Google says it plays fair, but that doesn’t stop the company from finding itself in head-to-head confrontations with regulators concerned with its market dominance and the potential for abuse of market power.
As much as I love Google, I’ve also been critical of it. My nervousness at where Google was going really hit its stride when it ventured into its Google Books adventure; and this had two fundamental consequences that I found extremely worrying.
The first was that it stripped copyright from authors which led to a number of objections from governments and publishers globally, and a forced backdown by Google.
And the second was it had a detrimental effect on book retailers everywhere. The brand that stood to lose the most however was Amazon, an online favourite of mine.
I interpreted Google’s move into book scanning and publishing venture as a head-to-head attack on Amazon’s core business. Not content with its domination of online search, Google’s desire was to dominate the entire Internet.
At the time, I wrote article called “How Much Power Is Too Much Power?“. It’s a question a growing number of commentators are beginning to ask – and millions of global Internet users should think about.
So Google Books threatened Amazon, but its just the tip of the iceberg.
Android is launched to attack Apple.
Google Chrome is attacking Microsoft IE (Okay, Microsoft has Bing in response.)
Google today officially launched Google+ because it wants to beat Facebook. Huh? Where does this end?
It may well be a consequence of the algorithm, however, Google already censures what it thinks you need to know about. Nowhere was this more pronounced than when the “Climategate” emails were leaked and published.
Head to Google at the time and you’d find some 300,000 Climategate results. Over at Bing, there were more than 5 million.
There is room on the Internet for many brands. Google does not need to own everything and we should be suspicious of any company that seeks to push all other competitors out of the way. Google should encourage alternate online brands to flourish in the consumers heart. It’s good for the Internet.
The more that Google intrudes into its non-core areas, the more it will be seen to be discontented with being the world’s biggest search engine, and only content with the world’s biggest everything.
The more it seems that it is after world-domination, the more interest it will attract from regulators, antitrust investigators and commentators that grow suspicious of its motives.
I’ve just deleted 1677 spam comments from my blog.
You’d think that would take all day.
Actually, it took less than 1 minute thanks to Akismet.
One click and pff, they’re gone.
If you have a blog, and are sick of stupid, endless, no-added-value spam, get Akismet.
Akismet is a hosted web service created by the guys behind WordPress which automatically detects comment and trackback spam.
If you’re non-commercial (like this blog) it’s free. There is a modest fee for a pro version.
Spam is a problem because Google counts backlinks, so blog comment spammers are motivated to head onto your website or blog, add a link back to their own site, hoping that Google will reward them with a higher PageRank. Err, wrong.
If you’re listening comment spammers, I just want you to know… You really waste your time coming here but, just in case you’re concerned, very little of my time gets wasted dealing with you.
First they targeted Nicolas Sarkozy’s Facebook page, and now they have targeted none other than Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s page on his own social networking website according to a report.
An unknown hacker hacked into the Facebook account of the 26-year-old celebrity CEO and recent Times Person of the Year, and posted this message.
“Let the hacking begin: If Facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011″
The post has since been deleted and Zuckerberg’s page is now back up again. Facebook has not commented about the hack and there is no mention about it on Mark Zuckerberg’s now online Facebook profile either. No-one knows how the hacker broke into his account.
Online security firm Sophos has posted this video about the hack.
The number of Facebook friends you have is correlated to the size of your amygdala, the center used to process the memory of your emotional reactions in your brain, according to a new study published in Nature Neuroscience.
The volume of your amydala has been connected to the size of the circle of those you come in contact with even with nonhuman primate species before, so Kevin Bickart and his coauthors took the idea and tested it out on people who interact with people on Facebook.
Using 58 adults with varying sizes of Facebook friends, the scientists figured out how many people each individual involved in the study regularly interacted with.
Then, they determined how many different groups of Facebook friends the person was in contacted with. Those two data points were compared to the volume of the amygdala and hippocampus, the later of which should not change in size depending on the size of the social network.
The results showed that the size of a person’s amygdala increased with more friends and more complex social networks.
So much for saying that people you interact with on Facebook aren’t really your friends. And, even if we might not know them personally, our brains are definitely making an emotional connection.
A Japanese woman has got her knickers in a knot over Google Street View.
