users have been surprised to see that they could not find any information about any cities or roads in Georgia. Even the capital city, T’bilisi, has not been marked. Only blank outlines of Georgia and its neighbours Armenia and Azerbaijan can be seen.

This led to some questions being raised about whether Google simply deleted the maps of these countries from their website following the ongoing conflict.

Fortunately, in this case Google is not playing God / political arbiter. The omission is merely due to the countries not being important enough for Google to bother with! In their own words, “we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren’t satisfied with the map data we had available.”

It has been standard policy at Google Maps that if they do not get properly detailed maps, they continue searching for better maps, and do not launch the maps until they are fully satisfied with the material available to them.

In all fairness, if it had not been for the recent upheavals that have occurred in that part of the world, most Google users would never have noticed the absence of detail on these maps.

Based on the feedback received, Google has now realised that users would prefer to have some basic information within maps of these countries rather than nothing at all. In accordance with these sentiments, Google has now decided to change their internal policy, and will introduce maps of the few countries that they have not yet covered, with whatever basic information is available to them.

Some of the other countries that do not yet have detailed Google Maps are Guyana, Suriname, North Korea, South Korea and Argentina. Users can make access information about these places on Google Earth in the meanwhile.

Time and again the site has been the first to report some world event or breaking news. The latest example of this quick reporting is the earthquake which occurred around Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.

The first update from Twitter followed only seconds after the event occurred. By the time the first official news of the earthquake emerged, about 4 minutes later, there were already thousands of Twitter updates.

Most news agencies that get their information from the Associated Press or similar news wire services, received their first feed about 9 minutes after the incident, by which time Twitter users had started twittering the information to their contacts from wherever they happened to be at that point in time.

It is only fair to mention, as pointed out by Zoli Erdos, that the news agencies have the added responsibility of verifying the facts of an event before reporting them, and they also have to give in-depth reports, all of which takes time, while Twitter does not carry that burden on its shoulders.

Twitter says that it is the real-time aspect of sending and receiving their updates, whether they are related to world events, or personal notes between friends or professionals, or any other form of communication, that is their motivating factor.

To illustrate their point, Twitter even put up a graph displaying the timeline of when news of the California earthquake was delivered on various channels:

The two firms were in an advanced stage of negotiations, and the price being quoted was in the range of $200 million.

Google was looking into the technical and financial aspects of Digg. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains that usually, by this stage the buyer knows pretty well what they are getting into, but since there is no firm commitment even at the term sheet stage, it is always possible to walk out for any reason.

No official reason has been given for calling off the deal at this late stage of discussions, but one undisclosed source says that it was due to some technical glitch, that the deal did not materialize, while another source reports that there were differences of perspective and ideology between the two companies, that led to the break down of talks.

It is possible, according to Arnold Zafra at Search Engine Journal, that Google just realised that this deal may not really help them to generate more revenue, which would obviously be their bottom line.

Whatever the reason may be, it looks as though Digg has been ditched at the last minute, yet again, and this might make it difficult for them to find a new buyer, as most companies would wonder what the problem was. Digg are supposedly looking to Allen & Co. to help them get some new financing for now.

In what seems like more than just a coincidence, Google started testing a Digg-like voting system for its own organic search results just last week. One might almost wonder – even though it obviously would not be the case – could Google have just freely borrowed ideas from Digg and then walked away once they got what they needed?

According to the study, of the 500 people surveyed, 57% were found to use CNN, for news-related searches while 53% used Google. They were followed by MSNBC with 41%, Yahoo with 40% and MSN.com with 31%.

Further analysis of the study reveal, that one third of the participants said they could find a relevant news video, to their query, at the first attempt, most of the time, while another one third said, they could find the most up-to-date news most of the time, at the first attempt itself.

36% of the participants said, they were Very Likely, to watch a news video, which was listed on a search results page, while they were searching for a news story.

35% of them said they were Very Likely to watch a news video, embedded in a news article.

33% of the respondents felt that they would like to watch more videos in search results, while 20% disagreed with this view, and 47% were neutral.

It was also found that, 51% of people watch video news for under 1 hour a week, while 49% watch video news for over 1 hour a week, and only about 25% watch video news for over 3 hours a week.

79% of users use Search to know the local news. Of these 42% use the local station name as a query, 31% use the city name and 17% use the zip code of the area.

However it was found that TV still beats the Internet as a primary source of news.

Two thirds of the participants in this study were aged between 35 and 64 years, and more than one third of these had an income of over $100,000 per year.

The idea has been propagated with a view to protect children from the harmful content available on mobile sites, such as cyber crimes, pornography and bullying, to which children would be especially vulnerable.

Council members made an earnest request to parents, schools and all others concerned, to help restict mobile phone usage by young students of elementary and junior high school levels to calls only, as far as possible.

