Google has stated that they are doing this because they wish to create a “beautiful, simple and intuitive experience” for their users.

In effect, the new policy will make it possible to share information provided by a user on one Google product across all other Google products and features. This includes Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, Google Plus and others.

A major stumbling block of this new policy is the fact that users will not have the option to disagree with the policy if they wish to continue using any of these Google services.

Consumer Objections

Users have voiced their discontent via comments and votes on the YouTube video introducing the new, unified privacy policy. The major bone of contention for users seems to be that information from any one Google service will now be accessible to a host of other services.

Regular consumers are not blind to the fact that Google makes its money from advertising. They also accept that in order to advertise on all of its services, Google does need to be able to pull information from one service and use it elsewhere. What they dislike is the idea that Google is mixing the concept of privacy in a closed system such as GMail with that on an open network such as Google+ or YouTube.

Official Investigations Triggered

Not surprisingly, the announcement has not gone down too well with certain groups. Gary Davis, the Data Protection Commissioner in Dublin, where Google’s European headquarters are based, has said that their office would be “further assessing the implications of the changes now that they are launched to users”. He also said that “Google has a responsibility to ensure that any such changes are made abundantly clear to users”.

Greg Jones from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office said, “Failure to inform users about changes may not only lead to a loss of trust in the company, but could also mean that they are failing to comply” with U.K. law.

Exceptions to this new policy will be Google Books, Google Chrome and Google Wallet. These sites will continue to retain their own privacy policy.This exception is due to legal reasons.

The new policy will come into effect from the 1st of March 2012.

A study recently conducted by ecommerce firm Baynote, has found that only 90 people out of the 1,032 individuals surveyed in the United States were in any way influenced by retailers’ pages on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Of this, 59% said that they bought products directly from the retailer’s own website.

In fact, 80% of those surveyed said that the social networks had no influence whatsoever on their buying habits. They claimed that recommendations made by social networks had no bearing on their purchase decisions.

Search and email were the dominant drivers of promotions and recommendations. While 93% of those surveyed used the Internet to research products, 91% rated recommendations from search engines as relevant and 63% found search engine promotions useful.

It was also found that tablets were becoming increasingly popular for browsing through the goods available online, as the relatively larger screen of the tablet as compared to the mobile makes browsing more convenient.

93% of these people also confirmed that they use tablets only as a means to browse the availability of products and then they buy the product directly from a store.

2011 U.S. online holiday shopping experience. Source: Baynote

While this study might alarm some readers, the core findings are not that surprising. Social media remains a great branding channel and should not be perceived as a venue to hard-sell products.

Facebook’s Messenger app, which is still in the trial stage, allows users to access the social network without opening a browser or while browsing other sites on the Web at the same time.

Users can chat with their Facebook friends, receive status updates and friend request notifications and view the news ticker.

The app only supports Windows 7 at present. Once the app has been set up, a user can log in by right-clicking the Facebook icon in the Windows system tray and selecting Log in.

Once logged in, the user pretty much remains permanently logged into Facebook unless they expressly choose to log out, which isn’t as easy to do. There’s no log out option in the main app window. In order to log out, you right click the Facebook icon and select Log out. Using this option will completely log the user out of Messenger as well as Facebook.

While this strategy of keeping users logged in by keeping the log out mechanism out of regular sight might seem cheeky, it doesn’t end there. The app allows users to ‘Exit’ and close the Messenger app but still remain logged in to Facebook. This keeps users logged in even if they log off the machine for when they log back into the PC.

Much like Windows Messenger, users of this service can also use the ‘x’ button at the top right hand corner, to close the side bar but still continue getting notifications and view chats.

While the app allows users to chat or message individuals, it is so far not possible to chat with a group of friends. As far as user privacy is concerned, the same settings that are applicable to Facebook will be applicable on the app.

According to this report, the list is similar to the one they had released last year. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of unique visitors to most of the top sites.

It is no surprise that search, social networking and video remain at the top of the reasons for mobile browsing with Google, Facebook and YouTube scoring the top three rankings respectively.

The world’s 10 most popular mobile websites are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vkontakte.ru
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com
10. twitter.com

The report has compared the findings between November 2011 and November 2010. Apart from seeing rapid growth in Asia, Opera Mini has also found a substantial increase in mobile Web usage in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia.

The Prince in question Alwaleed bin Talal is a majority share holder of the company Kingdom Holding through which the investment in Twitter has been made. This holding now gives the Prince a strategic stake in the network, which means that he owns more than 3% of the shares.

As a result of this investment Twitter will now have a valuation in excess of $10 Billion.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has recently been voted as the richest Arab businessman by the magazine ‘Arabian Business’. He is also the largest individual investor in Citigroup Inc. and also holds a stake in News Corp. He has also invested in Apple and General Motors.

This infusion of $300 million will enable Twitter to go ahead with their plans of a redesign in order to make the network faster and simpler. This should also attract more advertisers to the site.

While Twitter has confirmed the investment, they have not given any further details so far.

Twitter had also received $800 million in August from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner who has also invested in Facebook. At that time twitter had a valuation of $8 billion.

Considering the fact hat Twitter had played a significant role in the Arab Spring protests earlier this year, it may seem quite surprising that an Arab Prince has decided to invest in it. It could however be attributed to his good business acumen.

The new version of StumbleUpon will make it easier for users to discover content on the Internet. This is the first time in almost a decade that StumbleUpon has gone in for major changes to their site.

StumbleUpon’s homepage now has a new design as well as anew logo. The earlier blue and green logo has been replaced by this orange and white one.

An Explore / search box on the top right hand corner of the homepage allows users to type a search term or select one from the drop-down menu that appears when typing to discover content related to that topic. These “Channels”, which are now emphasized a lot more on the new homepage allow users to focus on subjects of their interest rather than randomly stumbling across the web.

Redesigned StumbleUpon homepage listing Channels of interest

User profile pages have also been overhauled completely. The new profile layout once again focuses on content discovery, making it easier for visitors to a profile to view and stumble web pages that the user liked. Following users and making new connections is also a lot easier now with the new profile layout.

StumbleUpon user profile

One of the most important updates, though, is the change to the Stumble bar. The toolbar, which can be used with most modern browsers, is still the most popular way for users of the site to discover new content. It contains the same features as before along with a more obvious marker highlighting “Sponsored” stumbles via the Paid Discovery advertising platform, thereby making it easier for users to differentiate sponsored sites from organically referred content.

One of the main reasons for this redesign is the huge growth that StumbleUpon has witnessed on mobile. They have seen a growth of 800% year on year and they wish to give their users a better experience that is reflected across all platforms.

Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon’s CEO, told Fast Company, “We’re doing a complete re-launch of the site, and a lot of it is inspired by our mobile experience”.

StumbleUpon continues to remain the dark horse of social media. The site doubled its user numbers since 2010 to cross 20 million users in October 2011 and is still counted as one of the largest referrers of social traffic in the USA, in spite of its user base being a fraction of that of Facebook.

