SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.
"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter wrote in a blog post published Thursday.
It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries. "Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said.
Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with "certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."
LOS ANGELES - The New York Times published on Wednesday its second bombshell of a story on inhumane working conditions at Apple's Chinese manufacturers. So how will the world's most valuable company, notorious for its secrecy, respond?
So far, with silence.
The Times profiled Apple's extensive use of overseas manufacturers on Sunday, but after Apple's astonishing earnings report on Tuesday, the Times returned with a follow-up report far more damning than its previous one.
Reporters Chares Duhigg and David Barboza spoke with several former Apple executives, employees and other individuals who have worked with the company, many of whom detail, in the Times' words, the "human cost" of making products like the iPad.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook is expected to submit paperwork to regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering and has selected Morgan Stanley and four other bookrunners to handle the mega-IPO, sources close to the deal told IFR.
The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 picked Morgan Stanley to take the coveted "lead left" role in what is expected to be the largest IPO ever to emerge from Silicon Valley.
LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc has hired Dixons Chief Executive John Browett, who revived the British electronics retailer by emphasizing customer service, to lead the iPad maker's global retail expansion.
Apple chief Tim Cook, making his first high-profile hire since taking the helm of the world's largest technology company, lured the well-regarded industry executive to fill a critical post once held by Ron Johnson, another outsider who left Target Corp to join Apple in 2000.
Steve Jobs believed that people should “Think different.” His vision for Apple has changed the way the world works. But, Jobs had plans just prior to his death to make a leap forward in one particular area.
Jobs didn’t just want to improve the camera on the iPhone, he wanted a completely new kind of camera altogether. To that end, he contacted photography company Lytro about the very different technology they were building into their products.
Yahoo!'s brand new chief executive Scott Thompson promised urgent action to turn the company around on Tuesday after it reported another quarter and year of falling income and profits.
Thompson, named Yahoo! CEO only on January 4, said the web giant needed to move quickly to exploit its huge bank of user data to regain market share, especially in display ads where it has lost ground.
Facebook announced today that they will begin shoving the timeline down users’ throats. It’s being pushed to everyone over the next few weeks, and once you get it you have a week to make it presentable.
From the Facebook blog:
Last year we introduced timeline, a new kind of profile that lets you highlight the photos, posts and life events that help you tell your story. Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have 7 days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else see’s it.
Earlier this month, Google launched “Search Plus Your World”. We’ll refer to it as “SPYW” to save time. The set of personalization features essentially equates to Google injecting a whole lot of Google+ into Google search results. This has been met with widespread criticism that continues two weeks later. According to a lot of the chatter going on, Google has lost the respect of a lot of users, and even some of its alumni.
Apple just posted its earnings for its fiscal year 2012 first quarter.
Last quarter, Apple didn’t live up to analysts’ expectations, but the company still had a record September quarter. This quarter, they had the holidays, and this quarter, they blew estimates out of the water.
The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion. Expectations were closer to $38 billion in the revenue category.
An increasing amount of homework requires use of the internet
More than half of teachers believe that children with no internet access are seriously disadvantaged in their education, a survey has suggested. A fifth of the 585 teachers surveyed for the Times Educational Supplement and charity E-Learning Foundation said internet access was essential for pupil's homework. The charity also warned it was seeing support from the government cut. It is estimated two million children live in homes without internet access. An increasing amount of schoolwork, especially at secondary school, is dependent on computer use.
Brazil’s Facebook audience has close to tripled in the past year and engagement on the site has soared. The huge growth spurt has helped the site overtake Google-operated social network Orkut for the first time within the country.
In December 2011 Facebook attracted 36.1 million Brazilian-based visitors, an increase of 192% year-on-year. Orkut grew by just 5% over the same period, reaching a total of 34.4 million unique visitors in December 2011.
“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil in a January 17 statement. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for
eBay offices, San Jose, California eBay stressed the importance of its applications for mobile phones
The internet auction site eBay has reported a big jump in its quarterly profits. Net income for the last three months of 2011 came in at $1.98bn (£1.28bn), up from $559m in the same period last year. "We had a strong fourth quarter finish to an excellent year," eBay president John Donahoe said in a statement. EBay said its earnings growth was partly driven by a gain from the sale of its remaining stake in Skype.
In 2011 there were 2.1 billion internet users around the globe surfing an estimated 555 million websites -- 300 million of which were created in 2011.
Asia’s massive internet population grew from 825.1 million internet users in June 2010 to 922.2 million in March 2011. Internet populations in Europe (476.2 million users), North America (271.1 million users), Latin America/Caribbean (215.9 million internet users), Africa (118.6 million internet users) and the Middle East (68.6 million users) saw comparatively modest growth.
Each internet user had on average just under 1.5 email accounts, amounting to a total of 3.146 billion accounts worldwide.
Apple Inc. fans should have something new to cheer this week, but it's not likely to be the latest iPad or a TV.
While the notoriously secretive Apple remains mum about its education announcement Thursday at New York's Guggenheim museum, observers aren't expecting a new gadget. Instead, the company is expected to unveil textbooks optimized for the iPad and that feature ways to interact with the content, as well as partnerships with publishers.