Prime Minister Fukuda agreed with the council’s conclusion that the use of mobiles can lead to various problems. He was reported to also wonder if children really need to possess mobile phones at all. It is estimated that about one-third of children between the ages of 7 and 12 years and 96% of high school students use mobile phones.

Only about 1% of these children have blocks on potentially harmful material, thus exposing them to fraudsters, pedophiles and harmful content. Even protected sites such as the school bulletin boards can be hacked into.

The Government will be considering these proposals carefully, before setting up guidelines in the next few weeks.

Live News Search originally served as a plain search service that focused on news stories. The Live News Search homepage contained no more than a search box and a short list of popular current news searches. However, since the growth in popularity of Google News as a news portal, Microsoft has decided to expand the capabilities of their News Search site.

News stories will now get categorised into ten sub-topics in the USA. These are: Top Stories, World, U.S., Local, Business, Politics, Entertainment, Sports, SciTech and Health. The updated version is not currently available to UK users.

Several new features have been added to the News search service to satisfy customer needs and to improve the overall user experience. Some of the highlights are:

1. Aggregated news
   Users can now browse through the latest headlines in a manner similar to that on Google News. Breaking news is placed prominently so that users are always informed of the latest developments. Stories will be grouped according to categories.
2. Localisation
   Local news will be presented across all states in the U.S.A. When the update is rolled out in Europe, the local news feature will provide information specific to individual countries.
3. Multimedia
   Various forms of multimedia including video and images will be accessible through smart-motion thumbnails, so that visitors can read the headlines and watch video footage at the same time.

In effect, the news search page will now contain local, national and international news along with multimedia all at once. For those interested in further details, they can either click ‘more on this story’ or query a topic in the search box. The news search results can also be filtered according to the user’s location and by source.

Suggestions on related topics will also be offered. Articles will be grouped by date. Related videos will be directly available. Further innovations such as the inclusion of blogs are in the planning stages. RSS support is also planned in the near future.

Coverage will also be improved drastically, as Live News will now be powered with information from over 2,000 sources as against only about a 100 in the past.

Live News Search

Protests erupted in Lhasa the capital of Tibet, against the Chinese government. The Chinese government blocked the popular video-sharing website YouTube to restrict the public from getting information on the protests. Soon after, access to other sites such as Yahoo!, Google News, the Guardian UK, The Times Online and the BBC was either completely cut off or selectively filtered.

The Chinese government usually encourages the use of the Internet for educational and business purposes, but has placed online filters to regularly block access to any foreign material that they feel is inappropriate or objectionable. Chinese websites such as youku.com, tudou.com and 56.com have not published any information about the protests in Tibet as theses sites are expected to enforce self-censorship.

Chinese users trying to access YouTube, just found a blank screen. The government has made no official statement about this move. Interestingly, today YouTube has almost as many videos depicting opposition to the Tibetan protests as it has of protesters against the Chinese government.

Video on YouTube showing protests in Tibet

This is the second time in less than a month that an Eastern government has blocked access to YouTube. In the last week of February, the government of Pakistan had ordered the national ISP to block access to YouTube, leading to the site going down worldwide due to a propogation error.

While the Internet allows individuals from all over the world to share their thoughts and experiences, it also allows more and more people in the world to become aware of the plight of others. Stamping out free speech by banning video sharing sites and newspapers might cocoon the citizens of China temporarily, but in the long run, the Chinese government will end up hurting its own credibility in the West.

Yahoo! Buzz

Stories on Buzz will initially be seeded from 100 pre-approved publishers. However, once the system is out of beta more publishers will be invited to share their content and get traffic from the site.

Users can “Buzz” up a story that they find interesting. Every time a user clicks on the Buzz button alongside a story, its Buzz Score is incremented. The search term popularity and the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz also count towards the Buzz Score. Stories with the highest Buzz Score are shown in descending order on the Yahoo! Buzz homepage.

The most attractive thing about Yahoo! Buzz is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! homepage, which can drive millions of visitors to the site in just one day.

Popular stories from each day will be encapsulated on the Buzz Log, the same way that the Buzz Index has been doing for popular search trends on Yahoo! since October 2005.

Yahoo! Buzz is very similar to many other social content websites, e.g. del.icio.us, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and last week’s latest arrival, BigNews from Ask.com.

According to Yahoo!, Buzz is unique because their rankings also take into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search and the number of times that content is shared with friends over email. Internet users are not as likely to be impressed with Yahoo!’s latest offering.

Various generic and niche social news sites already rule this space. Digg receives an estimated 12.5 million monthly users, compared to Propeller, launched by AOL last year, which receives less than 3 million users. Yahoo! Buzz will need to fight hard to wrestle traffic away from these sites, and while publishers might be keen to join, with the hopes of making it to the Yahoo! homepage, users will not be as keen to leave their established favourite social news sites.