It has been found that the following of a candidate on Twitter, can give a very good idea about how he will eventually fare.

When the number of Twitter followers of a candidate gains momentum, it has been found that his poll results follow suit. On the other hand, when the number of Twitter followers falls or stops gaining ground, his poll results are also negatively affected.

This trend had been predicted a while ago by Zach Green, CEO of Twitter election research 140elect. Now he has proven his theory based on the performance of the candidates.

He says that Newt Gingrich got a lot of new followers after he announced his candidacy on May 11 and then again after a good debate performance on September 7. At the same time his overall standing in the polls has also improved.

In comparison, Rick Perry received a boost following the announcement of his candidacy on August 13, but he has lost ground since then, in the polls. Concurrently it was found that a lot of people on Twitter have been mocking him rather than following him.

Other candidates such as Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have followed similar trends. When the number of their followers rises, they also make good gains in the polls, but when the number of followers falls, they lose ground.

Herman Cain too has lost Twitter followers as well as poll points following allegations of sexual harassment leveled against him.

Do these signals indicate that Twitter will be able to accurately predict the results of the GOP poll results? Or is it just a coincidence?

Google will synchronise the music to a Google Music library in such a way that the playlist will remain the same on all devices, be it a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Each user will be able to store upto 20,000 songs for free, but they will have to be manually uploaded.

Music can also be purchased from a music store in the Android Market. Over 13 million tracks from the big music companies like Sony, EMI and Universal will be available to buy, in addition to tracks from several independent labels.

Google Music on an Android mobile

Individual artists who have the necessary permissions will also be able to upload their music and build their own artist page through the artist hub interface.

This service will obviously compete with Apple’s iTunes. The cost of each track on Google Music will be the same as that on iTunes, ranging between $0.69 and $1.29. However, the cloud computing service by Google will be free, whereas Apple charges $25 for it.

While Google may not generate a lot of revenue through this service, it will help them build customer loyalty to Android-based mobile phones. Once a user has purchased music from a particular service like Apple or Google, they are unlikely to switch to another device.

The service will provide some music for free everyday, and those tracks will be displayed in the music library. Amazon also offers free tracks daily, but the service is rather complicated.

Google Music has already been integrated into Google+ and that will make it more popular as it can now be shared with friends. Social aspects of Google Music could be the main driver of its success, as it could potentially out-shine popular services such as Spotify and Last.fm primarily due to its larger user base.

Reviews of the service are lukewarm. A lot of the criticism focuses on the fact that the service has been released 8 years later than iTunes. The service also requires users to upload each and every song they wish to store and can create problems when users upload old iTunes tracks that had DRM encryption.

The biggest plus points in favour of Google Music are the price – free! – and the true portability of the service – it can be played on any device, incuding iPhones and iPads.

Most industry experts, though, recognise the Google Music service for what it is – a suitable replacement for the iTunes eco-system for Android devices and a means to complete and tether the Android user experience.

Horowitz emphasized the use of Circles to easily segment audiences when communicating brand / product / corporate messages and the Hangout feature, which allows brands to host face-to-face video sessions with customers. Both of these are features that would appeal to large businesses.

The real power of Google+Pages, though, lies in their ability to influence search engine rankings for a brand or product name. This alone is reason enough for all business owners to want to ensure that they do have a presence on the otherwise placid network. This is also Google’s only ace in an otherwise extremely weak deck.

A number of bloggers have labelled the new feature a rush job or a Facebook / Twitter rip-off. What they overlook is the fact that unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ can integrate with a number of even more useful services, not least of which is Google Search and YouTube, to change the way brands can reach their target audience.

Delicious was part of the Yahoo! network and used to be one of the most popular sites in its category. In December last year, there was news that Yahoo! intended to shut down the website.

Following this, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who had earlier developed and then sold YouTube, decided to buy it over from Yahoo! Delicious was taken over as part of their new company called Avos, which they had formed in April 2011.

Both Hurley and Chen had been thinking about the fact that there is always a flood of information on the Internet, and it is very difficult for users to go through all of it and reach the information that they are really looking for. With the revamp of Delicious, they hope to be able to simplify this process for users.

The new Delicious is supposedly a place where users can see the most recent links shared around topical events. On the homepage, users will now see browseable “stacks”, which are collections of images, videos or links to a particular topic.

Stack on Delicious about the TV programme, Merlin

Speaking about the newly launched site, Chad Hurley sa, “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing.” If this idea catches on, Delicious could soon become far more popular than it ever was in the past.

However, the first mover advantage that Delicious once had is no longer the case. Sites like Facebook and Google+ already have far more viewers and are extremely popular for social sharing. StumbleUpon has steadily grown in popularity as a social discovery tool.

Since the demise of Delicious a number of bookmarking sites have stepped in, but none have become quite as popular. While the organisation of information that the new service offers is great, conceptually, the new owners of Delicious might find that their absence from the market has cost them dearly and that they’ve missed the boat to become a social media powerhouse.

Among the projects that will be affected by this decision are Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki and Subscribed Links.

Aardvark is a question and answer social search site. Notebook was used to clip and save URL, text, and images. Fast Flip was a tool to enable fast news browsing and sharing. Sidewiki was an early social search effort that allowed users to read and comment on any website. Subscribed Links allowed users to customise search results.

The common theme with all these services was that they were attempts at socialising search.

Now that Google has introduced a new social network in the form of Google Plus and it is actually turning out to be more successful than any of the previous attempts, they will shut down all of these social sites and focus on strengthening Google +1.

Additionally, Google’s shutting down or gradually discontinuing a number of other services, some of which were quite popular. These include Google Ddesktop and several APIs, plugins and gadgets it supports, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security and Image Labeler. Components and features from many of these services are already visible in newer Google offerings and will continue to be used in other Google services.

The changes were initiated by Larry Page to improve overall efficiency. Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research has reportedly said, “We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential, but by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.”

The prime minister has justified his stance by saying that the riots had been “organised via social media” He further says , “When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

While it is indeed certain that misuse of the social media should not be allowed, the idea to ban the social media seems rather simplistic.

It can be argued that when social media did not exist, riots still occurred. In the olden days, people got together in small groups to discuss their strategy and then disseminated the plans in person. Later when the print media came into being, the use of news letters and pamphlets to propagate ideologies and plans was widely used.

In light of this, a blanket ban on the use of social media would be equivalent to ‘shooting the messenger’.

Also such an act would also prevent those with good intentions. There are many people who are using the same platforms to propagate peace and to help those affected by the riots.

It has now been decided that representatives of Facebook, Twitter and RIM are to meet with the home secretary Theresa May to discuss the steps they can take to prevent the anti-social elements from spreading further arson, as well as to discuss how these websites can be of use to detect those who are responsible for the mayhem caused.

These sites have gladly agreed to meet with the authorities and extend full cooperation to deal with the current crisis.

