On the one hand, finicky Apple users have been experiencing improved app discovery methods. On the other hand, Android is further stepping up its effort through enhancements to the Android Market, the Amazon Appstore for Android that sells Android apps alone as well as upgrades to services such as Appolicious and Appbrain.com.

Users find it easier to find apps

Of these search related developments in the wireless realm, the fine-tuning of the Android Market site is probably the most pertinent. The Android Market version on mobile devices was good. However, the Web version was rather shallow, offering no way for users to search for apps, something surprising considering that Google, the world’s search giant, owns Android.

So you would clearly expect a better performance. It introduced search on the Market site earlier this year, populating it with a vast assortment of specific categories for searching. The Market search and support was further improved with editors’ picks and trending apps along with spruced up graphics.

The new search strategy

Google apparently took a page from the playbook of Amazon more recently by giving away apps, in some cases, among the more popular in the Market. Instead of turning this into a pure giveaway, the Market is offering 10 apps each day for 10 cents apiece, thus requiring users to give their credit card details. Not many prospective app users refuse to cross that line, either because of fear of divulging their financial information or because of the inconvenience.

The Android Market still does well overall as a search engine, and will only get better, you can expect. It is possible to sort results by popularity or search relevance. The site judges the parameter relevance more effectively. For example, when one searched apps by Google earlier, one would receive a long list of those simply mentioning Google. Now the flaw stands rectified and only those apps created by Google top the results.

The search results come along with sample images to inform about the app experience, and after clicking through to app description, Android search recommends similar apps users have either bought or browsed. So searching in the wireless realm for your favorite apps is going to get only better, easier and fulfilling.

As online community increasingly migrates towards mobile apps, developers will continue to look for more efficient ways to take their offerings to as many people as possible through easy search discovery amid the crowded marketplace. The wireless realm is set to see vastly improved app-related engines and stores that facilitate the task by vastly improving their support system for both constituencies – users and the app developers.

A case in point is Lowe’s that recently pulled its ad campaign from a reality TV program showcasing American Muslims, after receiving a barrage of complaints from aggrieved community, the Florida Family Association, in particular. The North Carolina-based firm apologized, stating, ‘it appears we managed to step into a hotly contested debate with strong views from virtually every angle and perspective.’

Once the news of its backtracking, other customers joined in, and soon they were expressing their displeasure against the advertising on its Facebook Page as well. A particular post on the Page received almost 28,000 comments – of all hues – in only a few hours. Under normal circumstances, such hateful or profane would have been deleted. Lowe’s would normally delete these types of comments. However, the backlash was so severe that the company simply failed to moderate its fans and handle the scale of adverse comments in such a short span of time. Lowe’s (Home Improvement social media director), Brad Walters, was quoted as saying:

“Lowe’s received thousands of comments from many sides of the issue. We let the debate continue on social media sites of the company, removing only the most hateful ones and, in some cases violent, that clearly violate our policy. While we do appreciate the desire to discuss previous ads, the focus of our social channels is helping customers with their home improvement needs.”

Learn to deal with negative news flow

But the fact remains that the company didn’t have a contingency plan to deal with the sudden swift scale of comments it was bombarded with in no time. It opted to delete the original post, and so also the thousands of comments along with it. Thankfully, the situation has been controlled with a piece of handling once the company finally regrouped itself.

The point to be made here is that it wouldn’t suffice for a brand any longer to scroll through its ubiquitous Facebook Wall, responding, moderating and managing user-driven content intermittently at its own convenience. This can hurt in case of a sudden negative development. The adverse comments’ flow can be better handled with help of experts whose timely intervention can acquaint with services, tool and best possible practices to pacify users and tackle a wave of comments that can dent your online reputation and adversely affect the brand image.

Online reputation managers can work closely with you to form review/ escalation processes for testing peak events.

Just a couple of weeks prior to its announcement, the search engine major, Google, had subtly hinted so. It declared that it would now redirect Blogger visitors to country-specific domains that would allow it to block posts in countries that have stricter censorship laws in place.

