This is the first nationally broadcast television ad for the Chrome browser. It is a 91-second ad and was aired during the popular US television series, Glee.

Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users have been sharing the video widely since its release just 3 days ago, generating almost half a million views on YouTube and a lot of discussion for and against it.

This isn’t the first time that Google has shown a definite pro-gay bias. They were pretty vocal about their stance on gay marriage too, when Proposition 8 was up for debate in California. However, this is the first time such a large corporation has launched a major product ad campaign on the back of a strong pro-gay and pro-equality stance.

Everyone from the President of the U.S.A, Barack Obama, to Lady Gaga, to regular gay and heterosxual users have posted messages supporting the campaign and voicing their solidarity with the gay community. A similar campaign in the U.K, called “It Gets Better Today”, featured Prime Minister David Cameron and the Home Secretary, Theresa May.

Well known writer and columnist, Dan Savage, who used to play agony uncle to gays through his column ‘Savage Love’ had first started this campaign. He used it as a means to encourage teenagers that life does indeed get better, by referring to his personal experiences with his partner, Terry. His original video has been viewed well over a million times.

He had said then, “When a gay teenager commits suicide, it’s because he can’t picture a life for himself that’s filled with joy and family and pleasure and is worth sticking around for. So I felt it was really important that, as gay adults, we show them that our lives are good and happy and healthy and that there’s a life worth sticking around for after high school.”

This campaign is especially thoughtful as it seeks to help youngsters who need to come to terms with their so called “different” preferences, and deal with their family friends and colleagues who may have a lot of prejudices towards them and can end up hurting or being mean to them at a very delicate phase of their lives.

At the same time,  this ad will help Chrome to compete with its competitors, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, which currently have a much larger market share than Chrome.

Grindr is the largest all-male location based social networking app and was first launched about 2 years ago.

The app already has about 1.5 million users spread across 180 countries. Of this, about 56,000 are in the New York area itself and around 3,000 new users are joining the service every day. The average user spends about 1.3 hours on this app daily.

Grindr has been available on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad for some time and was launched on Blackberry handsets recently. Now, Android users will be able to interact with users on the aforementioned devices. They will be able to view profiles and photos and also chat with each other.

New Android users will also get a a free trial run of Grindr Xtra for 7 days after they download and run the app for the first time. Grindr Xtra is 100% ad free, thus giving the user more browsing space, and users will be able to view up to 200 men in their area. They will also be able to add 50 favourites. Users will receive notifications even when Grindr is running in the background. To view multiple profiles the user just needs to swipe back and forth. The monthly cost of the service is $4.97, which is lower than most other dating services.

Compared to other dating service, gay or straight, Grindr is definitely far ahead of the pack. The service was built specifically for mobiles, which means that it is built to facilitate interaction between users on the go, who are typing on a small screen. The simplicity of the app is its greatest asset, and is likely to steer its growth further.

When users look up data on words like ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ they do not receive any results. There is no data available for these search terms. However, they do show data for the word ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’.

Yahoo! Search Clues for “Gay” and “Lesbian”

It is, of course, possible that users may assume that these terms have been avoided deliberately with a view to maintaining a family atmosphere, where people need not be embarrassed by the availability of certain search words that have a sexual connotation.

While this attitude itself is quite surprising in this day and age, what is even more surprising is the fact that words such as ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ are very much present.

It is not known whether this act on the part of Yahoo! was accidental or intentional. However, once this fact becomes known to certain sections of users, it may lead to some protests regarding discrimination.

Not The Only Prude

Yahoo! Clues is certainly not the first to avoid the use of certain words that may suggest adult content. In the past, Google Instant, Google Trends and Apple have also disallowed the use of words indicating sexual context without an express confirmation from the user that they wish to view non-family-safe content.

When a correspondent from ZDNet contacted Yahoo! about these omissions, they received a reply to the effect that Yahoo! Clues was still in the beta testing stage and their data is not yet comprehensive. New search terms and data are likely to be added in due course. Yahoo! officials refused to confirm or deny whether terms such as ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ would eventually be included.

The study carried out in the first half of January 2010 found that keywords related to homosexuality had been filtered out in both the Arabic and English versions. When Arabic keywords like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘porn’ or ‘homosexuality’ were queried, a pop-up message appeared saying, “Your country or region requires a strict Bing Safe Search setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

In the English version, use of these keywords is censored for Image searches, but Web searches for gay and lesbian sites are allowed.

Bing searches for ‘gay’ censored in Middle East

Unfortunately, this censorship also blocks out searches related to sex education and gay equality rights.

Bing does not offer users the option to turn off the Safe Search setting in the Middle East.

It was, however, found that if users who are physically present in an Arabic country change their country setting to a version of Bing that is offered in another region, such as North America or Europe, then the censorship does not occur, and users can thus gain access to all the searches that are banned on the Arabic version.

Another way users could initially bypass the censorship was by using another non-filtered keyword along with the filtered keyword. For example, the keyword ‘lesbian’ is filtered but ‘lesbian rights’ was not filtered. This, however, seems to be fixed, and both queries are now being censored.

Surprisingly, OpenNet did not find any censorship relating to other sensitive topics such as politics, terrorism, religious rights or minority issues and gender equality.

As of now, it is unclear whether Microsoft has imposed this censorship upon itself, or is working under instructions from the local authorities.

After a very encouraging opening on Friday, with collections of $14.4 million, the rest of the weekend turned out to be something of a damp squib by comparison. While Friday’s collections made observers predict a first weekend collection of around $50 million, the actual takings at the box office amounted to only about $30 million, which is a very big let down, and rather unusual.