On the other hand, groups that advocate that people have the freedom to use all media to interact with each other have opposed the idea of banning the social media, and have even compared the move to what governments in places like China and Saudi Arabia may do.

These apps can be of great use to residents of the city as well as to tourists. Since the mobile apps are available to users at all times, it is a great way for people to make enquiries about the city and get up to date information even when they are on the go.

The ‘311 feature’ which is a built in app is very commonly used, according to Andy Sparks, UI and project and sales manager for eproximiti, a software development firm specializing in the health care industry and municipalities.

According to him since cameras and GPS facility are generally available in all smart phones, this app can be used to find out not only about events taking place in the city but also current details of graffiti information about potholes and bad roads, or fallen trees in some area and the like.

Earlier, information about such incidents could only be reported through phone calls and computers, but these apps on smart phones have simplified this process to a great extent. According to Andy Sparks, these apps can also be used to spread information about news initiatives being taken up in the region and increase citizen participation through increased awareness.

Some of the cities which have already introduced such local apps are Baltimore, New Orleans, Ottawa and Charlotte.

A well known mobile app called ‘Proximitips’ functions as a hyper-local social magazine, that not only provides news reviews and promotions but also has facilities for purchases and bookings.

This app can be used through street name city name or suburb. The app also allows users to interact with each other thus making the information more interesting and engaging.

Proximitips has been developed in London’s Tech City, and is available in throughout Europe covering 125 million places of interest.

The riots first broke out on the 6th of August in retaliation to police shooting a 29-year-old man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham (North-East London) on the 4th of August.

Local residents started to protest outside the Tottenham police station, but the protest then spread to a much larger area, involving about 20 neighbourhoods. The protest quickly turned into a violent riot.

A lot of the rioters resorted to using the Internet as a means of coordinating their “protests”. Possibly the most popular means here has been Blackberry Messenger, which allows people to communicate through its instant messaging technology in-built on all Blackberry handsets.

Other services such as Facebook and Twitter were also used, of course.

Not only were people instigated to take part in the riots through the use of these services, but photos and videos of arson were also uploaded and circulated widely. This further instigated otherwise casual observers to join in on the rioting and looting.

The other side to this story is the fact that the very technology that helped spread the violence is now being used to identify and locate the perpetrators of the violence.

Metropolitan Police using Flickr to catch London looters

Blackberry’s instant messaging service RIM will now be used by the police to find those who instigated the public to eventually led to so much of damage and destruction.

It is believed that the police are already making use of the data provided by RIM, and working within the guidelines of the Data Protection Act they will be able to make use of this information to nab the culprits.

Some civilians are also helping the police with this investigation. A group of people from Google have formed London Riots Facial Recognition. This is a group that requires membership and will make use of technology to help identify the arsonists.

Even more admirably, a number of civilian groups also used social media to band together and fight off looters as well as to organise clean-up groups to rectify the damage in their neighbourhoods without waiting for the government to act on it.

While London is quickly recovering from the shock and remedying the damage already done, most have been remind that while technology can be harmful in the hands of the wrong people, it can be extremely helpful when used by the right people with the right intentions.

Google had purchased the domain name and trademark Photovine about a month ago. At that time, people were left wondering why Google was interested in a photo sharing site, when they already have Picassa.

Now that it is known that Photovine will function as a photo-sharing app for smartphones, the purchase makes sense.

Photovine will be different from other photo-sharing sites. It will allow users with common interests to connect with each other. The FAQ describes Photovine thus:
“A vine is like a constantly growing family of photos connected through a common caption created by you, your friends, and people all over the world.”

Some examples of vines could be: “What Weekends Are Made Of”, “Secret Stuffed Animal”, “Party People”, or, “Love of My Life”.

As people add photographs to vines, they tell their own stories about the moments, images, and ideas that define our lives in a way that’s social, creative, and fun.

Photovine is run by Slide, which Google had bought over in August 2010 for $182 million.

The concept of collecting a chain of photos that are related to each other through a common caption is quite similar to the new version of Twitter search, where photo and video content are attached through hashtags.

It is not immediately known whether or not Google will eventually integrate Photovine into their new social network Google Plus. At present, Photovine is an invitation only service, and those interested can ask for an invite on www.photovine.com.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

Researchers at Nielsen have found that consumers between the ages of 12 and 17 watch mobile videos more than any other age group. During the last quarter of 2010 they watched 7 hours and 13 minutes of mobile video per month on an average. This is almost twice as much as the average 4 hours and 20 minutes of mobile video watched by the general population.

Teenagers use mobile text messaging more than twice as much as people of other ages do. In the first quarter of 2011 they sent an average of 3,364 texts, compared to 1,640 texts by those between 18-24 years of age. They are also more receptive to mobile advertising than others. 58% of them said that they “always” or “sometimes” watch mobile ads.

These youngsters are also quite addicted to social media. While they account for just 7.4% of the total number of social media users, they account for 78.7% of visits to social networks and blogs.

On the other hand, teens talk much less on the phone today than teens did in the 80s and 90s. They spoke an average of 515 minutes on the phone compared to 750 minutes by those between the ages of 18 and 24. The only demographic to talk less on the phone are users over 65 years of age.

Television viewing among teens is  much less than other age groups. While this might seem to be a good thing for their health and development, it actually isn’t. Their time is spent much more in front of a mobile or computer screen. The average American watched 34 hours and 39 minutes of TV per week. 12-17 year olds watch only 23 hours and 41 minutes per week. Teenagers also use home computers much less than older people. 18 year olds spent 39 hours 50 minutes online, of which 5 hours 26 minutes were spent streaming videos.

Children under 10 typically spend a lot of time watching TV, but now they are being exposed more and more to digital activities such as playing online games, watching videos and using social networks.

According to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, 30% of 3 year olds spend time on computers and 80% of 4-5 year olds do so. 90% of those in the 6-8 year bracket use computers regularly.

The +1 button allows users to share stories and articles with their network of friends. In functionality, this is similar to the ‘Like’ button from Facebook and is a significant step towards the concept of social search by Google.

When a user clicks the +1 button the user’s network – as defined by the friends on their Google Account – will be notified about it.

Sites that are interested in making use of this new facility can set it up by visiting Google’s +1 button code generator page. The button can be set up in a choice of four sizes ranging from 15 pixels to 60 pixels. Users have the option to include a counter that can indicate the number of +1s a particular page has received. The feature is currently available in 44 languages.

Generate a +1 button for your site

Although it might be too early to judge, one cannot help wondering how successful this new service will be. As of now, not too many sites have jumped to add this function to their sites.

Some of the popular sites to have already included it are TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land – all search industry and tech veterans.

However, most of the really popular blogs and websites have not yet added this service. Sites such as Business Insider, Perez Hilton and TMZ have all chosen to wait and watch whether users will pick up on this new service or if it will flop like Google’s other ventures into the social space.

