To anyone that doesn’t use Facebook this might seem like a small thing, but to the tens of millions who log on every day, this could prove to be a godsend. As all Facebook users know friends on the site do not all fall into the same category, some you night have known since play school, others you might have met once at a party and then forgotten you ever added. There are quite feasibly numerous things on Facebook that you’d be happy with your real, offline mates seeing that you might not be happy with almost strangers looking at, things like phone numbers, invitations to parties etc.

The new measures take on even more significance when you consider the possibility of excluding workmates and business contacts from seeing certain elements of your profile. It doesn’t take a business consultant to see that a status update like ‘Tara is sooo hung over this morning’ is not going to endear you to your boss.

The new system will also make phishing and other malware practices harder, simply by virtue of the fact that there will be less personal information out there to steal. It is however unlikely to do much about the employers’ growing concerns that workplace facebook use could compromise security. It will however make the quick background check performed by prospective boy/girlfriends and employers that little bit harder. Which is either good or bad, depending on your point of view.

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Microsoft’s reason for doing this? To protect the Windows software from becoming even more overrun with malware than it already is and in the process, try to rebut Mac users’ favourite criticism of PC’s, that they are more susceptible to malicious software than than macs.

There’s also a security concern to contend with. The vast majority of computers in the world use Windows, that includes some very important companies and government bodies, with some very sensitive information. If Microsoft wants to keep those clients, it’s in their interest to do something to halt the spread of infection.

The way to do that is to do something about the vast swathes of unprotected computers out there. When these systems fall prey fall prey to spyware programmers, as they frequently do, they become unwitting tools in the malware process, as malicious programmes use their contacts to cast their worms and trojans even further. If Microsoft can deny the hackers these extra contacts, then they will have gone a long way to halting the growth of the problem.

However, the plan is not without controversy. Whilst Microsoft claim that they are targeting only unprotected computers with their software, it is difficult to see how building a programme that essentially does the same thing as the offerings from McAfee, et al, won’t affect sales of their software.

Whilst I feel bad for the companies who’ve basically had their business model snatched away, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a necessary step. Scares like the Conficker worm have opened people’s eyes to the fact that Malware is in danger of becoming unmanageable, in fact, in an age when around 90% of all email communication is spam, some would argue that we’re already there.

Hopefully Microsoft’s programme will be effective enough and marketed heavily enough to convince the masses of the need to think about security.

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The assumption is that consumers are going online in order to find savings not available on the high street. This reasoning is borne out by the behaviour of consumers online who are researching more meticulously than ever, and not just on big-ticket items either, on all kinds of goods.

So how does someone adapt their ecommerce site to meet the demands of this new kind of online customer. Well, the first is of course, add value – do deals make savings, in general, give your customers a reason to shop with you, then push those savings in your PPC ads.

The new breed of choosy customer has also produced a real spike in the number of people using price comparison sites, so getting yourself on one of these has never been more important. There is however, also evidence that these customers have been doing their own research and legwork via peer reviewing facilities like blogs and message boards.

On the latter point it might be worth reaching out to relevant blogs and content sites, maybe offer a product for review, or sponsor a competition etc.

So, basically, at the moment if you’re a player in the world of online commerce, you need to be cheap and add value. You also need to have a strong off site presence and reputation.

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For Google to be at all perturbed by Bing, the search engine would have to be something special indeed. Let’s remember, Microsoft’s brand has been taking a hammering for the last several years and the company are currently hovering around ten percent of Google’s share of the search market. To overcome that kind of disparity Bing is not only going to have to be good, but better than Google, better enough to convince people to trash years and years of brand loyalty and switch.

Sounds unlikely doesn’t it – this is why Sergey Brin may just have handed Microsoft the biggest PR win they’ve had in many years, by appearing so worried about the new offering from the company. According to the Post and others, Brin is leading a special group of technicians to find out how the Bing algorithm differs from Google’s and figure out a way to undermine it.

It’s apparently quite rare for the Google founders to get so involved in day to day operations, leading many to believe that Bing either poses some threat or offers some kind of significant advantage over Google. The Post has an unnamed source stating, “New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey.”

Perhaps what has Brin worried is nothing to do with the search engine itself, rather the $80 – $100 million dollars that Microsoft is planning to spend on advertising Bing in the coming months. Google’s budget is dwarfed in comparison at a relatively anaemic $25 million for the whole company. The Google founder could simply be looking for a way to figure out what claims their rivals are going to make and prepare a response.

The arrival of Bing has already given Microsoft a bump in numbers from 9.1 to 11.1 on the week of launch though this was to be expected. As the politicians like to say, even a dead cat bounces. The trick will be keeping these new novelty-inspired users.

