One criticism of SOPA is that it is actually unfair to internet companies and gives media companies extra-ordinary power. This nice poster from Nasc, a website that specializes in pixel art, shows how the internet would become exclusive to media companies while other’s like Wikipedia, Google and would be treated as suspicious.

The picture above might be funny, but it does show what exactly is the problem. Most media companies, including some of the press have always believed that they have some sort of exclusivity with distribution of content. The internet has levelled the uneven world a lot.

Possibly such laws are trying to hang on to the old way of doing things, which was full of controls and exclusive access. In an open web today, exclusivity has hardly any place.

Do you think SOPA is about censorship or about hanging on to older ideas on distribution of media content? What are your views? Do drop in your comments.

Related: How does SOPA work? [Infographic]

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-- This Post [Funny Poster] The Internet Powered by SOPA/PIPA! is Published on Devils Workshop .

But true map lovers will probably will enjoy Google Earth a lot more. I think will soon replace most traditional world atlas books anyways.

Google Earth 6.2 Features

• The new version of Google Earth makes a big improvement from a visual point of view. Earlier we saw while the map was being rendered, a jigsaw of rectangular blocks show up. Now it is a lot more seamless and smoother.
• Also there are many search improvements, along with auto-complete for Google Earth search. This will a big help for users and might attract more search queries using Google Earth.
• Finally, the social push for Google Earth comes with the option of sharing screenshots from the software directly onto Google+. Users can also share screen shots via email.

• Google Earth 6.0 introduced immersive 3D layout and that has been advanced with more detailing.

If you download the latest version of Google Earth you might want to check how to activate flight simulator on Google Earth. Google Earth also has Building maker for users to contribute 3D models of building to it.

Do drop in your comments.

Link: Google Earth

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-- This Post Share Screenshots from Google Earth on Google+ is Published on Devils Workshop .

All this is might change very soon as Twitter will soon start blocking certain tweets to make sure they adhere to local laws of this country.

Twitter’s Country specific Settings!

• If you sign-in to your Twitter account and look up your Account Settings.
• It will show you the specific country that Twitter has classified your account under.

Thought users can change the country in the settings, it does not mean they will avoid their country specific censorship of Twitter.

Twitter associates the country specific information of an account thanks to a cookie stored on a browser. This probably will make it difficult for users to change count specific details just via settings.

Why Twitter has chosen to censor certain Tweets?

Actually, this is something that is unavoidable. Every country defines freedom of expression in different ways. For example in the US, all statements are legal. While spreading racist content is illegal in France and Germany.

There is also the question of copyright laws which can change from country to country.

Back in India, we have had the issue of internet censorship being raised. But without an actual law specifying what exactly is illegal, I doubt Twitter will filter or block tweets in India except the ones that are breaking laws in many countries.

The fact is this will make if easier for Twitter to grow a lot more in certain countries. This might make it a lot more locally relevant at the price of being globally relevant.

Do you think Twitter is selling out on its principles? Do drop in your comments.

(via Twitter Blog)

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-- This Post Twitter to Censor Tweets! Is Twitter Selling Out? is Published on Devils Workshop .

It replaced Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company for a while until their places were interchanged due to the day’s trading. In valuation terms, Apple is way ahead of tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

Microsoft is valued at $249 billion, while Google is at a much lower $146 billion. That means if the valuations of Microsoft and Google were combined it would be $395 billion. That is still below Apple’s $413 billion.

Apple’s Incredible Year

• Apple has continued its good performance from last year, when it overtook Microsoft in terms of profitability.
• More than just the market valuation, Apple also has cash reserves of almost a $100 billion. That means if tomorrow the Apple board decides it could buy out Dell and HP together and still have some money left.
• It also has enough money to completely buy out the social network Facebook. As Facebook has not had a IPO, its market value cannot be easily calculated but it is estimated to be valued around $90 billion.

Less is more

• The most amazing part of Apple’s growth in the past 2 years has been that it does not have a host of products and services. Products like iPhone, iPod, iPads and their App store is what is driving all this revenues.
• Also considering it sells devices which are considered expensive and a bit of a luxury, it still has grown despite the economic recession in the US and Europe. It seems Apple is recession proof.

It seems Steve Job’s philosophy of concentrating on a handful of products instead of several, has paid off BIG. Also with iPhone 5 and iPad 3 expected in the year 2012, it could mean there is no stopping Apple at least for the next couple of years.

Source: Nasdaq

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-- This Post Apple Is More Valuable Than Microsoft and Google Put Together! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Portal for Indian customers:

On multiple requests of Indian customers we have integrated an Indian payment gateway for more and better payment options. Now customers can buy domain and hosting by using their credit/debit card, cash cards and netbanking.

We have a new year offer still running, you can avail this offer before it expires. (Read this to know more)

EBS Associate Partners:

Now we are the ‘Associate partners’ of EBS and we will also offer the EBS Payment gateway integration to clients. Additionally we would also offer technical consultancy or complete EBS-WordPress integration services. Interested companies can contact here.

Link: I Love This Domain (India)

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-- This Post Buy Domains and Hosting From Us Using Netbanking in India is Published on Devils Workshop .