Sites such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Product Search and the Android Market are expected to add +1 shortly. These are Google-owned properties, though. Out of the top 10 most popular blogs, only 3 have added the +1 button conspicuously on their pages:

Success of the +1 button will be determined largely by the general public’s adoption of this feature. If Google’s history with social networking is anything to go by, few will be holding their breath for this one!

The footballer in question, a Premier League player, has recently been in the news for his alleged involvement with former Miss Wales and Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. The concerned player has brought an injunction against his name being published by the regular tabloid publications.

However, the story has been among the trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, where his name was revealed and discussed widely. This only means that even though the newspapers are being restrained from publishing his name with regards to the story, his involvement in it is common knowledge.

A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald has taken the liberty of publishing his name. They have also displayed his photo with a black bar across his face and the word “Censored” written across.

While this could be seen as willful opposition to the injunction, they have explained in their editorial that it is “unsustainable” for newspapers to be prevented from publishing this hot piece of news while the individual’s name is being openly discussed on Twitter, and therefore known to everyone who has access to the Internet.

They have further said that “The issue is one of freedom of information and of a growing argument in favour of more restrictive privacy laws.”

The British prime Minister, David Cameron has expressed general agreement with these sentiments. He has said, “It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, and so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today.

Mr. Cameron has further indicated that it may be time to take a fresh look at this aspect of the law, and make some appropriate changes regarding privacy laws in keeping with the times.

So far, the attorney general’s office has not brought any charges against the newspaper or Twitter. However, the judges ruling on the case have continued to rebuff attempts by the newspapers to bring this case to trial, mainly due to the fact that overturning the rules would only serve to benefit the newspapers and not the general public and definitely not the individual whose privacy is being encroached upon.

On the other hand, even if the courts choose to sue Twitter for the breach of the injunction the question being asked by many is whether it is possible for the British courts to sue Twitter which is an American company and has no culpability in the U.K. courts.

This prediction has been made by analysts in BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2010 – 2015). According to them, social media ad spend is any money that is spent on advertising through the various social networks, but does not include virtual goods, rewards, social gaming etc.

At present the major source of advertising on these social networks is display advertising, which generated $2.1 billion in 2010 and is expected to generate $7.7 billion in 2015. However other sources of advertising such as ‘promoted tweets’ on Twitter which currently generate negligible income are likely to become popular by then and will generate $600 million.

This means that the compound annual growth rate will be 31.6%. At present of course the major amount of all the revenue is going to Facebook which is the most popular social network. It currently has more display ad impressions than both Yahoo! and Google. It is also expected that their ad share as well as revenue will further increase.

According to an eMarketer report last January, the ad revenues of Facebook for 2010 had gone up to $1.86 billion, but the revenue of MySpace had fallen. It has also been estimated that Facebook’s global ad revenue will go up to $4.05 billion in 2011.

Andrew Shotland of Social Local Media says “Over the next few years, social media factors will become a core element of various ad networks, which will in turn drive increased advertiser spending and innovation.”

In order to help out with these shortcomings, and to make sure that users receive accurate and latest information on the subject, Cancer Research UK, a charity that also has its own website, has decided to work on improving content on Wikipedia, which ranks higher on Google for searches relating to most types of cancer.

Henry Scowcroft, Scientific Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK says, “It has been our intention for a long time to be involved in the online discussion outside of our own website. Wikipedia is nearly always at the top of an Internet search for cancers. It’s not always that easy to understand and sometimes it can be inaccurate or not completely up-to-date. We want to increase the accuracy and clarity.”

Considering the fact that Wikipedia has a very large user base – they received over 3.5 million page views for ‘Cancer’ in January 2011 – this is a very good move on the part of Cancer Research UK.

However, this is really quite a mammoth task, and will require a lot of manpower as well as time. The project has already started off with an entry on the ‘Hallmarks of cancer’ and screening for the Human Papilloma Virus, a lot of thought and effort needs to be put in regarding the number of people required to contribute to this project, and also how much time each person will have to dedicate to each wiki.

One of the major hurdles that must be overcome, is the necessity to stay up-to-date with the information at all times, as new research and information are constantly coming up on the subject and to continuously monitor the Wiki pages in order to prevent others from editing the correct information and replacing it with lies or falsifications.

Several music recommendation services such as Pandora and The Echo Nest have sprung up recently, to help users to find the music of their choice. Orpheus Media Research conducted a study in February 2011, which was reported by Mashable, to find out how useful these services are.

The study was conducted a across a sample of 500 users over 18 years of age. Of the people surveyed, 61% were casual listeners of music, 35% were music enthusiasts and only 4% were indifferent to music. 40% of the respondents had over a 1,000 songs in their personal music library, and 59% felt that music played a key role in their social lives.

The study reveals that 54% of the respondents had used a music recommendation service, and 40% of them use such services quite regularly, ranging from a few times a week to daily.

While only 15% (77 individuals) of the total number of people surveyed said that they found the type of music they liked while using music recommendation sites, 92% of these people had gone on to become fans and had even recommended the music to their friends.

However, 40% of the participants said that the services proved to be accurate less than 50% of the time, and 22% even said that it was nearly impossible to find the music of their choice.

57% of the users said that they still refer to the radio or word-of-mouth method to find the right kind of music. 14% use main stream media, while 10% use music streaming services.

Room for Improvement

No single service provider is a clear winner in this market. Most users create profiles across a number of services and use a combination of sites and apps to find the music of their choice. 43% of those surveyed, wished it was possible to discover new music through one website.

This could be good news to both current players in the market as well as aspiring new entrants, as there is obvious scope for someone to develop a good service that gains widespread approval and goes on to command the majority of the market.

Dr Greg Wilder Chief Science Officer at OMR said, “People clearly expect more from music recommendation systems. Current search technology is expensive and limited to subjective descriptions of music, which are often just not good enough. We are focused on changing that.”

Eventbrite, an event registration company recently conducted a study on the effects of social media on social commerce. When activity such as a ‘Like’ on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter generates money for the company or event concerned, it is known as social commerce.

Analysts at eventbrite have been tracking the sharing behaviour that occurs on social networks, with a view to help event organizers improve their business.

They have found that it is no longer essential for event organisers to have a very large budget in order to reach a large target audience, as they can do this almost free of cost through the various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Users were found to be more likely to share information about an event that they care about or are committed to. Thus, people who have bought a ticket to an event are more likely to inform their friends about it than people who have not bought a ticket.

Conversely, people are more likely to buy a ticket to an event if they are informed about it by someone who has already bought a ticket than when they are informed by someone who has not bought a ticket.

The study conducted last October found that the average value of a social share, measured as dollars per share through all social platforms was $1.78, while the dollars per share from Facebook was $2.53.

Over the last six months, the sharing activity on Facebook was found to be almost four times that on Twitter. This could be due in part to the larger user base that Facebook enjoys and in part due to the fact that relationships on Facebook are more like real-world relationships.