She is suing Google over claims the search giant displayed images of underwear hanging on her washing line on its Street View mapping service.
The unnamed woman is seeking damages of 600,000 Yen, claiming that the images had caused her psychological distress, resulting in losing her job and the changing of her residence.
Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported news of the suit, highlighting that the lady first saw the photo on Google’s Street View service in Spring when she performed a search on her own house.
It is claimed that upon discovering the pictures of underwear on her washing line, the woman’s existing obsessive compulsive disorder worsened as a result of increased anxiety, leading her to feel as if her life was being secretly recorded.
1. facebook
2. YouTube
3. google
4. ebay
5. hotmail
6. yahoo
7. real estate
8. maps
9. commonwealth
10. white pages
Fastest-rising news stories 2010
1. chile earthquake
2. haiti
3. ipad
4. iphone 4
5. vancouver 2010
6. melbourne storm
7. android
8. volcano
9. oil spill
10. world cup
Fastest-rising election stories 2010
1. australia election
2. bob katter
3. julia gillard
4. election results
5. voting
6. abc election
7. nla newspapers
8. greens party
9. labor party
10. poll bludger
Fastest-rising people 2010
1. Cody Simpson
2. Andy Irons
3. Justin Bieber
4. Julia Gillard
5. Lara Bingle
6. Katy Perry
7. Kim Kardashian
8. Jessica Watson
9. Andrew Bolt
10. Kevin Rudd
Fastest-rising celebrities 2010
1. casey johnson
2. bruce jenner
3. christina hendricks
4. heidi montag
5. joseph gordon-levitt
6. kendra wilkinson
7. jared leto
8. kim kardashian
9. sandra bullock
10. jake gyllenhaal
1. vanessa hudgens scandal
2. nrl scandal
3. masterchef scandal
4. lara bingle scandal
5. hey dad scandal
6. indian scandal
7. st kilda scandal
8. miley cyrus scandal
9. watergate scandal
10. tiger woods scandal
Most popular celebrity deaths 2010
1. andy irons dead
2. carl williams dead
3. justin bieber dead
4. gary coleman dead
5. tiesto dead
6. taylor lautner dead
7. johnny depp dead
8. lil wayne dead
9. lady gaga dead
10. slipknot bassist dead
Most popular celebrity weddings 2010
1. anna paquin wedding
2. chelsea clinton wedding
3. hilary duff wedding
4. kate ritchie wedding
5. katy perry wedding
6. miranda kerr wedding
7. robbie williams wedding
8. royal wedding
9. megan fox wedding
10. kyle sandilands wedding
1. the crazies
2. resident evil afterlife
3. ben hur
4. percy jackson
5. iron man 2
6. mary poppins
7. the avengers
8. transformers 3
9. breaking dawn
10. jesse james
INTERNET giant Google opened an online electronic book store overnight in a heavyweight entry into a booming market long dominated by Kindle-maker Amazon.
Google eBookstore was being rolled out in the US featuring the Mountain View, California-based company’s massive library of digitised works online at books.google.com.
“We believe it will be the world’s largest e-books library,” said Google spokeswoman Jeannie Hornung. “Including the free books, there are more than three million.”
Hundreds of thousands of digital books from leading publishers such as Macmillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster will be for sale in the eBookstore, which Google said will expand internationally next year.
Google e-books will be kept online in the Internet “cloud” and be available for reading from any Web-linked computer or using free applications on gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch or on smart phones running Google’s Android software.
In their earnings call last week, Google announced a record 2010 third-quarter revenue of $USD7.29 billion (up 23% from last year).
The market rejoiced and Google shares shot past $USD615 giving the company a market cap of more than $USD195 billion.
This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record — gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January, according to research by Arbor Networks.
If Google were an ISP, as of this month it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet.
Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments are included and error in Arbor’s data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks.
These numbers represent increased market share — Google is growing considerably faster than overall Internet volumes which are already increasing 40-45% each year.
Myspace, once a leader in social networking before the ascendancy of Facebook, is trading its social networking focus to target the music, celebrities, movies, television, and games that Gen-Y’ers love the most.
The company announced on Wednesday that it is launching a beta site that will be based on this shifted focus.
