Google(more info) endorsed Twitter(more info) in a big way by creating not 1 or 2 but to be exact 45 accounts in Twitter, the micro-blogging service. Google has made a list of accounts in Twitter which they made public in a recent blog post so that the users who are using their products can look for the updates. You can get a whole list of accounts on their official Google Blog. Google has accounts for everything even for Google Arabia for Arabic tweets. However interestingly Google doesn’t have a official account for Gmail, this account @gmail is registered by someone else. I think Google will follow the steps of CNN (more info) and buy off these accounts. This leads me with the conclusion of this talking point –Does Google want to buy Twitter in order to expand its reach in real-time search? They can but its tough to say now. Its for you to discuss the pros and cons of it.
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After all the buzz created by Google’s Chrome OS yesterday its time for Microsoft(more info) to have some restrained celebration. According to the latest data from Compete.com ,Bing (more info) a decision engine is now the 13th most visited site on the web. It has just taken one month for Bing to surpass sites like Twitter, Digg and CNN (Read more). Bing was able to register 49.67 million unique visits which is more than Digg with 38.96 million, Twitter with 23 million and CNN with 28.54 million(data represents U.S. traffic only). But older brother of Bing, Live.com is ahead of him by 30 million unique visitors probably because Hotmail still resides at mail.live.com. If they can embed Bing into Hotmail the result will further shoot up. David Pogue of New York Times wrote a review stating that Bing often does Google one better with its search results (Read more). The start is impressive(no doubt about that) but way to go before it can even think of challenging Google (Read more).
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Its Fact : There are more Facebook(more info) users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using this site. How can you believe this? The shocking revelation is picked up by analytics company iStrategy Labs which captured the data six months ago and saved it for comparison. College and high school users have plummeted by 20 and 15 percent respectively(Where the hell they are going?) But on the flip side users aged 55 and over have shoot up from under one million to nearly six million (more than 500% growth) in mere six months. This is a unexpected change to Facebook which started as a network for college students. This comes amid the statement given to Reuters by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen who sits on Facebook’s board that Facebook is likely to post billions of dollars in revenue in five years. When the team of ReadWriteWeb(more info) communicated Facebook about the stats this is what they have to say.
These numbers are rough not actual but- we are going to check on historical numbers internally and get back to you.
These stats may lead to significant changes in the mindset of the advertisers who will think of restyling their advertisements to suit every age group (not just college students). Just think how the Ads will look like in Facebook now?
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The Guardian in its report had hinted that Nokia is planning to introduce an Android-based smart phone at the Nokia’s World conference in September. But Nokia immediately squashes the speculation about Android Handset. Nokia has more than 40 percent worldwide mobile phone market share but it is losing its market share to other platforms such as iPhone and Blackberry. Last year Nokia bought out remaining 52 percent of Symbian(more info) and made it a free and more open mobile operating system.Nokia’s popularity has been dwindling in recent years, and HSBC analysts quoted by the Guardian reckon that the Finnish company has lost smartphone market share, going down to 31 percent at the end of 2008 (from 47 percent in 2007).These story has created quite a buzz in the market but Nokia in the statement release to Reuters said
Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever. Everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices.
Nokia denial seemingly seems that it is committed to its strategy of sticking with Symbian, which is the dominant smartphone OS globally. Nokia believes in driving straight!
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It has taken long time to come but it has finally arrived. Twitter(more info) started to roll out sponsored advertisement in right hand side of every user’s homepage in a subtle way. That was a long due and finally they started monetizing through ads. They are calling it “Sponsored Definitions” a different modus operandi, I suppose. According to the official Twitter blog it looks like Federated Media is handling their sponsored definitions. There are only two sponsored links seen so far one fromExecTweets.com and another from Universal Studio’s CinemaTweets.com. This may seems like a small step but a decisive and crucial one. So just the ads in the sidebars gives Twitter any sort of substantial income? Seth Simonds in hisblog mentioned that you can see the image ads in Twitter Japan by changing your language preference toJapanese. Thats already there. Verdict: It is the step in the right direction and looking forward to see how it shapes.