Networking events had a higher share rate than business events, conferences and seminars. Musical events and concerts also generated a much higher dollars per share value than fund raisers and social events.

Dollars per social share by event type

To conduct this study, Eventbrite used a set of in-house social analytic tools that provide tracking and analysis of each share that occurs.

The new platform provides advertisers with three types of advertising campaigns. They are Light, Standard and Premium. The Light option is the standard StumbleUpon ads version that was offered before the upgrade. The new options offer some new facilities to advertisers.

Targeting by device is one such new facility. This means that the sponsored stumble can be targeted specifically at various devices such as desktop browsers, iPad, iPhone and other Android based phones. This allows application developers to advertise their apps to users on specific devices that their apps are designed for.

The platform also provides advanced reporting, with viral sharing and engagement metrics, traffic analysis and a website quality score. The top-level service option also provides accelerated serving priority, which allows the advertiser to move ahead in the line.

StumbleUpon’s older ad model concentrated only on targeting new traffic for the advertiser or publisher. However, with this new ad platform, they are hoping to be able to engage visitors more.

Paid Discovery ads will show up on the StumbleUpon screen even without the user having to click on a banner. This is the same concept as the original ad model, where users were just led to new sites

Advertisers will still be able to target audiences based on demographics such as age, gender and location and interests.

While the earlier ad platform charged a flat rate of $0.05 per visitor, the Standard Paid Discovery ads will be charged at $0.10 per visitor and the Premium Paid Discovery platform will charge $0.25 per visitor.

Three ad options offered when setting up a campaign on StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

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.

These figures show a steady increase from the 160 million registered accounts in September 2010, and 95 million tweets per day in December 2010. The latest figures from this week claim that Twitter has 240 million registered accounts.

Source: DoubleClick Ad Planner

While these figures clearly indicate that Twitter is continuing to grow at a fairly steady pace, they do not say anything about the quality of the information being tweeted and how much of that information is actually ever read.

Quality of tweets is obviously not a concern for executives at Twitter, who have now decided to focus on global expansion.

With this in mind, they have recently launched their service in Korean, which is the seventh language that Twitter is available in. Other languages that Twitter is available in are German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and English.

Twitter has made deals with the local carriers LG and Uplus and local search engine, Daum, to encourage more users to sign on to Twitter in the Korean language.

The micro-blogging platform probably chose Korean as the latest language for their site, because the use of Twitter went up ten-fold among Koreans in the last year. iPhone and Android apps are also available in Korean.

The majority of Twitter users access the English language version of the site. However, the number of tweets in English has gone down by about 25% during the last year. This is sufficient reason for Twitter to try and expand to other languages.

While Twitter is now available in 7 languages, their biggest competitor, Facebook, is already available in 70 languages. Facebook managed to achieve this feat by crowd-sourcing the translation process by providing their users with a dedicated translation app.

If Twitter copied Facebook for once, instead of Facebook always copying Twitter, the micro-blogging platform could grow faster globally.

This new service has features that will help businesses that have a physical venue such as a store or restaurant, as well those who do not have a physical venue, but offer a service such as a TV channel, a university or an upcoming movie release.

Businesses with a physical venue, who wish to avail of this facility, will be required to follow a three-step process. They will first have to claim their business location. They then create a special for their clients who would check in to the location through Foursquare. Lastly, they would have to analyse the data they receive through the campaign to further improve their business.

Foursquare business page for AccuraCast

A Foursquare special can be any kind of discount or other inducement for users to check in via Foursquare when visiting the venue. New and regular customers can be lured and rewarded with different specials. This way, the business is not only exposed to the users, but also to all their friends and contacts on the network.

Above and beyond specials offered by the business, users can also earn badges and points from Foursquare, which get displayed on their profile.

Businesses that do not have a physical venue or do not host customers at their offices can also create a page on Foursquare. This page will have the logo and other details about the business. It will also be linked to other social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Users accessing these pages will be rewarded with badges from the business.

Foursquare brand page for Zagat

The Business Pages for brands are not yet open to the general public on a self-serve basis. Interested businesses will have to fill out and submit a form to Foursquare after which the page will be created. Foursquare will also provide these businesses with access to their Venue Stats dashboard, so that they can analyse the results of their campaigns.

Start here to claim your business page on Foursquare

Not only has the number of page views gone up from 250 million in the month of January 2010 to 829 million in December 2010, but also the average amount of time spent per visit has gone up from 12 minutes and 41 seconds to 15 minutes and 21 seconds.

The increase in time spent on the site, indicates that not only are new visitors accessing the site, but they also must like the format enough to spend a substantial amount of time there.

In fact, Reddit has been growing so rapidly, that they often have to struggle for their servers to keep up with the increased user demands. They have also decided to increase the strength of the engineering team from 4 to 6.

Part of the reason for the growth of the site could be their new and improved features and upgrades as also the fact that Reddit allows users to form new communities which enable users to discuss various topics of interest to them with each other.

However, the major factor of this sudden growth could well be the sudden downfall of Digg.

Digg has suffered a major setback since their last redesign in August-September 2010. Following this, a lot of users have deserted the site and no doubt a substantial chunk of those users would now be patronising Reddit.

It is an accepted fact that online shopping for standardised products such as electronic gadgets and furniture is quite easy nowadays. However, when it comes to clothes and accessories the decision-making process is quite complex because of the wide variety of choices available.

To help users with this, Google has formed a team consisting of experts in computer vision as well as fashion designers and stylists. The end result of their endeavours is Boutiques.com. This site allows users to go through a range of curated products.

Boutique.com’s algorithm will also suggest items to the user, based on the user’s known preferences. Other items or accessories that will go well with that product may also be suggested. The list of curated items available is categorised by colour, style, designer, celebrity, trend, retailer, blogger and silhouette. The styles are classified as “Classic”, “Boho”, “Edgy”  and so on.

This site is unlike any other Google-owned property. Search is not even a prominent part of the site! Instead, the site looks like any other clothing retailer’s website, with a few added features.

Google Boutiques home page

Users can also search for items of their preference using a mix and match attitude, based on their own likes and dislikes. Certain rules of style, such as not mixing vertical stripes with horizontal stripes or not using heavily patterned bags with heavily patterned dresses etc. are also provided on the site.

Good theory, poor execution

Google’s prowess at matching user behaviour with likes is fairly evident here. However, what the site gains in terms of algorithmic excellence and social interaction, it looses in terms of actual attractiveness, usability and effectiveness.  The site might help users to find new products and will also add more information to Google’s algorithm, but it does not present an exceptional shopping experience.

Manjul Shah, Director of Product Management at Google, says, “Shopping for clothes is about discovery and not just search. You go into a store looking for one thing and you might come out with nine other things too. We needed to find a way to create that ‘bump into’ experience.”

At present Boutiques.com is available only in the U.S. and has a very limited repertoire dealing in Women’s clothes, but they hope to expand their services soon.