Gradual roll out of content filtering plan

According to media reports, Google will be initially rolling out these changes to India, New Zealand, and Australia, with a plan in place to apply the content filtering measures globally. So, for instance, if a user in the country makes an attempt to access a free blog served from blogspot.com, for example, [blogname].blogspot.com, he or she would now be getting redirected to the ‘country-code top level domain’ (ccTLD) or [blogname].blogspot.com.in. The Google policy won’t affect Blogger blogs, which employ a custom domain.

Say, you are in Australia and checking [blogname].blogspot.com, it is possible to be redirected to [blogname].blogspot.com.au. In other words, A ccTLD, as and when it appears, actually corresponds with the country or current location of the reader. Google elaborates in an explanatory note as why is this happening:

“We routinely launch limited updates, so in the coming months you will see ccTLDs in additional countries. Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Blogger blogs will invariably be subject to censorship laws of the country. However, as it appears, Google is trying to be on the safer side when it comes to offending the authorities, though whether it accepts to censors everything it’s asked to by them or refuses to do so, is a different thing.

But the fact that it is ready to do so means that it is not averse to complying with requests for content blocking through blogspot.in domains. This process will be applicable to country-specific domains, as and when the need arises. Law enforcement agencies from different countries send several content removal requests for various reasons like national security and defamation, details of which are mentioned in the periodic Google’s Transparency Report.

Whether or not Google uses the policy to fulfill the censorship law provisions, Blogger users are likely to be affected in terms of the search rankings.

By keeping its professional identity separate from other social sites, LinkedIn, is now a highly established platform. It has grown to boast a user base of over 135 million with people from around 200 countries across the world. But is a string of Facebook apps, which apparently offer alternative to it, going to hurt its LinkedIn?

Independent software developers – rather than taking it right from scratch – are looking to infuse Facebook with a professional layer, with a belief that users will readily accept a ‘less-than-complete’ separation, so to say, of the personal and the professional. Aptly summing up the situation, a recent report in The New York Times by Randall Stross refers to BranchOut, a new startup. It offers a Facebook app for the purpose of job-related networking.

What does BranchOut do for users? Let us see!

• When the users join it, the software will pull all the available professional information about things like their education, current employer, job title etc from Facebook, keeping out everything else.
• However, excluding aspects such as indiscreet photographs does not necessarily make the latter a good basis for constructing a professional identity.
• BranchOut will show a candidate’s network of Facebook friends to prospective employers. These are not likely to have been gathered the way they usually are at LinkedIn, with the fair idea of the fact that one’s connections will closely be reviewed by HR managers verifying professional qualifications.

Monster’s BeKnown is another Facebook app, which competes with BranchOut.

• This particular app claims to pull out more detailed information from Facebook than its competitor does. However, it lists friends chosen by the user specifically, and only if they agree to be included.
• Monster Worldwide’s global product manager Tom Chevalier, who oversees it, states: “There’re people whom I would prefer rather not to interact with in my professional life, I may still be good friends with (them).”
• So, why not put in the same amount of time and energy to build a comprehensive profile over at LinkedIn itself? The app developers like BeKnown reason that visibility is a factor as the average Facebook user visits the site at least more than 30 times each month, and also contend that convenience is very important.

But LinkedIn’s has its strengths. Applicants would want to be where the prospective employers are easily found; and employers, on their part, where the most eligible candidates are. In both scenarios, LinkedIn is still an undisputed choice something which works in its favor and helps it to retain its dominance in the domain of professional networking.

Two instances in a debate about striking the balance between the free flow of information and privacy on the internet, are apparently pitching users against companies. The first one was a revelation that a network was seemingly sharing phone numbers of its mobile customers with any site/s that they visit. This came to light after Lewis Peckover, an IT systems administrator, put a demonstration showing how a number was revealed after a mobile device accessed a website over 3G.

