Beware: Google Blocks Use of PayPal!

It has recently been uncovered that Google is blocking the use of PayPal for payments.

The Washington Post uncovered that the Google App Engine, the new platform for building and hosting 3rd party applications, was not allowing the integration of PayPal payment handling.

The problem, as stated by the Washington Post, is that “developers who are building apps that use PayPal to handle payments usually require the application to send a request to the PayPal service. The URL’s used in these requests are all on the paypal.com domain name, and there is a test environment setup on a URL at http://www.sandbox.paypal.com. In Google App Engine applications, requests to either of these URL’s returns a generic ‘download’ error with no specific details.”

Considering that Google has its own payments system – Google Checkout – could this be just an honest mistake, or is there something more sinister going on here?

There was quite a discussion surrounding this on the Google App Engine forum, including a comment by Google employee Marzia Niccolai, saying that it was just an accident:

Thanks for the report! This is a bug, and we have located the problem. There was an error in our anti-phishing protections that was blocking some specific URL domains from being fetched using the URLFetch service. This was an oversight on our part, and these specific domain restrictions will be removed in the next few days.

If the developers themselves are to be believed, this was a deliberate block by Google and now that it has been discovered the search giant is now back-pedaling to make everything OK again.

The weakening economy and rising fuel prices has lead to greater unemployment across America. Instead of profit, new home-based businesses are opened for family survival.

Just a decade ago if you felt financial pains from a slacked economy your first option was a second job or moonlighting. Franchising with it’s high start-up costs and MLM with it’s checkered past was usually out of the question for most Americans in an economic emergency.

The Internet and telecommunications has changed all of that. Today, it’s believed that over half of all businesses classified “Small Firms” are run from home.

Their low start-up costs and savings on overhead allow, even novices, to turn a profit quickly and have a high level of success compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses.

This opportunity I am
showing you is unique, please don’t miss out, at least having a look. (this is
going to be bigger than Youtube, Facebook or anything that looks similar) At
the moment it is still an insider secret. I am in direct contact with the CEO,
I have pre launched Spain 12 months ago and this June launched UK. If you want
to be in at the top this is the time.

This is what I have
to bring to the table: Here is the
general overview:

It is a business in
the Media and Entertainment sector, HD film streaming, Music and Private TV.
This is the main free product .

FREE Boomerang*:
http://www.urlfreeze.com/sumo108/BlueBoomerangEngl (flash intro 5mins) or
http://www.my.catchboomerang.com (straight in)

* The Boomerang Media
Station is the most advanced media distribution technology on the Internet.
It’s not only high tech, but high concept as well.

Unlike a tool bar,
the boomerang does not depend on a browser nor will it slow down your computer.

Download the
Boomerang Media Station and enjoy the fastest streaming content on the
Internet!

I am looking for people

A)who want to put
content on,from singers , musicians, actors etc…

Anyone that puts
content on earns a royalty which is more than the usual. The revenue share is
70:30.

B)who want to become
an affiliate

C)Shareholders ( You
can buy shares at preferred rate $0.50 a share untill end of this week. There
are a few left) http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EWRC.PK they ought to level at $2.50-$3.00

D)People who want to
buy or part buy licences for various countries

I have put below a
lot of information, for you to go through or pass on.

For information on
the company, review the interview about the company info as a mp3 recording:

http://www.eaglevoicemail.com/mp3/heru2007-0416.mp3
and or

a video interview
with the CEO Henning Morales: (24mins)

http://www.eworldapollo.com/video/interview.htm

Play TV is one of the
most wanted features click on the boomerang and then click on max for full
screen high definition, this feature will be applicable for all films be it
music and advertising. Awesome.

There is more to
boomerang and our earnings than one sees at first glance.

There is an affiliate
program but also comercial sales of white label boomerangs and Shares sales
also advertising on top of the boomerang shop sales and afilliate bonuses.

These are some of the
possibilities for sales we are talking about:

White label:
http://boomerang.aulatina.com/?boomerang=hide

http://www.eworldtechnologies.net/boomerang.html

Services:
http://www.eworldtechnologies.net/services.html

Advertising:
http://www.eworldadvertising.net/

Investors please
click on the mouse in presentation to page:
http://www.eworldapollo.com/presentation/

Hope to hear from you
soon.

Bye

Maja

Some 11 million people, or 30 percent of UK internet users, spent time at sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, eMarketer estimates. Those three sites account for the lion’s share of users in the UK.

Though social sites account for only a tiny portion of UK online ad spending (3.4 percent in 2008), social-network ad spend will rise 77 percent this year to £115 million ($225 million), eMarketer projects. Spending in 2012 will have increased 148 percent over 2008 levels

Social networks have been part of the UK internet landscape for several years, and the UK dominates social-network spending in Western Europe with 68 percent of the market.

eMarketer expects the UK social-network market to enjoy slightly greater ad-spending percentage gains than that of the US; the UK social-network ad market trails that of the US by one to two years.