Shopping for a product on Boutiques.com brings up an error page

When Bing made their announcement, Satya Nadella, the Senior VP of Online Services, informed users that their search results would be enhanced by the ‘Like’ feature on Facebook.

In other words, when users conduct a search on Bing, they will be able to see which of their Facebook friends has ‘Liked’ the product or service being searched. Results that were ‘Liked’ by these friends will also be placed at the top of the search results page as they are likely to have more value for that user.

“Liked” results on Bing let friends help users decide which movie to watch

Thus, certain search results on Bing will now be personalised for individual users. This Facebook ‘Likes’ feature will be active only when the user has signed in to a Facebook account.

Another feature which Bing has also introduced, in conjunction with Facebook, is the ability to search more easily for people. Bing will now make it possible for users to search people by name and will bring up results from Facebook that are more likely to be the searcher’s friends. Users will then be able to add that person as a friend, or send the person a message directly from the Bing search results page.

Bing social profile search

Google’s newly integrated social search feature shows users conducting a search on Google for certain trending topics an indication of the pages popularity by including the number of times the page has been shared next to the page’s title in the search results. This social shares link, however, appears only on the main search results page and not in Google News.

Google social search results indicating number of times the article was shared

When users clicks on the ‘shared by’ link they are taken to the Google real time search results page for that link, which will show the real-time sharing activity for that particular page.

Unlike the Bing feature, this is a general sharing feature and it does not specify who has shared the article. It also does not give the user any specific information from friends whose opinion the user is more likely to rely on.

Bing is gradually rolling out the social search feature, and will currently limit the roll out to users in the USA only. Google’s feature is already live in the USA and UK.

Why Google’s latest social search feature doesn’t tie-in better with their social graph and show shares from contacts within a user’s social circle is not clear. Even with social graph integration, Google’s offering would rate second-class, at best, as Microsoft has a very big advantage here owing to their relationship with Facebook.

From 05:00 British Standard Time on Thursday to 05:00 today, three Twitter accounts fed information about each and every call that was dealt with by the Greater Manchester Police force.

Their main Twitter account, @gmpolice, interfaced with the public and retweeted information from the other Twitter accounts that had been set up for the purpose. Calls that were tweeted ranged from mundane complaints being logged for domestic and neighbourhood disputes to more serious matters such as rape, murder and theft.

Follower numbers of the GM Police Twitter account shot up from 3,135 last Friday to over 15,000 today. What caught a lot of people’s attention was the number of ridiculous calls that the police seemed to deal with.

Callers complained about televisions that didn’t work, horses that wouldn’t go where their owners wanted them to and builders showing up two months late!

3,205 incident reports were tweeted during the 24 hour period. 341 arrests were made and 126 people were taken into custody during the same period.

Police forces have used Twitter in the past to monitor and clamp down on criminal activity. This is the first time that a police force has successfully used an online social  medium to raise awareness of the work they do and gotten so many members of the public keenly interested.

A study has been conducted in this connection across 1,000 businesses in 17 countries by the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University in Indiana on behalf of the software security firm, McAfee.

The study found that in the last one year, 7 out of 10 businesses incurred large expenses due to security incidents related to the use of Web 2.0 technologies, and the average cost of such incidents was around $2 million.

The businesses that took part in the study considered the possibility of brand damage or the loss or leakage of important data through the accidental downloading of malware or spyware.

81% of the surveyed businesses restrict the use of at least one of the tools, such as social media, microblogging or web mail, while 13% block all such services. Such restrictive policies could be a direct result of such incidents coupled with the previously published statistics about the amount of time wasted by employees on social networking sites.

On the other hand, a report titled ‘Web2.0: A Complex Balancing Act’ by McAfee found that 40% of companies admit that the use of Web2.0 tools caused increased productivity and 75% of the companies they surveyed had increased the use of these technologies in the hope of improving revenue generation. These two seemingly conflicting reports present quite a conundrum for employers.

Mike Sentonas, McAfee’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Asia Pacific says, “In order for businesses to reap the benefits of Web2.0 they must understand their security options and stay informed, because the security landscape has really changed.”

In reality, the best option for companies is probably to encourage the use of social media for business purposes while implementing a strong security protocol and systems to check that malware does not get inadvertently downloaded.

In an interview with TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, Kevin Rose said that the team at Digg have made some mistakes with the site lately and this has led to a substantial fall in their popularity.

About a month ago, they launched a new version of the Digg user interface, dubbed Digg v4. This new site design has not been appreciated by Digg’s ardent users, largely due to major changes in its functionality. A poll on Mashable found that most users preferred the old site even though the changes were meant to make Digg more social and less of a closed network dominated by a few “power users”.

Since the new version of Digg was launched, a large number of its regular users started submitting stories to flood the Top News page with direct links to their competitor, Reddit. As a result, traffic to Reddit shot up and Digg raffic has suffered.

Daily Unique Visitors (cookies) to Digg versus Reddit
Source: Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Digg has had three different Chief Executives during the span of just six months. Some employees have also been laid off due to the problems the company is currently facing.

Under the circumstances, Kevin Rose has admitted to being quite tired and upset with the situation. He even went so far as to mention that he had been in favour of accepting a takeover bid worth about $80 million ($60 million plus earnout) when Digg was at the peak of its popularity, but his board of directors had turned down the offer at the time.

Rose has even refused to confirm whether or not he would continue to be associated with Digg by the end of this year.

The social news experiment from AOL, which was first called NetScape Social News, was rebranded to Propeller in 2007.

While the site had initially hoped to be able to give serious competition to Digg, the fact is that they never quite caught up with Digg, and of late both the site and the parent company AOL have been struggling.

Twitter streams from Propeller were always lagging behind by several days. Wikipedia claims that the site is being run by a team of just 2 people.

While NetScape was doing quite well for itself, it was expected that Propeller would be able to carry on from where NetScape left. However, the popularity of the site fell by about 55% in just nine months – in November 2006, they had 305 million page views per month, but they fell to just 137 million page views in August 2007.

A major reason for this sudden drop could be the fact that hey did not provide any links between NetScape and Propeller at the time of the change-over. If this had been done, more users may have continued to use the rebranded service rather than switching over to a competitor.

The site will be shut down on 1 October 2010.

This interface will now provide more detailed information about the tweet and its origins. When a user clicks on a particular tweet, a details pane will slide out to the right hand side of the tweet.

Thanks to the new design of the interface, users can now just keep scrolling down the page to see more tweets, rather than having to click ‘more’ every time.

Twitter has also got partnerships with media sites such as YouTube, Justin.tv, Flickr, TwitPic and several others due to which users can now embed photos and videos on Twitter which can then be seen by other users.

The details pane also provides related content about the author or subject of the tweet. Details such as other tweets by the same author, the replies received and geotagging of the location are also available. When a username is clicked, a mini profile of that user is seen.

This new interface has been built on Twitter’s own API and is still being gradually rolled out to users.