The company in question, O2 network, was rather quick to react, as it sensed a storm brewing up on Twitter. Yes, it conceded, we did share customers’ numbers with its ‘trusted partners to let services such as age verification’. However, it claimed that the However, it claimed that the intension was never to take such bits information to reach every site, something that happened because of a faulty maintenance, now fixed.

New EU legislations

So why and how would it really matter if your number or other information was provided out to a site – directly or indirectly? The point here is that it might well be a breach of the prevailing data protection legislation provisions in Britain that lay out norms for how this data can or cannot be shared and how the customers are to be informed of this.

And then there are going to be stringent pan-European rules that bring us to a second example. The new data protection directive in EU incorporates ‘the right to be forgotten’ or, the right to inform a social site to take out those indiscreet photographs of the past that might affect your job interview outcome.

More radically, in the backdrop of the web industry, at least, it gives the right to inform a search engine and other websites where a photograph might have landed to expunge it too. The idea behind the new radical directive, slated to replace 27 existing data protection regimes all across Europe, is to put users in charge of their personal information, making them more secured and confident while using online services.

Search and social sites are not happy

This new internet regulation, however, has rekindled debate on Sopa and Pipa, the American anti-piracy laws. While welcoming the strengthened privacy norms, The Open Rights Group (ORG) has appealed to the Commission for ignoring complaints regarding the impact on operations by social sites and search engines.

According to ORG’s Jim Killock, advice from Facebook and Google is not warranted when framing privacy provisions. Both believe most consumers are not averse to share data online, a claim backed by the advertisers, who vouch for its relevance to offer customized services for the benefit of users.

The shares have been changing hands at levels valuing it at roughly $80bn in private secondary markets, and Facebook could well be worth anything between $75bn and $100bn by the time it hits Wall Street, it is believed. There are indeed expectations that a public listing would put an astounding $100bn price tag on Facebook, though a section of stock market feel that might not be the case amid recent market volatility and also poor response to other internet IPOs in recent times.

Mark Zuckerberg, due to turn 28 this May, along with his early visionary collaborators, created Facebook in dorm room of a Harvard University eight years ago, quickly taking it from a despised social distraction for college students to a global utility reshaping the World Wide Web. Not since Google has any online company managed to build a service of this scale and influence, which has become an integral part of our daily lives and internet habits. So the frenzy around the IPO is really understandable. According to an estimate, Facebook has made revenues to the tune of $3bn- $6bn last year.

But what’s the world media making out of the Facebook IPO. Reactions have been diverse from caution to exuberance, from praise to skepticism. Let us sample a few to gauge the mood prevailing as far as the proposed public listing of Facebook is concerned:

“By pushing his social network onto the stock exchange, the still youthful CEO stands to reap billions putting him in the upper echelons of the one percent. Yet in his letter Zuckerberg maintains that the company’s success is partly attributable to the way that it has integrated the good elements of the hacker creed, such as its meritocratic nature and its emphasis on engineering, into its day-to-day operations.” (Reuters)

“Its founder and CEO owns more than a quarter of the company. Zuckerberg holds roughly 534 million shares. If that higher valuation holds up when the company goes public, Zuckerberg would be worth $24 billion or more. He has also collected some cold, hard cash over the years. Last year, he made $483,000, took home a $220,500 bonus, and received additional perks like private jet travel valued at $783,000. His regular paycheck is about to be slashed, though.” (CNN)

“A lofty valuation for Facebook would evoke the grandiose ambitions of the previous Internet boom in the late 1990s. Back then, dozens of unproven companies went public at sky-high valuations but later imploded. Facebook is still a small fraction of the size of rival Google. But many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct increasingly more capital to the Web’s social hive. Investors now have to try to ignore the I.P.O. hype and soberly sift through the first batch of its financial statements to gauge the company’s potential.” (The NYT)

As widely reported, this is going to be among the biggest ever share sales witnessed on Wall Street. It should quite easily dwarf the issue of $1.9bn by Google after the company went public seven years ago. Of course, the issue size would still be some distance short of the overwhelming $20bn raised in November 2010 by General Motors. Yet, the reported valuation can make it one of the world’s biggest IT firms by market capitalization.

