In an article in the Wall Street Journal online, it has been reported that Yahoo! Inc., who until recently has focussed on its own social network solution, has finally thrown in the towel and made friends with Facebook.</p> <p>"'Frenemy' part friend, part enemy is where Yahoo finds itself with Facebook," says David Karnstedt, Yahoo!s former senior vice president of North American sales. He goes to say that the advert side of Facebooks business is growing fast; sometimes at the expense of Yahoo!. That is the enemy side he says.</p> <p>"The friend part is that Yahoo has stopped trying to get people not to go to Facebook and decided it was better off enabling that, largely because it didn't have a real choice,"</p> <p>Yahoo! users may have noticed the quiet addition of Facebooks Like and Share buttons over recent months, as well as the new-found ability to access Facebook with a Yahoo! email address. The hope with these steps was to entice Yahoo! users to stay a little bit longer. So far however, the results have been minimal. Which brings forth the question, did Yahoo! wait too long?</p> <p>When addressing the lack of significant change, Yahoo!s chief product officer Blake Irving said that social networking was still very much an open playing field and that the company was still developing ways to allow its users to better connect.</p> <p>As Facebook continues to grow a key outlet for sharing online content, companies like Yahoo! are looking for ways to better-control how users find and interact with it; rather than leaving it all up to Facebook.

Yahoo! has announced a new, customisable multi-source app for smartphones and tablets called Livestand. In essence, the application will serve as a digital news stand, providing users with content they can personalise according to their interests.</p> <p>The application will be funded by targeted advertisements, with Yahoo! offering brands targeting options based upon users specific interactive formats and interests. According to executive vice president and chief product officer Blake Irving,</p> <p>Adoption of tablets and smartphones is exploding but digital media isnt keeping up. Consumers cant find the publications they buy off the newsstand, and publishers and advertisers cant reach the audiences they want to serve.</p> <p>As the premier digital media company, were in a position to meet all of these needs. Livestand is an immersive environment that provides a dynamic and personalized experience for consumers and a pipeline of fresh and active content for publishers and advertisers.</p> <p>To fuel the application, Yahoo! will extract content from a massive digital library providing content from news sources, finance, sports, Flickr, omg!, and other members of the Yahoo! Contributor Network.</p> <p>Content will be customisable based upon interests, location, and even the time of day. Publishers and content providers will be able to expand their content in a way that provides social interaction with users.</p> <p>This announcement comes in the wake Yahoo!s earlier statement that they intend to get more personal with their mobile content this year.</p> <p>The application is set to launch first on Android tablets and the iPad. Mobile applications are set to follow later in the year.

Content provider Yahoo! India has announced that it has been designated host to the official ICC World Cup website, providing cricket enthusiasts from around the world live match updates, detailed analyses, commentator remarks, and video as well as live chat and interactive games and contests for visitors to participate in. Users can also buy tickets and ICC merchandise at the site.</p> <p>Cricket is the most passionately followed game in India and Yahoo! Cricket will deliver compelling and unique content alongside interactive contests to build on the euphoria for the game, said Prem Paniker, Managing Editor of Yahoo! India.</p> <p>ICC GM Campbell Jamieson added, As the countdown continues to the Cup that Counts, we are thrilled to be working with Yahoo! to launch an online destination that offers the exclusive ICC Cricket World Cup content in an innovative and engaging way.</p> <p>In conjunction with the announcement, Yahoo! India has announced Safer Internet Day 2011 which focuses on the safety of children online and educates children, parents, and educators on better online habits.</p> <p>Todays students should be made aware about copyright issues, piracy and safe access on the Internet, says Priyanka Jetley of DAV Public School in New Delhi. At the same time they need to understand the inherent dangers of sharing personal information and identification to any sources online. The Web is a marvellous destination for everyone, so it is important that our students understand and can deal with the important online issues they face every day.</p> <p>The official ICC world cup site address is: iccevents.yahoo.com.