“Though social network advertising is forecast to grow aggressively this year, it will only do so if social network operators can develop substantial metrics showing the value and performance of the advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, author of the report.

“I hear it every time I’m on a (tech) panel,” Murphy, Facebook’s vice president of media sales, says with a wry smile.

He’s referring to the inevitable question on
when Facebook and other social-networking sites will turn their steep
market valuations into mounds of currency. (Invariably, Murphy answers
that Facebook has a long list of major advertisers.)

Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking
sites have been the rage of the tech industry for more than a year.
Following investments by Microsoft and News Corp., the companies are
valued in the billions of dollars and are considered blueprints for how
to build a website. Yet a deeper question lingers: How are they going
to consistently produce profits to match their soaring valuations?

It is a parlor game that has Silicon Valley buzzing. With online ad
spending booming into a nearly $50 billion market this year, there is
plenty of money to be had. Big-name advertisers are drooling over
millions of young, affluent consumers who are spending more time on
their online profiles than in front of TV and movie screens. They are
particularly smitten with the prospect of tailoring ads to people’s
specific interests.

But Google commands a sizable chunk of the
market — especially in the USA — leaving dozens of social-networking
sites to scramble for a piece of the advertising pie. Plus, there is
the ticklish task of sites and advertisers pitching products without
trampling the privacy of consumers.

Short of striking it rich with online ads or
creating a new revenue stream, how can so many sites leverage their
vast audiences? In many respects, it is the same query that dogged
portal companies in the mid-1990s and search engines in the early ’90s.
Some were sold. Some went public. Some went belly up.

The ongoing challenge is to concoct a potion —
be it through banner ads, premium subscriptions or licensing agreements
— that no one has perfected. Facebook, crown jewel of the field, is
valued at $15 billion but barely turns a profit.

“You can’t have a $15 billion market valuation
based on advertising alone,” says Bill Eager, co-founder of bSocial
Networks, a maker of software that helps social-networking users market
to each other. “It’s the single most-asked question in this field.”

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li has
pondered the next stage for social networks. She envisions the
ubiquitous sites will, in five to 10 years, “be like air: They will be
anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.”

Eager estimates there will be as many as 250,000
sites that call themselves social networks within a year, compared with
about 850 today. “Everyone will reposition their site to take advantage
of this phenomenon. It happened before with portals.”

To get there, though, there is that little
matter of making money. “Facebook’s real problem isn’t privacy, it’s
monetization,” says Dave McClure, a start-up adviser and angel investor
in Silicon Valley. “It’s not too early to worry about how Facebook
makes money.”

Murphy and other Facebook executives are well
aware of that concern. “Advertisers follow people,” says Sheryl
Sandberg, a former Google executive who recently was named Facebook’s
chief operating officer. “We have 70 million active members. Once you
have engaged users, the revenue will follow in that order.”

The Web economy

Seth Goldstein, whose company SocialMedia
Networks helps create ads for social-networking sites, says sound
economics underpin the hype of social networks. “More and more people
are spending more and more of their time within the Facebook
ecosystem,” Goldstein says. “This is the largest aggregated, engaged
audience. Period.”

Social networks present an enormous opportunity
— maybe the biggest in tech since e-mail. The sites have simplified and
amplified connections between people online, creating a thriving
ecosystem of small programs that let friends interact through games,
greetings, video clips and more.

Nonetheless, a fundamental challenge is that the
networks often are “walled gardens,” closed to the rest of the Web.
Avid Internet users must maintain separate accounts on different social
networks, blogs, photo-sharing sites and instant-messaging services. In
each case, they must invite the same friends to each separate service.

Services such as AOL and CompuServe were early
walled gardens before they became widely available websites. The same
with early e-mail services and instant-messages.

Last week, both MySpace and Facebook addressed
the issue by announcing they will soon let users share profile data
with other websites.

“We’re taking those walls down,” says Amit Kapur, MySpace’s COO.

Facebook will let members take their personal
profiles to any website that wants to host them. For now, MySpace is
opening user profiles only to a few sites, including Yahoo and eBay.

Social networks are the latest iteration of the
Web economy. But unlike e-commerce sites and search engines, they offer
a more intimate setting for friends to share information. It is also
conceivable that social networking, like e-mail, will never make piles
of cash.

Facebook’s ambitious plan to reshape advertising
— via a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon — was a bust.
The idea was to inform friends whenever a Facebook member purchased
something from online retailers. When consumers protested its invasion
of privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the miscue and
promptly apologized.

Even Google, as close to a money mint as
anything online, has struggled. Google has a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corp. to place ads on MySpace, and owns Orkut, which flopped in
the USA. Co-founder Sergey Brin recently admitted the “monetization
work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped.”

“No one has done for social media what Overture
and Google did for search,” says Martin Green, vice president of
business at Meebo, an instant-messaging program that works across
multiple IM services.

“There needs to be an AdWords for (social
networks),” says David Carlick, a partner at VantagePoint Venture
Partners, referencing Google’s ad system that displays text ads related
to search terms.