‘Facebook a brilliant achievement, but $75-$100bn? Would make Apple look really cheap,’ media baron Rupert Murdoch twitted, echoing the excitement surrounding it. Facebook’s gradual but well-orchestrated move touched off a frenzy among prime Wall Street banks to lead this high-profile and highly profitable deal. Morgan Stanley is going to be the lead underwriter for the share sale. Rumors of its initial public offering have been in the air for last several months, though the ultimate valuation Facebook will draw is anybody’s guess. Describing it as a ‘bittersweet moment for the US’, The Telegraph’s American business editor wrote:

“Anyone dipping into Facebook’s prospectus will be bombarded with evidence of the meteoric growth Facebook has achieved over the last three years. It’s an echo of the early years of other US companies, such as Ford and General Electric, that reshaped the world. But there’s one important way in which Facebook differs from its predecessors: it’s not creating as many jobs.”

The social site was launched in 2004 by entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg along with other fellows at Harvard University. Since then, it has grown into a highly prolific, prominent and popular online platform. Having achieved an astounding worldwide reach, it makes money largely through advertising. In spite of early skepticism about whether social sites like Twitter and Facebook would ever be able to monetize their vast user base, ad revenue has trickled in.

As a private company, it doesn’t need to make its accounts public, but reports circulated in January last year referring from a document of Goldman Sachs to its key clients pegged its net profit at $355m on revenues of around $1.2bn in the first three quarters of 2010. However, cutting through the hype, The Forbes columnist Peter Cohan argues that Facebook’s IPO is rather irrelevant from market perspective. He mentions:

“It is popular in the media to compare it to that of Google whose price has risen nicely since its 2004 IPO from $84 to $580. That 30% compound annual growth is good – but Google trades 19% below its 2007 peak of $715. To be fair, there is a bit of good news for those hoping that Facebook stock will climb after it goes public. That’s the only glimmer of good news for why the IPO might breathe some life into the business of VCs and tech entrepreneurs.”

Inability to transform the manner in which companies operate their business means that Facebook will remain merely a niche or isolated phenomenon in the broader economic scheme, he avers.

Google is trying to push its search engine as a marketable brand, though it’s hardly unknown to anyone, with no less than two-thirds of the total market share in the US. The thought behind this is to remind users why and how Google and its impact on our lives matter and to represent its powerful online brand in the offline realm. Google’s rival, Microsoft’s Bing, also has been running an ad campaign.

As the search engine giant faces antitrust regulators’ scrutiny, it is eager to narrate ‘heartwarming’ tales about itself to connect with audiences; it’s about human emotion, a bit surprising for a hardcore company, but that’s the way to go. Google believes. Its ad for Chrome, ‘Dear Sophie’ tries to touch the hearts with an emotional appeal. And this despite the fact that data is the king at Google; it’s still not wanting to back up mushy sentimental branding with hard data.

This has been a major transformation for Google, already a household name that still feels the needs to tell an interesting story now. One reason is that it needs new properties like the Google Plus and the Chrome browser to succeed for finding revenue sources beyond search ads. The campaign is part of its mission, launched by its chief executive and co-founder Larry Page to cut down its product offerings and make the existing products more intuitive, attractive and better integrated with one another.

The company won’t divulge how much money it has spent for the global marketing push, albeit it concedes the fact that there had been an apparent shift in strategy. The vice president (global marketing), Lorraine Twohill, has been quoted as saying that as the company gets bigger, it faces more competition, more messages to consumers; more products are there, so it needs to do a bit more for communicating what they actually are and how you can utilize these products, she emphasized.

Lorin Pollack, Google’s event planner reasons that they run an online brand and one cannot actually experience it but for typing keys. So it’s a responsibility to bring the brand to life outside of the realm of computer. The expert adds: “Google is a clean and simple brand. I draw inspiration from the home page, which is just simple.”

