The prison is located in St. Petersburg which is the second largest Russian city. The prison is known as Kresty prison.

While it can easily be understood that the companies which have joined Twitter, would have done so in order to remain conspicuous and thus indirectly help monetization, the idea of a jail joining the social network is not quite so easy to understand. In fact it seems quite strange at first.

The first few tweets which were sent out from here were about the history of the jail, which had been built in 1892, and where Leon Trotsky the exiled communist leader had been held captive after the Bolshevik revolution.

The latest tweet received from Kresty prison has advertised job vacancies, which is quite a novel idea under the circumstances.

Those who wish to follow the tweets from Kresty prison can check out http://twitter.com/sizo_kresty.

The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in these markets will grow much faster over the next 5 years than in the developed countries.

Keeping this fact in mind, marketers in industries such as media, financial services, telecommunications and consumer products will need to remodel their marketing strategy if they wish to target these developing markets.

Taking into consideration the difference in demand for Internet and mobile connections in these developing countries gives invaluable insight in the market’s requirements.

In developed countries, a per capita income of about $20,000 is required for Internet penetration to reach 50%, and the demand rises further with the income.

Mobile penetration, on the other hand, requires a much lower per capita income – just about $5,000 – to reach 50%. Several consumers also have more than 1 mobile phone, enabling penetration can exceed 100%! In fact, mobile penetration in countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia is higher than that in the U.S. and Canada due to the fact that  mobile handsets are more affordable than personal computers.

It is estimated that in the next 5-7 years, mobile penetration will be 140 phones for 100 people even in countries with low GDP.

Mobile communication in emerging economies may generate even higher growth in business, than other mediums. While TV and the Internet can be used to reach larger and targeted audiences in developed countries, it may be wiser and easier for marketers to use mobile to reach larger audiences in developing countries, especially since Internet penetration in these countries will still take a while to grow to the same levels as those in the U.K. and Europe.

A reverse innovation model has been created, mobile advertising is being nurtured in developing coutries and then transferred to the developed markets. Investment in mobile advertising and technology would also yield better results to businesses in these developing countries.

Mozilla is expected to launch the latest version of their browser, Firefox 3.1, shortly. In Russia, however, the default page will now be Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, instead of Google.

According to Harvey Anderson, who is the General Counsel at Mozilla, they have conducted a very extensive and detailed study into the matter before arriving at this decision. He says, “Russian users really wanted direct access to Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds. As a result we’re planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds.”

The change by Mozilla from Google to Yandex at this point of time is particularly interesting, given the fact that in August 2008, the Russian online ad market grew by 73% compared to what it was in the same month a year earlier. It has also been estimated that the Russian online ad market will grow from $400 million in 2007, to $4 billion by 2017, which is a 10-fold increase in a span of just 10 years.

This move will certainly boost the fortunes of Yandex at the expense of Google.

In the past, Google and Mozilla have shared a mutually beneficial or symbiotic relationship for quite a long time. Google received exposure by being the default home page and default search engine on Mozilla browsers, and in turn, Mozilla earned a major share of its revenue through Google.

This happy situation may now be on a slightly sticky wicket, given that Mozilla will replace Google with Yandex in Russia and Google is now promoting its own browser, Chrome.

In fact Google believes that by 2010, the internet advertising market in Russia alone could touch the $1 billion mark. In 2007, the Russian market was worth $200 million, but Google hopes that this spend will seem insignificant in the next few years.

A Russian executive of Google, Vladmir Dolgov, says that the online advertising market, has captured the imagination of people in Russia, and already 75,000 of Russia’s 3 million registered companies are advertising online. Surely others should follow soon.

While Google continues to compete with Yandex.ru and Rambler.ru, Russia’s leading search engines and ad networks, and is keen to get more and more searchers on their site, their operations will be controlled from Moscow and St. Petersburg, only, since both are close to the Eastern end of the European union, which makes accessibility to existing operations easier.

Google first entered the Russian market in 2006, with a meager 5 percent of the market share. It now holds over a third of the market according to a report by comScore.

coComment allows users to keep track of all the comments and discussions they are participating in or observing on the web. Users get notified when someone adds to their comment stream or discussion. And, if they’re bloggers, the users can display the comments they make elsewhere back on their own blog.