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Firefox 3.5 is available for download, offering users more speed, privacy and greater compliance with HTML 5 video standards. After the release of IE8(more info) and Safari 4(more info) its was the time for Mozilla(more info) to release its newest version to make things more hotter in browser battle. It doesn’t have any knockout new feature but have few smart ones to catchup with other browsers. I am going to list three most significant feature to look forward to.
1) It includes the new Javascript Engine TraceMonkey which makes it to run sophisticated web applications like Google Docs(more info) much faster. It is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2. It is not the world’s fastest browser but has a serious speed to compete with Chrome(more info) and Safari.
2)Among the most compelling feature is the support for the HTML 5 video standard, which enables video playback in the browser without the need of plug-ins. This allows videos to become just as interactive as every other part of a page. You can rotate a video while it’s playing, have a clip show up in a circular frame rather than a square one,
3)One of the new things that Firefox included is the location aware browsing. It saves users time by allowing browser to know where they are located and websites can use this information to populate nearby points of interest and useful data like map of the area.
It also has feature like private browsing and forget site which are already there in Chrome and Safari. But it has to still travel several miles in order to get pass IE in terms of market share (IE still has around 66 percent market share).
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MJ’s death news has taken the internet by storm. Believe it or not, the web almost ceases to work when the news of MJ’s death starting to come. According to the statistics the worldwide internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours. TMZ.com actually first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest and it has taken around 3 hours (Its huge in the internet age) for Google to display this piece of news in its homepage. According to the Google Blog the spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook for an automated attack. As a result for about 30 minutes when some people search Google News they saw a “We’re sorry” page. Also for some time it is not populating the desired search when searching for “Michael Jackson died”. The first search which it has displaying was about Michael Jackson, the author who died in 2007. The issue is now fixed but it is does go to show that Google’s algorithms not always understand the trends that are going on. It is not only Google but all famous news sites like CNN, TMZ, LATimes crashed out. Twitter also struggles as hundred of thousands of tweets came in very short amount of time. In Trending Topics of Twitter 9 out of 10 trends are of MJ and Twitter search seems to be running about 20 minutes behind. It was a bad day in the office for the biggies and they want to quickly forget that. They also need to take a lesson from this episode and in the future try to handle big breaking news in the real time. At last R.I.P. MJ.
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Does China really want to stop pornography or does it want to stop the rise of Google in China? The Communist government of China has ordered Google to suspend a part of its search operations and block foreign websites with pornographic and vulgar content. The automated keyword feature which provides suggestions for keywords has been disabled for now. “If these restrictions are kept up for more than a few days, they will have a huge impact on Google’s business in China,” said Edward Yu, chief executive of Analysys, an internet research firm in Beijing. I think there is more to it than what meets the eye. Some observers believe that it is because of the bitter rivalry of Google with the local search engine Baidu. Presently Baidu holds around 59 percent of market share of China in search arena. The important thing to note here is that, similar content for which Google services has been disabled can be easily found in Baidu. Google is steadily catching up in China after it started its operations there in 2005. But this may give a set back to its operations in China.
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Is $380K really going to help Yahoo to sail out from troubled waters? Yahoo, the Internet Giant has auctioned his premium domain name contests.com for a mere $380K. A killer domain name like this would have fetched million of dollars. MG Siegler of TechCrunch compares this to other domains which got sell off in past year such as Toys.com for $5.1 million and Candy.com $3 million. Looking at these figures I have a right to doubt the business acumen of Yahoo. I am confused and still trying to figure out why there is a need to sell contests.com. May be they needed to make a payroll this friday..LOL…
Is Unite going to reinvent the web as claimed by Opera? Its surely has the potential but time will only tell. Opera has gauged the rise of social networking and its an attempt to take advantage of it. Opera Unite is a technology that embeds a Web server in your web browser and gives you both the option of Server and Client on your computer. It actually eliminates the dependence on the third party servers. It allows users to directly share files and photos, send messages, chat, build networks and even host their own websites from their computers. The ease of use of almost all activities is fascinating in a manner similar to that of Google Wave. I also expect that Unite is going to make a dent in web hosting business. The fact which is disturbing me about Unite is that it is open source and hackers can easily take advantage of any vulnerabilities to be find in Opera model. I definitely recommend checking out the Opera Unite to have a whole new experience of web browser and also it is very easy to use.
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