Google ready to exit from China

Google is prepared to leave from China the world’s biggest online market and would not compromise on the censorship of its web search engine. A top Google official told US lawmakers that the company was firm on its stand that it will not allow censorship of its contents in China.

“We are currently reviewing our business operations in China as we no longer feel comfortable censoring our search results in that country,” Nicole Wong, vice-president of Google, said in his testimony before a Congressional committee. Wong’s remarks of his company being prepared to leave China came as it said that it was in talks with Beijing on the future of its internet services.

Wong said the company in its investigations had discovered that the accounts of dozens of Gmail users around the world, who advocate for human rights in China, appeared to have been accessed by third parties. This, he said, happened independent of the attack on Google, through phishing or malware placed on those users’ computers. “These circumstances, as well as attempts over the past year to limit free speech online, led us to conclude that we no longer feel comfortable censoring our search results in China. We are currently reviewing our business operations there,” Wong said.

Google threatened to leave China in January over what it said were cyber attacks at its source code and Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google said the US government should promote internet openness as a major plank of US foreign policy. Free flow of information is an important part of diplomacy, foreign assistance and engagement on human rights, Wong told the Congressional committee. He also cautioned that internet censorship should be part of US trade agenda because it has serious economic implications.

Facebook - The New Live TV

Pantaloons, India’s largest cloth retailer has leveraged the power of the Facebook Platform to take it’s top class fashion show live on the internet. The Panatloons’ Fashion Show had top business honchos walking the ramp. The live web cast on Facebook was available on the Pantaloons Facebook page at 6 pm on March 5.

The preparation for this even started some time back which included Pantaloons Style Inc getting the top management executives from various companies to style themselves and upload their pictures for votes in a contest. The contest received more than 15,000 votes from the online respondents. Pantaloon’s online Facebook Fanpage – Fan count saw a 4000+ increase all owing to the live web cast. This is indeed powerful to Facebook!

With more and more businesses and organisations taking to Facebook as their online streaming partner, it won’t be wrong to say that Facebook is the new live TV. The best part about streaming an event live on Facebook is that users get to comment real time on the stream, which is a big feedback in real time for businesses or companies doing the live web cast.

Reuters to Journalists: Don’t Break News on Twitter

Reuters has released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to scoop the wire by breaking stories on Twitter.

The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on Twitterfirst specially in disaster scenarios, Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter. Twitter journalism has became a trend now.

The social media policy in question also addresses a number of other Twitter, Facebook, and online concerns, offering up instructions and recommendations whenever possible. Journalists are advised to get manager approval before using Twitter for professional purposes, have someone double-check their tweets before posting, avoid disclosing personal biases (especially political), and to separate professional and private activity with separate accounts.

The policy as a whole is a fascinating read and exposes that Reuters, as a media organization, is torn between encouraging employees to use social media and the realization that the online behaviors of their staff put them at risk, a sentiment expressed in the comment that these tools, if misused, could “threaten our hard-earned reputation for independence and freedom from bias or our brand.”

Yahoo Mail Makes Friends with Facebook

In December, Yahoo revealed a new strategy, lots and lots of Facebook. Now the company has announced that it’s gradually rolling out the first feature to come from the partnership Facebook connect integration with Yahoo Mail.

The new feature means that Yahoo Mail users can now connect their Facebook accounts and integrate their Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses into their Yahoo Contacts list. Users can visit the Import Contacts page to be guided through the Facebook friend import process.

Of course, this is just the beginning of the full Facebook Connect feature bonanza on Yahoo. You can expect functionality to be integrated into news, sports, finance and even Flickr in the months ahead.

Given that Facebook is now 400 million members strong, we have to believe that there’s a significant shared user base between Facebook and Yahoo. In a perfect world, Yahoo will see those users stay on Yahoo properties and use the Facebook contact and sharing functionality to push Yahoo content out to the world’s largest social network and generate more traffic in return.

Companies Are Using Social Media Data

Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on the people. Information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums and other sites is fair game. It is yet another reminder that people need to be aware of what they are posting on social networking sites and to whom they’re connected. Online users have no clue that a comment they made on a blog is being added to a database for some unknown use.

Aggregators like will collate information about individuals and sell it to companies that want to learn about those customers and what they do online. If a data mining company turns your chatter and network into a behavioral pattern, and if they can prove it has some worth, then it’s valuable to companies. Entities such as airlines, politicians, and even non-profits can use this data for finding new customers or targeting products to existing ones. Financial services companies such as banks and lenders are also using the same datamining services for marketing purposes and to make lending decisions. For instance, certain types of credit products, which fit your personality, could be marketed specifically to you. It’s a helpful tool to identify the right customers, the best customers.

Consumers might soon be seeing more credit card offers in their mailboxes. In the last quarter of 2009, the number of credit card offers mailed were up 46% from the third quarter of 2009. Credit card companies are already using social media to launch new products. American Express launched its new Zync card on social media sites.

Tweeting towards 10 Billion

About one year ago Twitter reached a huge milestone one billion tweets. Four months ago,five billion tweets were served. And now, in about one day, Twitter should reach another very important milestone 10 billion tweets. Although Twitter has been some what struggling with traffic (compared to its earlier immense growth) in the last couple of months, it still managed to go from five to ten billion tweets in four months, quite a remarkable achievement.

Counting tweets is actually quite easy: Just look at the URL of any tweet. The number at the end of the URL seems to be the number of that tweet, and at this moment the number of one of the latest tweets is 9917803012. If this seems like a long way to go before we reach one billion, check out this counter. Yup, we’re getting there fast.

The five billionth (now deleted) tweet was a simple, “Oh lord,” written by Robin Sloan. I wonder what the ten billionth tweet will say?