Farhad Divecha: Let’s start with a quick introduction of what coComment is all about…

Matt Colebourne: Certainly, we are one stop shop to track, manage, share,and explore conversations on the Web. We can keep track of all the conversations that an individual is having, and so they can place comments on 50 different sites, local forums and whole bunch of different places. We will follow all those conversation and they will receive updates. We would also allow them to share those conversations with other people via, say their Facebook profile or any other profile for that matter. Currently we have about fourteen and a half million that we are tracking on a thousands of different sites.

Farhad: So could you essentially pick conversations from a number of places and syndicate or show them on any other place that you wanted to?

Matt: Yes, exactly. And all of your conversation will show up on your profile page on coComment.

Farhad: Can users then decide who can see these conversations and who cannot or is everything just public information?

Matt: Users can decide. The new version gives users the opportunity, should they wish to control who can see everything they say.

Farhad: Let’s talk a bit about the social aspect of this. I find this concept quite interesting because one of the problems that I personally face, and in fact quite a few of the people I have spoken to recently also face, is the problem of too much social variety. We all have profiles on a number of different networks and blogs that we visit regularly.

You start talking in one place about one thing; you like the discussion there and you might share it with a few friends by then starting a new conversation elsewhere about the same topic. A little bit down the line you see somebody else talking about the same topic, and you pipe in there. Soon you have participated in a conversation on the same topic in 10 different places with 10 different people, and you start losing track of what you have said. How does coComment’s offering tie in that social aspect and does it rely in some ways on everybody who is conversing with you also using it?

Matt: No not necessarily; because you can bring people in the conversation using a range of third-party tools such as Twitter but I think what makes a great conversation the first thing is the topic should be something that the audience is interested in, and the other thing is that people who participate in the conversation. For example you could visit a cathedral and just have a look around, which isn’t the most exciting thing for me. However, if the tour guide I appointed was absolutely mesmerising and told me the history of the place and really brought it to life, I would have had a different experience and enjoyed the same activity thoroughly.

For us the question was therefore, if that is what makes a good conversation, how do we bring this model online? We are not trying to build a social network. What we are doing is allowing the natural conversational behaviour to operate on the Internet, allowing people to share stories and getting others to participate.

Farhad: In some ways, though, that still leaves one slight problem unsolved … if you have these conversations in 10 different places, and they might be conversations around a really interesting topic and in each of those places you have two or three really interesting participants with whom you want to carry on the conversation, you still have to go to 10 different places to carry on that conversation, or somehow get all of them to converge in one place.

Matt: Bear in mind that all of those conversation are tracked in a single location, so you are only ever 1 click away from each one. What the system will also do is tell you who your neighbours are, and so therefore point out to you that they are commenting on the four different blogs that you’re commenting on, and therefore you should possibly connect to them. What coComment cannot do is take the user away from the site. So while you can’t bring the conversations together, what you can do is view them all in the same location so that it becomes much easier.

Farhad: That’s good because it does take the pain away to a great degree.

Now let’s talk a little bit now about the reason we actually got in touch in the first place. A post that we published in mid-January talked about the Government of India’s plans to regulate blogging and whether that was a good idea. Also, in recent times we have had a lot of different stories come up in the news from countries like Russia, China and Iraq where people do not enjoy freedom of speech as we do. People in these countries use blogs to voice their opinions and use search engines like Google to find information.

In countries like Iraq where people are not typically connected, even now, to the World Wide Web, and the newspapers are controlled by the government or the dictatorships, people use blogs and the Internet in general to voice opinions that otherwise would never be heard.

How is coComment changing that, or making it easier to give a voice to individuals from the various parts of the world where normally one would never have heard their opinions?

Matt: Firstly the biggest one, probably, is access to a larger audience. What could have been a small cry lost in the wilderness could now be heard by millions if what the individual was saying was relevant.

There is also the bigger issue of freedom of speech. What people who oppose that individual’s freedom of speech tend to use as defence is the disruption created and the impact on other individuals. What we’re doing here is saying “let’s turn things round a little bit.” What we say to people is “let us not impinge on what people want to say,” we say this to publishers, brand owners and corporations as well, “because if the users don’t say it here, they will say it somewhere else, and you may never know about it.”

Rather than censoring on behalf of individuals, we let the other individuals react and take the first person down. We should treat bloggers and their visitors as adult. Users then think about the social consequences of saying something and that makes each user choose what they do or not say. This is a far, far better solution than trying to get an employee or officer or a censor board to moderate on behalf of individuals.

