Weblog

The folks at Facebook have had a busy week. They began with announcing a forthcoming data portability product called Facebook Connect, (which marks the abandonment of their fundamental ‘walled garden’ approach to user data management) and then went on to ban Google’s own data portability service (Friend Connect) from their Facebook API, stating a violation of terms of use as the reason.

Some bloggers and commentators have been contemplating if this might mark a new phase in the development of social networking, with the earlier co-existence of the main players now giving way to a more open tug-of-war for market share. After all, new user uptake is slowing down, and one way for social networking sites to continue to grow will…

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This week saw Myspace win a huge victory against junk mail in the form of a record £120m legal judgement against two spammers. Their press sources are claiming this represents the beginning of a serious spam crackdown. For many however, the question remains; is this genuinely likely prove an effective example in curtailing spam, or simply turn out to be yet another high-profile waste of time?

Parallels with the record industry’s efforts to discourage illegal downloading with much-publicised lawsuits come to mind. Despite generating quite a few short term headlines, the lawsuits rarely achieved their purpose of scaring downloaders into paying or abstaining. The odds of getting caught were simply far too remote to warrant desisting.

In the case of Myspace spammers…

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Here is a quick update to the Phorm article I posted on here a few weeks back.

Unconfirmed rumours are currently circulating that Virgin, one of the three major ISPs to sign up to Phorm, is set to dump the controversial service. Virgin’s official company position has not changed if you ask their press department, though the source of the rumour is a high ranking Virgin Media director.

This comes as yet another blow to Phorm after Talk Talk, another of the three ISPs, stated it would implement the service only on an ‘opt in’ basis – rather than the ‘opt out’ initially hoped for by Phorm.

BT however remains staunchly committed to Phorm – though I doubt how loyal they will stay…

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So, almost exactly one month after Google launched their App Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a considerable bandwidth price reduction. Google’s rival to AWS is still only in a closed beta release stage, but it has nonetheless already impacted positively on the breadth of options available to programmers – and now also contributed to reducing costs.

Amazon are unlikely to openly concede that their price cut is a response to the launch of Google’s free rival, but there can be no doubt that the reduction will make AWS more competitive against the GAE (N.B. the AWS price cuts are significant; heavier users could save somewhere in the region of 25%).

With Google’s App Engine still a limited beta release, and…

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It’s official; companies are finally recognising that outlawing social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook in the office is unlikely to work. Moreover, not only is it a futile task, but it also represents a massively missed opportunity to improve the efficiency of an organisation – and the quality of employee experience.

For many years the office watercooler has been the focal point for social encounters in the office. Now, in the age of Web 2.0, we are seeing a steady revolution in our corporate social lives. Degrees of connectivity within organisations are on the up – and not across traditional lines of the corporate communication structure. Instead we are forming links between points previously left unconnected, all thanks to…

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