Now it has brought about a convergence of 60 different privacy policy into a singe one. Well on the surface it looks a lot better for Google users, as a single privacy policy can actually be read and understood and not reading through several ones.

But it has also raised some questions on what happens to the data and how Google will deal with it.

You can check the old privacy policy here and compare it with the new single privacy policy.

What could be the advantages for Google?

Google will also integrate all the data, users have across all their products and services. This could be something that it already does through various privacy policies, but now will do it through a single one.

Users might not like the idea of their data being integrated from various other services, but it will probably give Google better way to serve up relative advertisements.

I think most people would be fine with this data being integrated, except with Gmail. People already do not like the idea of advertisements being served up on Gmail. If they see their data from Gmail being used to serve up advertisements on their search results, it might cause some criticisms of Google.

Here is a video explaining their single privacy policy

Do drop in your comments.

(via Google Blog)

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-- This Post Google Updates It’s Privacy Policy: Check Difference Between Old and New is Published on Devils Workshop .

It was in September 2011, when Facebook announced Timelines, a new layout for Facebook. That is now almost four months ago. The promise being that the new Timeline feature would be rolled out within the next 10 days to all Facebook users. Some said it was a knee jerk reaction to Google+, others felt Facebook was reinventing social media.

The world was set for Facebook to do something radical, probably for one last time, as once it has an IPO, such radical changes might be difficult to explain or rather convince to shareholders.

The Timeline Saga

It was initially rolled out to only developers and that hack was used by many to get Timeline layout.

There were some issues regarding timelines and the wait for it got longer. Apparently a website by the name Timelines.com, had legal issues with Facebook using the term Timelines.

Finally Facebook, did start an international roll-out for all users in New Zealand. It eventually made Timelines available to all users. Though not all users were on the new Timeline layout as they had to opt-in for it.

Finally, Facebook will be forcing Timelines to all users over the next few weeks. I have mixed feelings about the new layout, as it makes all past post quite easily available for others to look up. We decided to take a poll on our Facebook page about Timelines . Though the number of people voting on it were very few the verdict on if people liked or disliked Timelines stood at 50/50.

What are your views on Timelines? Do drop in your comments.

(via Facebook Blog)

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-- This Post Facebook Starts Shipping Timeline for All Users 4 Months Late! is Published on Devils Workshop .

You can follow official PMO twitter account @PMOIndia. At the moment it’s just having 6 tweets and 4 photos with more than 20,000 followers which shows how popular this account is and that too within a couple of days. It seems like everyone was waiting for him on Twitter.

Let’s see how beneficial it will be for the media and for a normal person. You can check the current PMO updates on Facebook on this official page. What do you think about politicians joining social networking websites to interact with people? Is it of any use or not?

Link: Official PMO India on Twitter.

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-- This Post 20,000 followers for Official Twitter account of Prime Minister’s Office in 2 days is Published on Devils Workshop .

Picnik’s editing tools will still be available within Google+ images in the form of Creative Kit. But not all Picnik tools will be available. Even if Google does bring in all of Picnik’s image tools into Google+, that would mean users will need a Google+ account to use it.

A silver lining to Picnik closing down in April 2012 is that its premium features will be free to all users until it actually closes down.

I have always considered Picnik to be the best online tool for editing images. Picnik was bought by Google to improve its online image editing options. I was so impressed with this new acquisition from Google, that I wondered if Google might use this along with Picasa to challenge Flickr.

Google’s Clean up act

I guess this is part of Google’s clean-up act which has seen a host of not so popular products being canned. It first shutdown a host of services in September 2011 which included Google Toolbar and Aardvark. The in November 2011, it shutdown even more services like Google Friend Connect, Google Wave, Google Gears and others.

Usually most of these shutdown announcement have included more than just one or two services and I guess we might wait for a couple of days to see if Google will be phasing out more services.

What are your views on Picnik being closed down? Do drop in your comment.

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-- This Post Google Decides to Shutdown Popular Image Editing Tool Picnik is Published on Devils Workshop .

For example when we search for the term ‘Facebook’ on Google, I get results to People and Pages Related to Facebook along with the regular links. These results show links to profiles of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

These are links to their Google+ profiles. Both profiles have never been updated for many months. Considering both account for the positions of CEO and COO at Facebook between themselves, it would be better for Google to show links to their Facebook accounts which are a lot more current.

While Google might be suggesting Facebook and Twitter are not sharing their data, but a search for ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ shows up his profile on Facebook as the top social result. So Google is in a way unfairly pushing only Google+ results.

‘Don’t Be Evil’ Features

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace engineers have come with a bookmarklet cheekily called ‘Don’t be Evil’. It aims to transform the results into more relevant ones as seen in the image below.

• The results are transformed into more relevant ones after clicking on the ‘Don’t be Evil’ bookmarklet.
• There is also a Chrome extension if you prefer extensions instead of bookmarklets.
• What is interesting to note is that these results are improved by using Google search results itself.

Here is video demonstration about this bookmarklet and how it improves search results.

What are your views on Google search results pushing Google+ profiles and pages? Should they stop being partial towards its own social network? Do drop in your comments.

Link: Dont’ Be Evil Bookmarklet

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-- This Post Facebook and Twitter Tells Google “Don’t be Evil” With Search Tool is Published on Devils Workshop .