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One thing that’s been pointed out is that, despite months of fevered publicity, the Pre failed to generate the kind of crowds that have greeted the release of the G1, the iPhone and even new Blackberries in recent years. In my opinion, an unfair comparison, for one thing, Palm doesn’t have the brand strength that Apple enjoy (no one does), so they were always going to come of second best there, they also don’t have the gimmick of the first ever specific mobile phone OS, like the G1 did.

Also, the technology behind SmartPhones is now pretty old – the law of diminishing returns is going to be a factor, as is the fact that many of the people who were ever going to get one of these phones already have one. As a result, I don’t really think we can judge the Pre on launch hype as it’s just not a level playing field.

What will be crucial for Palm is whether or not they can keep up the momentum for the next few weeks. This may be hampered by the fact that demand has outstripped supply, meaning that, in the words of Tim Donahue, vice president of business marketing – Sprint, “There will be constrained inventory for some time. And there will be spot shortages for the foreseeable future.”

The Pre has been touted as a hybrid of both the Blackberry and the IPhone. It’s touch screen and similar in functionality to an iPhone, though it also has a slide out keyboard and the ability to run several programmes at once, which is expected to appeal to the business users who keep Blackberry afloat.

Overall, I think that Palm have reason to be cautiously optimistic, a possible 100,000 in sales over a weekend is not to be sneezed at and the press have, thus far, been incredibly kind. It could be that Palm is back.

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The software, named ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’ works by accessing a central database of banned websites and then blocking internet users from accessing those sites. The programme’s aim is, according to a government notice issued in May, “Constructing a green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment, and preventing harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people.”

This news comes in the wake of last week’s anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, during which China was rumoured to have blocked access to sites like YouTube, Twitter, Flickr etc., to attempt to prevent any non stage-managed information about the event filtering through to the public.

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Many analysts expect that ‘not very much’ will be the answer to that one. Using a recent Windows Vista cost cutting move as a guide, some analysts have predicted as little as $100 dollars will be the asking price for the system. For my money, they could well be right, Windows Vista has been such a disaster that Microsoft need, for probably the first time, to actually make the case for an upgrade rather than just taking it as a matter of course that people would. The easiest way to do that is to lower the price significantly.

However, on the other side of that coin is the fact that continuing to use XP, a system that is two years out of date will be fairly unpalatable to most businesses. Microsoft may well take the stance that committing to another few years of using an out of date system will be too much for most IT departments to stomach. Basically it depends on whether or not Microsoft feels like playing hardball or eating humble pie.

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The truth is that at this stage, nobody really knows the true extent of Wave and what it will be capable of yet. The makers recently let the experiment out of the lab by opening the API up to a group of carefully selected developers in the hope that they would come up with new functionality for the application that they hadn’t thought of. So basically, there’s no telling where the app will go from here.

Put simply, Wave is a new form of email, though this is probably too basic a description. It’s really more of a multipurpose communications platform that combines the features of email, with instant messaging and forums. The developers of wave were struck by the notion that email had remained, relatively unchanged for around forty years, after being invented sometime in the 60s, before social networks, before forums, before even the internet. Their mission, in their own words, was to try to create an email service that looked as if it had been invented in modern times.

It works like this, conversations, or ‘waves’ are hosted by the programme, parties exchange messages like normal though instead of several messages flying back and forward there is only one master conversation that people access. If you have a response to one particular part of the conversation you simply click it and write. Your response will be shown as relating only to that part of the conversation.

Okay, so the above features are useful but not exactly game changing. The really impressive stuff comes through the functionality of the programme. For starters, its real time which means you see each other’s keystrokes as you type. This means that email and Instant Messaging are no longer distinct entities, in fact Wave is better than IM as it eliminates the tedious ‘Joe is typing’ message that comes up as the other parties type IMs. Essentially Wave makes Instant Messages actually instant.

If you’re the kind of person that carefully crafts each and every email they send and checks religiously for spelling and syntax then the chances are the above is sounding less than ideal to you, but don’t worry it is possible to turn off the real time typing function. It is also possible to send private responses to just one person if you have something to say that is not relevant to the whole group.

Another element that’s impressing about Wave is the attachment capabilities. It’s basically a drag and drop set up. For example, all you have to do to attach several photos to your email is highlight and drag them over – it will then present those photos as thumbnails actually within the email. This means that Wave in addition to being a communications tool is also a perfectly decent personal online photo archive. All you’d need to do is create waves instead of albums.

As I said earlier, these initial core features are set to be expanded and changed over the coming months, though a strong consensus is emerging that Wave could be a hugely important invention for all of us. Even if it will take some getting used to.