I think we support the freedom of the individual to say what they want and we also support the freedom of the reader to choose what to read.

Farhad: Just playing the devil’s advocate here, one could make the argument that a system like yours could also work very well for those who want to stifle freedom of speech.

Instead of having to monitor a hundred thousand different venues where a person or a dissident could go and speak. Now all they need to do is to come to one place and monitor all the conversations. In some ways, this system is making it easier for dictatorships or governmental regimes who do not advocate freedom of speech and try to thwart it.

It becomes so much easier for the government of China or a dictator or a Communist President to pinpoint who the particular dissident is and where they are voicing those opinions and shut them down by whatever means. And what’s worse is that the means these guys use tend to be a lot more drastic than just banning conversations or user profile or giving them lower trust ranks.

What would your response be to that sort of a counter argument, I mean, it is making things easier, isn’t it?

Matt: We did not make things easier. To be honest with you we do not do anything that could not already be done. We just present conversations in a way that benefit the end user. We have not built anything that can be employed by people who want to abuse freedom of speech to do something they cannot already do.

Farhad: Yes absolutely, you are right there. You have not made it possible, but you have made it easier

Matt: Well we have made it slightly, but bear in mind we certainly mitigated the very small potential for misuse because we don’t require the users to tell us who they are, we don’t require them to be registered for three days and can use the guest id for that period, but also we don’t assume any ownership of the content; The content either belongs to the site that hosts it or to the end user, and what that means is that we believe the content is the user’s content and we will protect their rights to it, and to do whatever they need to with it without heed to any kind of oppressive government.

Farhad: Alright, could you tell me a little bit more about the data privacy aspect. You touched upon this yourself when you said that users don’t need to identify themselves on your website but very often most other websites do require users to identify themselves before they start placing comments also most comment systems will very easily track the IP Address etcetera. So is there some way that users could use the coComment system to hide their identities?

Matt: I wouldn’t say they can actively use it to hide because obviously they’re still commenting on the site and not on coComment. They can essentially use something called meta conversations where the person can write a comment on any website anywhere in the world and it looks like it’s on the site, but actually it is hosted on coComment. Now if they do that those conversations can be public or private. If it’s public, any other coCommenter can see it. If it is private, only the people that you select will see it.

Farhad: When people can see your comments, though, would they also be able to run a backwards check or who is and figure out where you are coming from?

Matt: The point is, that they won’t even see the conversation unless you’ve chosen to let them see it. They won’t even know the conversation is there.

Farhad: But you see, at times with people who want to voice their opinions, they want to share their views but not necessarily be found. Someone who is against the Russian Premier right now, or against the Iraqi government, would want everybody else to hear what his thoughts are but still not necessarily be want to be found.

Matt: In which case this would be perfect. They would set up the system to make the comments public to coComment, make that available to a limited audience, such that those people who are interested get notified and then select whom they want to allow to participate.

Farhad: It would be interesting to know how many people are aware of such things in the third world, and can use it. And with knowledge of such a system whether countries like India and China would even be having debates about regulating blogs because they would then realise that they can’t do much, since there is always going to be a way around it.

Matt: Yes, it is quite a neat way around it, because even though the content appears to be sitting on the site, to end users and the search engines, it is actually sitting on our servers and getting sent direct to the end users.

Farhad: I now have just two last questions – what is the future going to hold for coComment and what do you think is the future of blogging, conversations and social networking online? Which way are we headed? Which way are you guys headed? And which way is the entire blogosphere and the Internet headed, in your opinion?

Matt: Our opinion is that the whole aspect of commenting or conversations is going to become bigger, because essentially Web 2.0 is about interaction, people interacting online is becoming ubiquitous – even my 70-year old mother is going onto website and commenting rather than writing letters. This space is absolutely exploding, and rightly so, because what it does is it enables people to find out more information, to say what they think about it and defend there views publicly in front of thousands, in a way that was never possible before. That can only be a good thing.

Farhad: Well, it has been very interesting talking to you. I think the conversation has touched upon some very interesting topics. For us here it does not seem as much of a minefield as it does out in the East right now. We take this freedom for granted. I would have been shocked if the UK government or the US or Canadian government ever even considered regulating blogs or any other form of social networking, but there are people out there who see blogging as the only venue to air their views. I hope that this right is never taken away from them.

Screenshot of a coComment user profile