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Twitter hushing tweets country-by-country

Twitter tells the little blue bird to hush – but only in certain countries. In a sharp policy turnaround, Twitter has announced that it will now exercise the ability to withhold tweets depending on the rules and laws of specific countries. Previously, the social network had held firm to a stance of refusing to censor tweets that may contravene a country’s laws. However, until recently, the only way in which Twitter could block a tweet was to delete it across the service globally. In an official blog post yesterday, Twitter stated: “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content. “Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally

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Has Google Replaced Content as King of the Web?

While great content will always get you noticed, I have come to the somewhat obvious conclusion that “Content is NOT King, Google is King” on the web. This is a slightly different mindset when it comes to getting traffic and marketing on the net. This new mindset doesn’t change the fact that you still have to create great content, but it changes the way one goes about promoting that content on the web. In the last few years, Google’s share of the search market has grown to 65% or much more in most areas of the world. This domination of online search puts Google in control of what content is seen – regardless of its quality. It plays a major role in your content’s visibility, a role so great that without Google’s approval, your content is not exactly dead in the water, but your chances of succeeding is much less than with a thumbs-up from Google

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Has Google Replaced Content as King of the Web?

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Google merges privacy settings

Google has announced changes to its privacy policies that from 1 March will move users to one single, consolidated policy. “Despite trimming our policies in 2010, we still have more than 70 privacy documents covering all of our different products,” Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering Alma Whitten wrote on the Google blog . “This approach is somewhat complicated. It’s also at odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google .” Most of Google’s products and services will be included in the new privacy policy – Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome will all retain their own policies. As a result, the new policy grants Google explicit rights to combine users’ personal information across the majority of Google’s products and services. “Our new privacy policy makes it clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all products,” Whitten wrote. For users, the new privacy policy means that when signed in, user data will be shared between services – for example, between Gmail, YouTube, Google+ and Google Maps – resulting in more refined search results and relevant ads. “We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day,” Whitten said.

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Social networks Focus on the User

Fed up with being ignored by Google , engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have joined forces to create a new tool that gleans search results from social networks other than Google+. ‘Focus on the User’ uses Google’s algorithms to “determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.” By using the tool, users can see search results from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, along with LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed and several other social networking sites across the web. Instead of automatically being met with Google+ results, users can see the most relevant social media results on any given search. “When you search for ‘cooking’ today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result,” the website said . “That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was updated nearly two months ago.” The bookmarklet – dubbed ‘Don’t be Evil’, after Google’s own motto – runs in Chrome, Firefox or Safari and automatically checks for any social profiles associated with a given search term, replacing Google+ profiles.

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Feds seize MegaUpload; Anonymous retaliates

In one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have seized and shutdown popular file-sharing site MegaUpload. With 150 million registered users and nearly 50 million hits daily, MegaUpload was among the world’s biggest file-sharing sites. The so-called locker site allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. The movie industry has long hurled copyright infringement allegations at the site and complained that it was profiting off pirated material. In a grand jury indictment, MegaUpload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions. Though, with the site being based in Hong Kong and MegaUpload operators living in New Zealand, jurisdiction was a tricky issue. However, the revelation that some of the alleged pirated content was being hosted stateside on leased servers in Virginia was enough for U.S. prosecutors to act.

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Apple unveils new and improved iTunes U

Apple unveiled its new and improved iTunes U – along with iBooks 2 for textbooks – at its education event in New York. What started as a largely overlooked collection of video lectures and podcasts created by university professors has been redeveloped and re-launched. Now, users can subscribe to courses on iTunes U, with a single course icon appearing on the iTunes U bookshelf. All the course information – videos, books, documents, course materials and even space for note-taking – are contained in once place, with check boxes so virtual students can check their own progress. “The all new iTunes U app enables students anywhere to tap into entire courses from the world’s most prestigious universities,” senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddie Cue said . “Never before have educators been able to offer their full courses in such an innovative way, allowing anyone who’s interested in a particular topic to learn from anywhere in the world, not just the classroom.” Lecturers can also host their own materials for the course outside iBooks – course specific lecture notes and study sheets can all be collated and linked to the iTunes U course binder. Currently, most of the courses on iTunes U are available for free – with materials from Yale, Stanford, and the Open University all available for download. “Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,” senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Philip Schiller said in a press release .