So far, several players have managed to cash in to varying degrees:

•MySpace. Since it scored a $900 million,
three-year deal with Google in 2006, MySpace has been profitable. And
it has given News Corp. a nice turn on its $650 million acquisition in
2005; Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital, expects MySpace
to haul in $700 million to $800 million in revenue in fiscal 2008,
mostly in advertising.

MySpace last month forged partnerships with
major record labels Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group
and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group to offer its 117 million members
tickets, ring tones and artist merchandise.

Driving a good chunk of sales is a project
launched last summer called HyperTargeting, software that mines the
profiles of MySpace users to deliver ads tailored to their interests.

Hundreds of advertisers are part of the program,
including Toyota and Taco Bell. Another income source is the sale of
mobile ring tones and ads.

MySpace isn’t through. It is “definitely looking
into subscription services” and emerging international markets such as
India and Japan, says CEO Chris DeWolfe.

•Facebook. Despite some hand-wringing over its fate, Facebook stacks up well compared with Google at the same juncture in its history.

Facebook hopes to double its revenue to $300
million to $350 million this year, its fourth of existence. Google’s
revenue soared fivefold, to $440 million, in its fourth year.

The 70 million-member network has ramped up
revenue with the sale of banner ads through an agreement with
Microsoft, targeted-ad programs for local businesses and the sale of
virtual gifts. Those gifts, such as a birthday cake or a popping cork
of champagne, are affixed to a user’s profile in the manner that
someone would sign a high school yearbook.

“We believe there will be a diversity of revenue
— with brand-name advertisers, local advertisers and direct-response
advertisers,” says Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s vice president of
product marketing.

•LinkedIn. The business-contact site has
built a booming business in five years through banner ads from the
likes of Porsche and Microsoft; subscriptions; job postings charged to
corporations and small-business owners; and corporate sales to
Symantec, MTV and others. LinkedIn is developing other revenue streams,
including research services to locate experts.

“It is a global, interconnected world, and we
are the one professional network,” says CEO Dan Nye. The 250-person
company boasts 21 million members and is adding 1.2 million per month.

Social-networking site Bebo, recently acquired
by AOL for a knee-buckling $850 million, is parlaying its popularity
with a predominantly young audience — many are 13 to 24 years old. It
has struck up marketing initiatives with advertisers such as Nike and
Apple, says Ziv Navoth, vice president of marketing and business
development at Bebo, which has 43 million users. That is a key reason
it has been profitable the past 18 months.

•Vertical social networks. Social
networks that cater to the specialized interests of their members offer
a premium of eyeballs and opportunity for advertisers, who want a safe,
well-lit place they know and trust.

“If you have the right audience and the right
engagement, you can build a real media business,” says Tina Sharkey,
CEO of BabyCenter.

For most social networks, the goal is to carve
out a niche where they fit in a market dominated by generalists
MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net, an online
file system.

So far, several have. Imeemhas established
itself as a music and media social-networking site with 25 million
unique visitors each month. Xing, a business-contact list service
popular in Europe, says its revenue doubled in 2007 — to $30 million,
from 2006 — because of premium subscriptions, an e-commerce marketplace
and banner ads.

Meanwhile, Ning, a free platform for
do-it-yourself social networks, has helped create more than 260,000
networks. The company estimates that, by the end of 2010, it will host
some 4 million social networks, with tens of millions of members,
serving up billions of page views daily.

Show me the money.com

Opportunities abound. Though the U.S. market is
largely sewn up among the Big 3 of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, the
international market is wide open. China alone has jolted to $1 billion
in online ads last year from nothing a few years ago.

ZenithOptimedia estimates online ad spending
worldwide will soar 26.5% this year, to $47.7 billion. Total ad
spending worldwide, by comparison, is expected to grow 4.6%, to $653.9
billion this year, says Universal McCann.

It won’t be easy, with so many social networks
slugging it out. “The pressure is to scale up revenue and then show a
profit,” says Kent Lindstrom, president of Friendster, the one-time
red-hot social network in the USA that has since become popular in
Asia, with nearly 50 million members.

Speculation veers from the dire to the giddy.
“Honeymoon is over for social networks. They need to start generating
revenue now or bow out of the race,” according to a new report from
In-Stat. Yet Venture capitalists are taking bets on the IPO
possibilities for Slide, a maker of widgets for Facebook and MySpace,
among others.

SocialMedia CEO Goldstein is betting it will be
late this year or early 2009 when name-brand advertisers flock to
Facebook, Slide, Ning and others. Coincidentally, that’s when investors
expect revenue to ramp up.

Silicon Valley is keenly aware of the vagaries
of empty dot-com promises. Just ask any of the once-promising start-ups
in the portal and e-commerce markets that were eviscerated amid high
hopes and low revenue. Plus, there is the specter of impatient
investors.

Some sites could draw millions of customers, but
if they are short on funding there isn’t much they can do, analysts
say. “The clock is ticking,” says Emily Riley, senior analyst at
JupiterResearch. “If they don’t have enough volume (users) to land
premium ads and charge per page view, game over.”

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