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Slideshare.net is looking like a real winner in the online media sharing market. Their Youtube-style content portal is designed for hosting and sharing slideshows, presentations, and ’slidecasts’, and is currently the leading site in this sector. I had a little explore of the various features on offer to see just how good it really is…

The first thing new visitors will recognise is the layout - the homepage features a search bar, a tag cloud, and then selections of most popular, most downloaded, and recently added shows. Further down there are links to users and groups (like Youtube, Slideshare encourages users to register into the community - though you can use the site without doing this).

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 be to compete for the existing users of competitors…

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.

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.

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%).