Recently Google conducted in-laboratory research designed to measure the impact that third-party content has on website performance and DNS security and the results were interesting.</p> <p>Ad networks like AdSense, Tribal Fusion, and Friend connect are responsible for anywhere from 12% to as much as 53% of a pages loading time. Other popular third party applications, like Facebook Connect, Twitter widgets, and Digg also have adverse effects.</p> <p>In a recent statement, Dave Karow, senior product manager at Keynote Systems said;</p> <p>The more complex your website is, the more likely it is that its performance and possibly your profit margin is in the hands of third parties and their components that are running on your site. By using the proper performance tools in a targeted manner, both business managers and developers can effectively monitor the impact of third-party performance both on the individual component level and in the aggregate.</p> <p>Third-party content plays an important role in many business websites, providing a source of both content and revenue. So, in most cases, the third-party content cannot simply be removed, but rather a fix must be applied before it has a negative impact on visiting customers.</p> <p>In addition to the drag placed upon page loading, third-party content is also a potential security issue. A recently-released report from Secunia said that 69% of the security holes discovered in 2010 were from third-party vendors. So, it is not always Microsoft who is to blame.</p> <p>When it comes to the web, quality content is king. If you are using third-party apps to offer it, stay diligent and pay attention. Fixes can be applied and there are programmes out there that will scan your third-party applications and alert you to potential concerns.

In January, reddit entered the exclusive club of being one of only a handful (respectively) of websites who can lay claim to over one billion monthly page views.</p> <p>According to their just-announced Google Analytics data, for January 2011, reddit accrued 1,000,404,480 page views. That is despite having only 13.75 million unique visitors. The reason they were able to reach such heights is because, although unique visitor numbers were low, individual users tended to stay on the site an average of 15 minutes and 40 seconds browsing an average of 14.7 pages in each visit.</p> <p>In a Reddit blog post, Mike Raldi writes, Never has a single punctuation mark brought us so much joy. There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion page views in a single month and now reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club.</p> <p>This past year, reddit has really seen a lot of growth going from 250 million page views in January last year to 829 million in December. And now its over a billion. Thats a 300% increase in page views over the course of a year.</p> <p>Curious as to what exactly put them over the one billion mark? It was this little gem written by Mike Raldi:</p> <p>This is an accomplishment that all redditors should take pride in, because people wouldnt keep arriving in droves and coming back if not for the community that youve created here. To see how fast our little sites been growing, contrast this post from July or this one from last month. Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the billionth page view was this submission.

UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has ordered Ofcom to review a part of the Digital Economy Act 2010 which deals with website blocking.</p> <p>The DEA is a somewhat controversial attempt to address internet copyright infringement through the use of P2P (peer-to-peer) public file sharing. Measures proposed include strangulation (speed restrictions), disconnection of services, website blocking and warning notices issued to those customers whose ISPs appear on an illegal file sharing site. At one point, website blocking was removed from the Act, but it was re-inserted shortly before the May general election. At that point, there was no time left for debate, so the Act was rushed through.</p> <p>Now, with the Coalition government in control, the DEA is being looked at again; in this instance, for how it deals with website blocking. Key concerns include the fact that it does not work. ISPs cannot actually remove or block content that does not exist on their own networks. This truth was highlighted in the recent events in Egypt, where the government resorted to cutting off internet access completely in order to gain control over how information was disseminated.</p> <p>When asked about the review, Culture Secretary Hunt had this to say:</p> <p>"The Digital Economy Act seeks to protect our creative economy from online copyright infringement, which industry estimates costs them 400m a year. I have no problem with the principle of blocking access to websites used exclusively for facilitating illegal downloading of content. But it is not clear whether the site blocking provisions in the Act could work in practice so I have asked Ofcom to address this question. "</p> <p>In addition to site blocking, sections 3 and 18 of the DEA are also scheduled to go under review next month.