The screenshot above illustrates that Yahoo! Buzz is not seeing huge volumes on its first day. While the Buzz Scores of the top stories are in the hundreds, closer inspection reveals that the actual number of votes is much, much lower (read the number of votes below the highlighted “buzz up” button). This could change, of course if the service is properly marketed and diligently promoted for a long time.

We have a couple more screenshots from the system below:

Error message that shows up when you try to Buzz a story that isn’t integrated into the Buzz system.

Related top stories are suggested when you Buzz! up a story.

http://news.ask.com/news

Stories on BigNews will be graded by a ‘BigFactor’, which is based on various indicators such as how recently the event occurred, availability of photographs, the impact created by it, the number of links generated, etc. Unlike Digg though, viewer’s votes will not be allowed to directly affect the story’s rankings.

BigNews will provide top stories to Digg. In return, the top 5 Digg stories and 5 Digg articles that have not garnered any votes yet will be featured at the bottom of the BigNews page. A Blogviews section placed on the right, alongside the main stories, will highlight the latest posts and topics being discussed from popular sites like TechCrunch, CNN, USA Today and The Hollywood Gossip.

Every story on BigNews will include a BigFactor counter and a “Track” button on the upper right hand corner. Passing the mouse over the counter reveals information about the various factors contributing to the score. Clicking on the “Track” button opens a drop down list of popular news aggregators where the story can be followed, including Google, Yahoo! and even regular RSS. The story snippet also cites sources from which the story has been collected.

Ask have implemented this new sub-domain keeping in mind the true spirit of Universal Search. On the homepage visitors can view top news stories, blogs, videos, images and even Digg stories. In contrast, most of the other news aggregator sites stick to one or two result formats, usually text and images.

According to Ask.com, BigNews is a site for people who like to see different viewpoints to their story. For starters BigNews is reported to have more than 10,000 sources. Prominent among them are, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and MSNBC. BigNews has not yet released details on how other publishers can get add their news content. It is expected that such features will be made available shortly.

Official Press Release

In a letter to the board of directors at Yahoo!, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, “Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.”

The first thing that springs to mind when reading this is that the rumours were true – in 2007 and even back in 2006 the two companies were considering ways to partner or join forces!

Another post on TechCrunch UK discusses the regulatory implications of such a merger. Microsoft is no stranger to regulatory scrutiny. The new merger will just add to the heap of inquiries already underway in the EU. The dynamics of this merger will be quite interesting, though…

Yahoo! Search Marketing is the most desirable asset that Microsoft will obtain as a result of this merger. The combined popularity of Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! Search in the UK and Europe will still amount to less than 20% (even less than 10% in many countries) of the total search market. So by no means could this be considered anti-competitive.

Email and instant messaging, however, are a different story. The combined popularity of Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger as well as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail would dwarf all the competition. While the services are free, they do represent significant ad inventory, which could irk Google greatly.

Kelkoo and MSN Shopping are both extremely popular shopping portals that were once competitors, but will now join forces. This could create minor issues from a regulatory stand point, but the greater likelihood is the eventual absorption of the Kelkoo brand in the larger MSN portal.

Microsoft’s offer could not have been better timed. Yahoo! recently announced poor results and a bleak outlook, causing their stocks to fall (NSDQ: YHOO). The news has been received well by Wall Street, with shares of both Yahoo! and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) rising in early hours trading and the overall market receiving a much-needed boost of enthusiasm.

If the two Internet giants do merge, it is not clear what will happen to the workforce. Yahoo! will most likely go ahead with the layoffs announced earlier this week. And as the two companies align departments, more downsizing is likely to occur in order to minimize overlap in job functions.

An interesting question stemming from this latest piece of news is ‘what will this merger mean for the search and search marketing industry’?

Update:

An official press release from Yahoo! states that the board have confirmed receipt of the offer from Microsoft and are considering the offer.

So what does News Corp gain with this acquisition? If the rumors are substantiated, this acquisition could be used to retain and regain both users as well as readers. This is possible through an integrated incorporation of news content in LinkedIn and layering its network’s features on the online site of Wall Street Journal. The declining business classifieds of Wall Street Journal and its other newspapers can also be bolstered by this acquisition. News Corp’s move has quite an advertising potential.

News Corp is recently attracting marketers with the launch of more in house ad network tools through its acquisition of MySpace.

Social networking sites are fast becoming one of the most sought after media distribution channels. In this light, the integration of Wall Street Journal and LinkedIn by News Corp can be a positive step forward.

LinkedIn would definitely gain more mainstream attention through this merger. However comparisons are inevitable with that of the acquisition of MySpace. To begin with, LinkedIn users are not as active as those of MySpace and the traffic is less. But on the other hand, the users of LinkedIn belong to a select professional group with steady incomes. All in all, in order to cash on this new acquisition and give some competition to Facebook, News Corp should think of technologically upgrading LinkedIn. A few more social features will be a nice idea, because there might be more potential in a site that offers more than just an educational and professional background of a person.