Archive for March, 2009

The UK Government is planning to track and save the messages of social networkers on a ‘big brother’ database, alongside new plans to store information on phone calls, e-mails and internet visits. Security officials fear that social networking sites may be a loophole that terrorists and criminals might exploit. Privacy campaigners have fiercely opposed and criticised the plan.

Yoursphere.co.uk, a US-based social network for teens-only will launch into the UK. The youth site charges around £27 annual subscription, which means it’s free of direct advertising. However, the site is looking to partner with brands to support its scholarship and mentor programmes. The site will have a Report Abuse button, which links directly to ChildLine.

Bebo, the British social network that was acquired by AOL last year, has expanded to five new European countries – France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The social network is already available in the UK and Ireland.

Twitter’s founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey are being offered “wheelbarrow loads of cash”, according to a source close to the pair. “But they are being very careful about who they accept money from and who they give their equity to,” the source told The Telegraph this week. Twitter’s huge growth has attracted much attention with its global user base now 7m and 1.8m British users.

In the US, Hulu.com offers TV series like The Simpsons for free online. So should YouTube be concerned about the NBC and Fox joint venture launching into the UK later this year? Unlike YouTube, whose popularity is based on user-generated streaming video, Hulu.com offers a legitimate, on-demand archive of hit prime-time TV shows like 24. Today, Hulu is attracting 309m video viewings a month, significantly less than YouTube’s s 6bn, but it is outperforming more established sites like Yahoo and MySpace. Read March’s Signpost next week for a more detailed article on Hulu.

Small businesses are developing a Twitter habit, sending 3m messages or ‘tweets’ a day to cut marketing costs, according to a study of over 500 businesses by O2, the mobile phone group. An estimated 700,000 small companies in Britain are using the microblogging site and the number is growing at a rate of 6,000 a day. One in 10 small business owners said they had saved up to £5,000 on marketing costs since signing up. While a third admitted they’d signed up to monitor competitor’s tweets, almost 75% said they were using Twitter to keep in touch with customers and suppliers.

Facebook has launched Facebook Connect for iPhone to enable mobile users to connect with each other via third party applications. It will enable Facebook iPhone users to share information and play games with friends across the web on their mobile. There are nine different applications to download including Urban Spoon, to see restaurant reviews posted by friends and the Playfish game, ‘Who has the biggest brain?’

Twitter is the fastest-growing community member site in the US with an uplift in user numbers of 1,382% for the year to February 2009, according to Nielsen. Over 7m Americans visited Twitter in Febriary 2009, compared to just 475,000 the year before, according to the research. Facebook was in the third spot, after a US interactive magazine called Zimbio. Facebook’s growth was 228% but it had the largest user numbers of 66m, up from 20m in February 2008.

Facebook directs more of its users to Google than to MSN or Yahoo, and the social networking site has also seen an uplift of 198% in the number of visitors accessing its portal via the search engine, suggesting the relationship between the two is currently “complementary”, according to RBC, using date from comScore. The number of users accessing Facebook via the search engine has mushroomed from 52 million to 150 million.

Google’s satellite mapping tool Google Earth has been a massive hit among consumers since its launch four years ago. One enterprising individual, 27 year old, Tom Berge, has been using the tool to embark on a lucrative life of crime. He zoomed in on roofs of historic buildings like schools, churches and museums to find darker coloured lead roods, which he then pillaged and sold for scrap metal making a cool £100,000.