Google’s strategy seems to have connected with most viewers since they would prefer viewing a real-life story than have a slew of products being pushed at them.

The practice is also called ‘likejacking’ because gullible victims are lured into clicking the ‘like’ button on Facebook to perpetuate it. Facebook’s case has been backed by the US state of Washington in suing the accused firm of ‘clickjacking’ charges. According to the plaintiffs, Adscend Media has been making money from the rampant scam tricking a host of advertising clients for each Facebook user, who gets misdirected to a target ad or some subscription service.

As media reports suggest, it is probably the first time ever that any state government has approached legal authorities in a stiff crackdown against spam spread via social sites like Facebook.  The Washington attorney general senior counsel Paula Selis underlines the significance of this step to move the federal court through two separate albeit similar claims that have been filed both by the state and Facebook.

According to Selis, clickjacking had become more pervasive, and millions of users had probably suffered from Adscend’s spam. Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot added that security is akin to an arms race so it’s important to stay ahead of scammers and spammers. Both have accused Adscend of blatantly violating federal and state statutes that outlaw any deceptive or misleading commercial electronic communications as well as unfair business practices.

The separate lawsuit point out that Facebook pages devised as ‘bait’, disseminated as harmless posts to social network users, seemingly originating from friends, entice people to view provocative or salacious content. To do so, they first need to follow a series of steps that supposedly reveal the tempting content, actually designed so as to lure users to other websites, where they are prompted to divulge personal information or sign up for mobile subscription services.

They are tricked into ‘Liking’ the Facebook ‘bait’ page that alerts other friends to the particular page’s existence, helping to propagate it. Then they’re informed they can’t access the content unless they fill out a form for an advertising offer or online survey.
In one real-life example cited, the ‘Like’ button was overlayed with a link labeled: ‘This man took a picture of his face every day for 8 years!’

Here the promised content obviously does not exist. The user out of curiosity is diverted through a series of fake prompts taking them away from Facebook – to a string of ads and subscription offers. In some instances, a hidden code is embedded in a link on these ‘bait’ page that activates the ‘Like’ button without even one clicking it, sending it by default to friends’ news feeds. Rob McKenna, the Washington state attorney general, stated the state was going to take action against cyber fraud by developing legal and technological expertise.

The idea is to develop a secure web application for its strategic information & operations center. The app is expected to gather critical open source information/ intelligence to let SIOC quickly decipher and geo-locate emerging threats. The product will allow the FBI to assemble real time data cached as well as information, and link it to specific locations and also to be easily shared.

The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) mentions in the RFI that social media has emerged as a primary source of intelligence and information gathering since it has become the prime first response to most key events and hence the primal alert to many possible developing situations.”

The FBI made the request just weeks after the Department of Homeland Security of US released a report into the specific privacy implications of monitoring new media websites. It sought to justify the principle of utilizing information users have provided and not having opted to make private. “Data posted to social networking sites is publicly accessible and also voluntarily generated. So the opportunity not to offer it (information) does exist prior to the informational post by the user,” it stated.

It listed sites the bureau intended to monitor, including the photo service Flickr, Itstrending.com, a site that displays popular shared items on Facebook, and YouTube. It highlighted words that it looked out for like “small pox”, “gangs”, “recall” and “leak”.

The application, as FBI sees it, should be able to collect critical ‘open source’ information and possess the ability to:

• Give an automated search as well as scrape capability of popular social networks including Twitter and Facebook
• Let users create new keyword searches
• Show various levels of threats as alerts on maps, if possible using color coding so as to display priority; Yahoo Maps and Google Maps 3D listed as ‘preferred’ mapping options
• Plot an array of global and domestic terror data
• Translate tweets in foreign language into English.

An FBI spokesperson was quoted as saying by the BBC that this particular software being thought through was:

“no different than applications used by other government agencies” and that “the application will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words… and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security.”

Privacy groups like Washington-based EPIC describe the FBI request as ridiculous. One doesn’t know so many of the people during Twitter communications. The monitoring agency might launch investigations sans accountability or transparency.