Trade analysts and others from the field, are suggesting that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter caused the downfall of the movie. It is believed that reviews sent out on the social platform could have discouraged prospective viewers from going to see the movie.

While this may certainly be true to an extent, one needs to evaluate objectively why the tweets sent out were so largely negative in the first place.

Could it be possible that the movie was really not what the audiences may have expected, and therefore it did not do well?

The article on Time.com indicated that the second Transformers movie and Ice Age both performed very well during the same time frame, in spite of both being in their second week.

The trend for Bruno on Twitter, seen above, shows a definite spike on Saturday, with Bruno-related tweets accounting for 0.71% of all tweets, followed by a steady descent. The same pattern was seen a week earlier, for Transformers, albeit with a much higher peak – 2.13% of all tweets – followed by a sharper decline in discussions, as seen below.

Comparing Twitter streams for Bruno and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, both have equal numbers of positive and negative reviews today.

However, the real reason becomes more obvious when we compare the US and UK markets. Tweets from the UK are largely positive, which probably reflects its success at the UK box office – 2nd biggest opening ever for an 18+ movie – whereas tweets from the USA focus on the gay content and the sexual obscenities.

Cultural differences, especially rampant homophobia in the USA, are probably a big factor that could explain why the movie is faring poorly in the USA. Another factor could be that the movie is just plain bad. To be fair, though, it is certainly possible that the existance of Twitter allowed viewers who could not stomach the flamboyant homosexual fashion designer to spread their views faster than normally would have been possible.

Filters on Google AdWords are equating the word ‘gay’ with obscenity. Because of this, an ad by poplar Gay news magazine, BGay.com containing the term ‘gay’ could not be uploaded as it failed to meet their editorial guidelines.

The advertiser concerned received a message saying “Gay – Unacceptable Content”. Adding insult to injury, a further message goes on to say “We’ve detected that your ad may contain words often associated with pornography. Google policy prohibits the advertisement of pornography unless it involves consenting adults. Related content is not permitted on the website or as ad text or keywords.”

AdWords editorial policies seem to suggest that the word ‘Gay’ relates to non-consensual sex or sex with minors, which is certainly out of line, and their homosexual clients are bound to be extremely upset with this.

A campaign called ‘Amazon.fail’ was launched on Twitter after this incident came to light. Eventually, Amazon issued a statement saying that due to an error in their system, sexual orientation had been classified as adult content and hence the gay titles had been erroneously deleted. They even promised to restore the titles at the earliest.

Google’s pro-gay stance on California’s proposition 8 has shown them to be very politically correct and mindful of equal rights for everyone. While this is an automatic error caused due to the way their keyword suggestion and association algorithms work, they would do well to set the record straight by correcting this immediately, and also resetting their filters, before they are subjected to a PR nightmare similar to what Amazon is currently facing.

View NDTV: Should blogs be regulated?

Blogging has given people the chance to express their views and feelings on various issues that they feel strongly about, while at the same time providing a platform of anonymity for those who may desire it.

In the social mileu of India this has created quite a hue and cry as some of the blogs seem to be quite “provocative” or offensive to other people. These bloggers face the possibility of receiving comments on their blog that may use unacceptable language and be hurtful to the blogger.

There is a debate raging, at present, in the Indian sub-continent about whether blogs should be regulated. Whether this is possible at all is also an issue under discussion.

Regulation of blogs, according to most bloggers, would be an infringement of their basic right to freedom of expression. As with all forms of media the idea of such censorship does not go down well with the blog authors. They believe that blogging has provided them with a forum to express themselves freely, which they could not do earlier and this freedom should not be curtailed.

As far as the issue of hurting sentiments is concerned, bloggers believe that people who feel offended always have the option of not reading these blogs. Hence their right to freedom of expression should not be censored.

While it is rather unlikely that the government of India, or any other country for that matter, can do much to regulate all blogging activity, or stop the message contained in a blog from going out before it gets written, the fact that they are contemplating this is cause for worry in itself.

Vikram Joshi, a charming gay professional who authors one of the popular blogs featured in the NDTV program says, “The reason a lot of us write blogs is because the mainstream media does not cover issues we face enough. Blogs have turned out to be the only way that young gay men like me can be heard and reach out in this society. If the government clamps down even on this, they will be stifling our voices and curbing our freedoms once again, which isn’t very different than what happens in dictatorial regimes!”

Video chat, mobile dating, social networking, blogging and video sharing have all been rapidly absorbed by gay Internet users. Sites like Bent.com, DList, Made In Brazil and ManD8 have adopted new Internet technologies and taken the competition to a different level. While Gaydar remains extremely popular, its basic interface and dated chat / messaging system provide minimal interactivity.

The largely tech-savvy gay Internet population has started looking at better quality sites that offer them more ways to interact with other users. Gaydar have recognised the competitive threat and are slowly reacting.

Gaydar Mobile allows users to search for other members by location as well as matching profile details, message other users and vote on user profiles in their “SexFactor” section. While these are early days, the immense popularity of the parent site might be just enough to drive a lot of traffic to the mobile site.
Launching a mobile site and a blog service might help Gaydar keep off some of the competition, but in the long run they will definitely improve the site functionality if they intend to stem user attrition to the newer, cooler sites, or even long-time competitors Gay.com. QSoft, the parent company seem to have recognised this already and are working on Gaydar Nation – a single portal that brings together all their different services, brands and features. The new site is currently in beta.

• Gaydar Mobile
• Gaydar Nation