In the UK and large parts of the USA, businesses still see social networking as a social tool something for personal use. It is blocked by IT departments and if there is a social networking marketing and content plan in place, it is manned by one or none persons. That is the typical way of looking at social networking.</p> <p>But IBM sees social networking as vital to business; and now, they are expanding their corporate network to include an app which will allow IBM customers to use their iPhones, iPads, and BlackBerrys to gain access.</p> <p>The network isnt at the water cooler anymore, IBMs head of social networking Alistair Rennie told Bloomberg in an interview.</p> <p>The idea to expand the social network came last year, when Rennie was talking with a client in an Indian airport. When the client changed topics to something Rennie was not prepared for, he used his BlackBerry to access IBMs internal network and glean information from colleagues.</p> <p>I had everything I needed, he said. It saved me hours.</p> <p>With that experience came the thought that if it was so useful to him, it would be for customers as well.</p> <p>Citing research from IDC Corporation, IBM says that the sale of social business programmes should triple by 2014, to almost $2 billion USD. By adding collaborative software to the mobile gadgets business users use most, corporate productivity can be raised, giving IBM an extra boost.</p> <p>The software will feature an activity feed providing relevant news and information, Rennie tells Bloomberg. Customers will also be able to hold web meetings, post blogs, and share photos.

In an article posted on the Washington Post website, Cecilia Kang reports that, as of Friday, Google has adjusted its algorithm in an attempt to prioritise websites with original content over content farms and spam sites.</p> <p>While there will always be story-sharing and the ability to get information from multiple sources, over the past few years, the existence of what are essentially low-quality sites which regurgitate news scraped or copied from other sites has clogged our first page search results with spam.</p> <p>In the Official Google Blog, Matt Cutts addressed the problems with search engine spam earlier this month. Then, on 28 January, Matt used his own blog site to update his original post; writing that the fix had been launched.</p>

The Financial Times reports that Egypt is now under an Internet and mobile phone black out as of this morning, as authorities attempt to throttle communication between protesters and to prevent certain news reaching the rest of the world.</p> <p>During the unrest, social media site Facebook has been key in helping protestors organise quickly and effectively, with young people accessing the site from both personal computers and their mobile phones. But now, telecom companies have been told to block the internet completely. Further, SMS has also been stopped, with Vodafone confirming that they are being required to suspend services;</p> <p>?All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it? they said in a statement.</p> <p>FT goes on to report that Renesys, which monitors web traffic globally, has said that at 12:34 AM local time, there was a ?virtually simultaneous withdrawal? of Egyptian networks from the World Wide Web.</p> <p>In a tweet issued before the blackout, one observer wrote, ?I suspect the internet cut off is just a fraction of what the government has in store for Friday.?</p> <p>?This is a completely different situation from the modest internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make internet connectivity painfully slow,? Renesys writes in its blog. ?The Egyptian government?s actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.?

Last year, Twitter introduced its ?you both follow? feature around the same time it started offering recommendations on who it thought you should follow, based upon your current follow list. But now, that feature has been scrapped in favour of a new feature simply known as ?Connections.?</p> <p>Located on the right hand side of your Twitter profile, Connections shows you what you have in common with other Twitter users, for instance, who follows both of you and/or who both of you happen to be following. In essence providing a bit more insight into people Twitter is suggesting you might be interested in following and getting to know.</p> <p>An email sent by Twitter to popular social media news and opinion site Mashable said this about the new feature;</p> <p>?We launched this to make it easy for you to see the connections that you have in common with other users. Basically, we?re focused on the mainstream market around the world. We want to make the Twitter experience easy and enjoyable.? They go on to write, ?By exposing accounts that you and another user have in common you will now know how those accounts are connected to other accounts you already follow. As a result, you?ll be able to make more informed decisions about which accounts to follow.?</p> <p>According to Mashable, the new connections feature is just one of the ways Twitter is trying to make its micro-blogging service not only more attractive, but more comfortable to use for the technophobic.