More about the new Twitter interface

The service which was launched in March 2009, took more than 1 year to reach 1 million users. The next million came in, just 3 months later and the third million was reached just one and a half months after that.

While it was initially assumed that location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla would receive stiff competition from the launch of Facebook Places, that does not seem to have happened as yet. In fact, co-founder Dennis Crowley said that foursquare received that largest number of sign in one day, the very day after Facebook Places was launched. He also says that Foursquare is receiving about 18,000 new users per day.

Other location based services such as My Town and Loopt have already amassed over 3 million users before Foursquare, but one of the main attractions for users to sign up with Foursquare seems to be their practice of rewarding users with badges and points.

However if they hope to compete successfully with the 500 million users of Facebook in the long run, they will have to diversify and improve their services.

They have recently managed to raise $20 million in funding, which they will use to employ more staff and also to get new premises and spread to San Francisco.

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School are just two of the many colleges to have done so.

The idea behind this move is to prepare their students to make use of these ever growing networks to reach and engage with their target audience in innovative ways.

Companies such as AT&T, Citigroup, Panasonic etc. have already started hiring employees as social media directors, to develop and manage marketing strategies through the social media.

These companies strongly believe that the social media offer a novel opportunity to interact with their customers and also to learn what they want.

Different colleges are offering different types of courses based on the social media and quite expectedly they are much in demand.

The Champlain College was among the first to offer such a course, and they did that way back in the year 2000.

Apart from teaching students to use the social media, they are also taught to understand the psychological and sociological aspect of the social media.

Some of the schools actually make the students conduct campaigns for the various companies, and study the effect of the campaign, on the performance of the company, before they are certified to have passed the course.

A recent report from Econsultancy indicates that email still is a powerful medium for targeted advertising.

Stefan Tornquist, Econsultancy’s US Research Director says, “Despite the current hype surrounding social media, social network adoption and its influence on e-commerce is far from maturity. More than a third of consumers (37%) do not use a social networking site, while those who have recently become a ‘fan’ or ‘friend’ of a company or brand online are still in the minority.”

In fact it has been found that communication through email and even snail mail is more effective than the newer marketing efforts via delivery notices, notifications, vouchers and special offers on social networks.

What Is The Best Way To Receive Ads For Sales & Specials?
(Image courtesy of Econsulting)

Econsultancy’s report, titled How We Shop In 2010, has separate findings for the U.S. and for the U.K. as there are some differences in the online shopping habits of both places.

In the U.S. the study was conducted across a cross section of 1,400 respondents and about 1,000 in the U.K. Detailed demographics concerning age, sex etc were used to better understand and interpret the results.

The study does confirm that it is essential to target your ads at the appropriate audience as 53% of users felt that irrelevant information devalues the mail and 54% felt that the emails had no special advantage.

In the U.S. 55% of respondents said that high product ratings increased the chances of a purchase and 56% said that consumer generated reviews increased chances of using an online store. Two thirds of those under 24 check emails on mobiles and search is the primary source of information for most purchases. Men are more likely to use search engines and women are more likely to have discussions online or off. Those between 25-38 years of age are most likely to rely on e-commerce.

In the U.K. 57% appreciate ad messages which provide discounts and other special offers, 365 say email helps them make online purchases and 38% do not use social networks. 61% use search engines to study products, while 75% of those between 18-26 years use social networks to research products.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

Though the information has not been confirmed by Google itself, TechCrunch claims to have checked with several sources that Google has indeed invested between $100 – 200 million in Zynga.

The deal which is believed to have gone through about a month ago, is likely to be followed by a strategic partnership between the two companies.

The investment has been made by Google as they are believed to be in the process of launching Google Games by the end of the year.

The partnership with Zynga will not only allow Google to have a good support for building up their social games, but will also indirectly help to attract more users to their social site through the games. If available statistics are to be believed, about 155 of Facebook users play FarmVille daily.

Zynga is known to have played a similar role, to establish Facebook as a leading social network in the past.

If Google is able to replace PayPal, with Google Checkout as the main mode of payment for Zynga games, that will be an additional benefit to them.

In the mean time, Zynga has been doing pretty well for itself. They have raised $500 million in the last year, and their revenue for the first half of this year is $350 million.

Facebook on their part will have to remain on their toes, if they do not wish to lose their top ranking in the social network market. They have also recently signed a 5 year distribution deal with Zynga, which may not seem very prudent now.

In order to simplify their users lives, YouTube recently introduced a new feature known as YouTube Leanback. As the name obviously suggests, this feature allows users to lean back and enjoy videos with a minimal amount of maneuvering.

YouTube Leanback

To use this facility, users will initially have to feed in certain details, like settings and preferences. They also have to feed 8in the required content, from the subscriptions. They can also access videos which their friends are sharing on Facebook if their YouTube and Facebook accounts are connected.

Once this is done, videos of the user’s interest will start playing as soon as the user opens the site. It is also possible to watch things like news and other entertainment programmes.

To select the required video, the user has to use the scroll keys on the keyboard, thus obliterating the need for the mouse. Each time the user navigates to the button he requires, he has also to click the ‘Enter’ key. The space bar of the keyboard functions as the ‘Pause’ and ‘Play’ key.

Unfortunately, the YouTube Leanback feature does not provide any keys with which to control the volume of the video. For that, one needs to use the controls on the system or the speakers.

Other than that one missing feature, watching videos with the YouTube Leanback feature has become similar to watching TV as one can easily use a wireless keyboard to navigate with. YouTube refers to this as the ’10 foot experience’.

Watching a stream of videos on YouTube Leanback

The most surprising thing about YouTube Leanback is that it eliminates the need for users to search, which goes against all of Google’s business principles!

For some time now, it had been indicated that Twitter would change their system for storage of tweets from the current MySQL system to Cassandra. However, they have now made it clear that they will continue to store tweets on the MySQL based system, at least for now.

One of the probable reasons they do not want to make this change at present could be the fact that they are trying to sort out the problems they are having with uptime, possibly due to the unexpectedly high traffic volumes they continue to have to deal with.

They will, however, make use of Cassandra for several other purposes. Their geo team has already started using it to store and make queries about places of interest. Their research team is using it to store data mining results for their entire user base. These results can then be used to provide information to @toptweets and local trends.

While it has often been assumed that Twitter would use analytics for monetisation, they have never confirmed this in the past. Now, however, Ryan King of Twitter has said that the analytics operations and infrastructure teams are trying out ways in which Cassandra can be used for large-scale realtime analytics internally as well as externally. He further said that Cassandra will be a part of many new large scale projects from Twitter and they will continue to grow it for a long time to come.

A while ago, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, mentioned that Google was working on building a full-fledged social network – Google Me. Kevin Rose says that he got his information from a “very credible source”. His tweet, though, has now been deleted from Twitter.

This information has since been backed up by Adam D’Angelo, who was formerly the CTO at Google.