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Well, the answer to question one is basically a resounding yes, Google’s domination of the search marketing world is so complete now that they really do have full control of the industry, far eclipsing both Yahoo and MSN. The question is whether Google have played by the rules or not in getting to that position. If it’s deemed that they have, then there’s really nothing anyone can do and Google really are that rarest of things – a natural monopoly. If not however, they could be opening themselves up to the kind of antitrust trouble that Microsoft got themselves into at the end of 90s.

Personally I think the first option is the more likely. Google haven’t really abused their position of power to unfairly hamper their competitors, also, they tend to keep their software open and compatible with other formats, something that Microsoft decidedly don’t do and continue to get punished for. The most important point in the debate is that, as Google are so fond of saying, ‘competition is just a click away.’ Internet users can use Live Search or Yahoo any time they like.

It’s simply not Google’s fault that their competitors have failed to come up with a product capable of competing with theirs and almost every step of the way they’ve been a lot fairer to their competition than they could have been. To punish them for just being better would be grossly unfair.

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Those of you doubting the validity should check out the video below. ‘Brushes,’ the application used to create the picture records each ‘brush stroke,’ allowing you to play back the drawing process at your leisure. The result below is the breathtaking 51 second record of the creation of the cover.

Apple are predictably spinning this as proof positive (if any were needed) that the iPhone, far from being a glorified toy, is actually a serious piece of computing equipment capable of performing complicated and unique tasks. Obviously, impressive as it is, it is really only a good picture, done on a hand held device. Still, bit of a hurrah moment for Apple, and not just from a marketing point of view.

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Nokia’s Ovi Store was supposed to be the solution to this problem. It was supposed to be an all singing, all dancing rival to the app store where developers would have almost free reign to innovate and create exciting new programmes for Nokia devices. Much noise was made about the launch of the project yesterday and users logged on in droves to get their first impressions of the new store.

Unfortunately for Nokia those impressions are unlikely to have been good. According to reports when attempting to use the site last night users found that pages either didn’t load or were incredibly slow. Now, some slowness you could forgive due to increased usage just after the launch however, the issue continued for hours. There were also reports of products disappearing for no apparent reason and even very generic search terms yielding no results.

As anyone who’s ever launched a site, or anything for that matter, will know, the hours and days immediately after the launch are hugely important… So, not a good day for Nokia.

Here’s what the company had to say for themselves…

“Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements.”

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This leads to a real quantity over quality bias amongst Twitter users as they struggle to get as many followers as possible, following absolutely anyone in the hope of getting a follow back and in turn getting many of these haphazard follows themselves. Pretty soon, and we’re talking days here, it’s possible to get thousands of followers, even if you haven’t written anything on Twitter at all.

In the short term this is good for professional users as they have a huge stable of followers to begin pushing their message on. However, there is a danger of killing the golden goose here and professional followers should all be aware that they run the risk of falling foul of the law of diminishing returns as what they’re up to promotionally begins to pollute and corrupt the user experience – the reason people go on twitter in the first place.

If less people go on Twitter there are less people to sell to. If we end up in a situation where there’s not much going on other than companies preaching at each other about their products or services then the whole thing becomes useless for any purpose, especially sales and corporate networking.

The traditional/desirable user experience on Twitter goes something like this. You go on, you write some tweets, people that like what you have to say follow you, then you browse other people’s tweets and follow people that interest you. That way, when you log on you are greeted by a list of tweets there’s decent chance of you being actually interested in.

Essentially the point is that no one actually keeps track of a thousand accounts, therefore the people that are following so many people are essentially operating contrary to the main point of twitter, actual interaction rather than spam.

So, what to do about it? Well, the only way I can see is to limit the number of people you’re allowed to follow. Admittedly, the backlash to this would be huge, though think about it, by limiting the number of followers you’re allowed to have, you assign follows a value that they have until now lacked, this would make people more careful about the people they follow, this would mean having 1000+ followers would actually mean something.

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1. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. Yep, that’s right Wolfram Alpha is intended as a medium to find out specific answers to questions, not to organise the crazy hotchpotch of information, and indeed miss-information, that fills the internet.

2. Wolfram Alpha can only answer where an answer actually exists. This is a big one, there is only one correct answer to the question ‘how many inches in a metre?’ (39.37 stats fans). However, a question like ‘how many new users did Oprah get Twitter?’ simply doesn’t have one, any answer would be an estimate therefore not within WA’s remit.

3. You can’t see the site sources because there aren’t any. Again, WA is not a search engine, it uses its own internal knowledge base to generate answers.

There, hope that helps clear up some confusion.

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