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McAfee to plug spam hole

McAfee’s defences have sprung a spam leak, but a plug is on its way. McAfee has acknowledged that a flaw in one of its programmes has left its customers’ PCs vulnerable to being hijacked by spammers. However, the anti-virus firm said it planned to release a patch by the end of today. The problems began to surface as McAfee customers reported via blog posts and forum sites that spammers were using a hole in McAfee’s RumorServer relay service to send spam from their machines without their knowledge. According to David Marcus, director of security research at McAfee Labs, the flaw is isolated to the SaaS Total Protection anti-malware service and there is no evidence that customer data has been compromised. “The patch will be released on January 18 or 19, as soon as we have finished testing,” said Marcus. “Because this is a managed product, all affected customers will automatically receive the patch when it is released.” Furthermore, there are two issues with the software – the ability for hackers to misuse both ActiveX controls and “open relay” technology. “The first issue has much in common with a similar issue patched in August 2011,” Marcus explained

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New-fangled e-books with Amazon’s KF8

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing has released new tools for creating e-books using Web technologies, announcing it’s ready to receive Kindle Format 8 (KF8) books from publishers. KF8 is Amazon’s next generation file format offering a wide range of features and enhancements – giving rise to a new breed of e-book with high resolution colour and pop-up text through the use of HTML and CSS tools. According to the ever-expanding online market: “Through the use of HTML5 and CSS3, KF8 allows publishers to create great-looking books in all categories, particularly those that require rich formatting and design, such as technical and engineering books and cookbooks.” The move signifies the growing expansion of e-book capabilities. Where pure text is satisfactory for many books and easily meets the needs of reader apps for mobile phones, graphics are becoming more and more crucial for many markets. Amazon added: “For those doing more advanced formatting by writing HTML5, using design software or working with a conversion resource, KF8 features such as Kindle Panel Views and Kindle Pop Up enable great fixed layout books like graphic novels, comics, and kids’ books.” Kindle Fire users – Amazon’s tablet introduced last year – will be the first readers to get their hands on books made with the new formatting tools, downloading them straight to their devices.

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Google+ phases out incoming stream

Google is set to axe its ‘incoming stream’ from Google+, in an effort to keep things simple for users. Engineering Manager Dave Besbris quietly announced the changes in a Google+ post , stating: “The ‘incoming’ stream was a part of Google+ from the very start and it served an important purpose at the time to help discover others on Google+. “Since then however we’ve added a suggested user list, What’s Hot, the ability to share circles and in-product search with saved searches.” Through the incoming stream, users could see posts and activity of others who followed them but whom they didn’t follow themselves – however, critics argued the feature was too confusing. The move away from its ‘incoming stream’ comes in direct response to user frustration, and tweaks to Google+ have incorporated some of the features of the incoming stream to other aspects of the social networking site. “We’ve also greatly improved our friend suggestion algorhithms. these changes all serve the same purpose that incoming originally did: connecting people,” Besbris said. “Based on your feedback and our user research, we learned that the “incoming” stream was a very confusing part of Google+. Not surprisingly, this feedback was reflected in very low usage of the “Incoming” stream compared to the rest of Google+, so we decided to remove it and simplify things.” The young social network has been constantly refining its services to make them more user-friendly since its initial launch – tweaking existing features and introducing new ones. And, with Google’s latest Search plus Your World updates , activity on Google+ is now even more visible in search results – a move that will likely encourage users to engage with the social network even more.

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Twitter throws the first stone at Search plus Your World

As news about Search plus Your World spread like wildfire through the internet, the web’s biggest microblogger was quick to throw the first stone at Google . It seems Twitter is less than enthused about the proliferation of social search results in the latest Google update – users can now see a mixture of social and global results for search queries, including stories gleaned from Mountain View’s own social network, Google+. Former Google employee and Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted that it was a “bad day for the internet”, and Twitter followed suit, releasing a formal statement : “Often, [users] want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. “We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisation and Twitter users.” As part of Google Realtime Search, Twitter signed an agreement in 2009 with the search titan to carry results gleaned from its microblogging site. When the deal expired this past July, Twitter opted not to renew it, and shortly after, Google announced it had disabled Realtime to explore other options. Google responded to Twitter’s statement , saying: “We’re a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.” Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

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