D’Angelo, who worked for Facebook after he left Google, now has his own site, Quora, where he made this announcement. According to him, the Google Me project is more than just a rumour. He says that a lot of people are working on it, and he is very confident about it. He feels that Google has realised that their site Buzz is not good enough o compete with the very rapidly growing Facebook, and hence they would like to set up a full fledged social network of their own, and this is now a high priority task for them.

According to D’Angelo, Google had earlier assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow down in time, but as there is no sign of that happening, they have decided to take up the challenge and start their own social network.

Also, Facebook has now ventured into search, which is traditionally the strong hold of Google, so Google has decided to enter the field of social networks.

Google had tried their hand at social networking in the past with Orkut and later with Buzz, but for one reason or other, both these sites did not too well on a worldwide level, so now they could be starting afresh with Google Me.

It is also obvious that owning a social networking site would improve their potential for advertising, to a very large extent, which means that they will generate more revenue, hence the rush to start the new social network.

The confirmation came during a Facebook Developers Garage event in London. Zuckerberg said, “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.”

Ever since Twitter talked about delivering location-based services, there has been speculation about Facebook following their lead and launching some location-based features.

The New York Times was probably the first to report, in March, that Facebook would allow users to share their location details by April. When that did not happen, Advertising Age said in May, that the features would be launched by June.

Facebook reportedly had to put aside several projects that were in the developmental stages, including the location feature, in order to sort out the problems that arose from their new privacy interface.

Now that Twitter has already gone live with Places, the Facebook team has made the time to concentrate on building location awareness. However, there is still no clarity about how the features will function and how they will affect the user as well as the market. If history is anything to go by, it will most likely be very similar to Twitter Places!

Facebook location features will probably link to Facebook Community Pages such as this one.

The new service has been incorporated in their trending topics feature and is known as ‘Promoted Trending Topics’.

The first such promoted topic is for Disney / Pixar’s movie, Toy Story 3.

Promoted trending topics are clearly highlighted with a yellow box that says “promoted”. When a user clicks on that topic, a search results page is shown with the advertiser’s promoted tweet at the top, followed by “Top Tweets” that Twitter selects based on the number of retweets and then other users’ tweets about the topic.

The promoted tweet in the search results could contain link to pages with more information, just like any other tweet.

Even though promoted trending topics are placed near the bottom of the page at present, the yellow box is bound to attract some attention, especially while it’s new. Twitter might have to bump up the promoted topic ads in the future, once users get used to seeing it and start ignoring it.

Promoted trending topics will appear irrespective of the location to which the trending topics are set. One condition that has been set for the continuation of the promoted trending topics is that they must resonate with Twitter’s user base. If they do not attract sufficient attention, they will disappear just like any other trending topic.

Promoted tweet from Disney for Toy Story 3

While Twitter continues to claim that promoted tweets and promoted topics are not “advertisements”, it is rumoured that promoted topics are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars!

A study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has found that several people over 50 years of age in the USA are not only using the Internet very comfortably but are also adept users of Facebook and the latest gadgets such as the iPad.

AARP interviewed 1,360 adults over the phone last month and found that 27% of Americans over 50 years of age use social networks. They also found that Facebook was the most popular social site for this age group, ahead of other sites like MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. eMarketer had also conducted a similar study a while ago and found similar results.

49% of those between 50 and 64 years of age and 40% of all above 50 years said they were very comfortable with the Internet and frequently used it as a means of communication.

It was also found that 47% of these users heard about the social networks from family members and 70% of them did so through their children or grandchildren. Most of these senior citizens use the networks to keep in touch with their children (62%) and grandchildren (36%) and not to spy on the youngsters as some might suppose.

83% of the respondents had also heard about the iPad and while only 2% of them had already bought one, 11-14% of them were planning to do so.

The new feature allows users to see exactly where in the world a particular tweet has originated from. It also shows nearby locations such as restaurants, shops and theatres.

Twitter Places is available on both twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. The service was launched to coincide with the ongoing World Cup, allowing users to tag their tweets with the location from where they are sending the tweet, which is especially cool for those sitting inside the stadium and watching the FIFA World Cup live!

Tweets with embedded location information

The current football World Cup is just one example of how Twitter Places could be helpful. People receiving tweets regarding breaking news stories are more likely to be interested in tweets originating from the place where the event is actually happening.

Users who wish to see other tweets originating from a particular location can click a Twitter Place within a tweet to see all recent tweets from that location.

Foursquare and Gowalla will be integrated into Twitter Places, as many users on these sites already automatically tweet check-ins. Twitter will also release an API to allow developers to integrate their applications with Twitter Places.

Twitter Places will be made available to users across 65 countries in the course of about one week. Mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Android and Blackberry will also soon have access to Twitter Places.

78% of smartphone users accessed their browsers in April 2010 and 80% of them accessed applications. By contrast only 19% of feature phone users accessed their browsers, and 17% accessed applications. But feature phone users still constitute almost half of all users who access their mobile browsers and applications.

In April 2010 there was a growth of 28% in the number of users accessing their applications on the phone. The figure was up to 69.6 million users.

Social networking through apps saw a growth of 240% and was up to 14.5 million users. Access to News Apps grew by 124% to 9.3 million users and Sports Information apps grew by 113% to 7.7 million users.

Mobile banking usage has also more than doubled over the last year, to nearly 5 million users. Online retail sites via browsers also grew by 47% to 7.3 million users.

In April, the number of mobile users accessing their browser also grew by 31% to nearly 73 million users. Social networking through browsers grew by 90% to almost 30 million users.

Mark Donovan, comScore senior Vice President of mobile says, “With mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content – whether it is via application, browser or both – continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands. Although application access is clearly on the rise, with several categories more than doubling their audience via this method, content consumption via browser continues to be the most popular method for Americans to access mobile media.”

In other words, brands and marketers need to take care of both categories of users while planning their campaigns, as they have an opportunity to grow through both channels.

They go on to explain that they want to give importance to architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API and ensuring the long term health and value of the user experience.

Twitter manages the integrity and relevance of the content in the network, in the form of the timeline, and they spend a good deal of time and money, to ensure user satisfaction.

It is true that in order to monetize their site, they have announced some measures lately, and one of them is Promoted Tweets. They clarify however that these tweets have to be relevant in order to retain the basic essence of Twitter.

Thus they have decided to disallow third party apps developers from injecting paid tweets into any of their services.

In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued.

As may be expected, many third party developers have reacted quite negatively to this decision. They feel that this decision has only been taken with the intention of avoiding any possible competition to ‘Promoted Tweets’.

‘What The Trend’ analyst Liz Pullen says, “The problem is that business have been created, received funding and developed over the past year, with the full knowledge of Twitter, and this just undercuts & destroys them.”

Others have also said that they have been building these apps after being told by Twitter that “they had nothing to worry about.”

Twitter client Eric Woodward said “It is clear that Twitter is going to take everything for themselves,”