Facebook finally announced the full launch of its new Open Graph, initially announced at f8 last year.
“The Open Graph has already had a significant impact on music, news, and video, but this was just the beginning,” explains Facebook’s Eddie O’Neil. “Starting today, developers can build apps that let people add anything they love to their Timelines – whether it is eating, traveling, shopping, running or taking pictures.”
Take one guess what you’re coworker next to you is doing right now. If you guessed that they’re putzing around on Twitter, you’re probably right.
New research conducted by Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, reveals tremendous growth in use of social networks on corporate networks (i.e., at work) over the past year and a half. In fact, there has been a 300% increase in active social networking (this includes posting updates, app use, etc.) compared with the activity during the same period of time back in the latter half of 2010.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a message about SOPA and PIPA on Facebook today. He said:
The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.
High-ranking members of the OpenStreetMap project — an open source mapping project that competes with Google Maps — have claimed that user accounts attached to a range of Google internet addresses in India have been maliciously tampering with its data.
Google said that two people behind the accounts were contractors using machines on Google’s network, but a spokesperson for the search giant added that these contractors were “acting on their own behalf.” The spokesperson also said that the contractors are “no longer working on Google projects.”
Google is retiring the old version of AdSense for Search and telling users to switch to the new version powered by Google Custom Search, which has been offered for a while.
According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.
Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors.
There is a difference with this new format, however. The format, which runs on Google Product Search, will show users products and prices without them having to click on a "plusbox" to expand the ad.
To a person with poor eyesight, Yahoo, Bing, and just about every other organization trying to compete in the mobile search market might as well not exist. New stats indicate that Google has an overwhelming lead, allowing it to dwarf competitors by comparison.
The graph below, which was constructed by Pingdom's bloggers using data from StatCounter, pretty much speaks for itself. The bars corresponding to the mobile market shares of "Yahoo," "Bing," and "Other" just peek above the x-axis, and would be almost impossible to discern if not for the orange-on-black color scheme.
A post on the Royal Pingdom blog concluded, "If Google firmly believes that mobile is the future (which is the opinion of CEO Eric Schmidt), they are making all the right moves."
A new report from Econsultancy suggests that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for e-commerce. The report says that over a third (37%) of consumers don't use a social networking site, and that those who have become a "fan" or "friend" of a company or brand online are still in the minority.
The report is based on a survey of over 1,400 U.S. consumers, which the firm calls "nationally representative."
While Facebook may think email is "probably going away," marketers are still having a great deal of success with it. And just as increased mobile adoption continues to fuel social media use, it's not exactly hurting email.
There’s a never ending supply of information out there for us web designers. If there’s something we need to learn, we can find it in one form or another. Sometimes it may be on a blog or it could be in a book. While you may have to shell our some money for a good web design book, there are a number of them out that have online versions that are totally free. Here are 10 you should find very useful.
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout.
CMS Tree Page View is a plugin for WordPress that adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages, like the view often found in a page-focused CMS. It's a very useful WordPress plugin that adds AJAX tree overview of all your pages in WordPress administration area.
Within this page tree you can edit pages, view pages, add pages, search pages, and drag and drop pages to rearrange the order. You can also choose to display tree on the dashboard through plugin’s settings page.
52framework is a complete tool to help you start building with HTML5 and CSS3 with the use of new tags, input fields, rounded-corner, text-shadows, etc. It includes a grid system and CSS reset (that is modified for HTML5).
WordPress is a great platform for setting up an online store, and there is a wide range of themes available to help sellers reach target customers. This post presents 20 of the best ecommerce themes, including both free and premium examples, covering storefront templates aimed at a variety of niche markets.
High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.
One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It's being referred to as "Mayday," and some claim it is costing them money.
Do you think the update has affected your revnue?Comment here.
Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, "this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back."
She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, "seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before."
If Carol Bartz's remarks about "pretty search" (made during the Yahoo Investor Day event) left you scratching your head, her company's acted quickly to clear up the confusion. Today, Yahoo updated its image and video search homepages so that trending terms are represented with rows of pictures.
Five pages of images representing trending topics have been made available in each case, and it's possible to either click through the pages one by one or let them scroll automatically. Then, by hovering over an individual image, a user can see what site it came from. Current top sources include the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New York Daily News, YouTube, Yahoo Video, and Metacafe.
We'll let you judge whether this is a good or bad thing, but Google is not giving up on its Buzz service. Today, in addition to introducing a "reshare" feature, the company decided to make Buzz available to people using many more types of smartphones.
You may recall that Buzz only worked with iPhones and newer Android devices when it launched. Obviously, that left a lot of folks out in the cold.
The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only.
The following is the press release.
Joomla! 1.6 Beta Released – Download the World’s Leading PHP-based Content Management System and Easily Build Websites and Online Application
Yahoo has a new advertising campaign going, which takes aim at Google. Will it help the company's market share? Bing has been taking a similar approach since its launch. While its share has done pretty well considering how new the "decision engine" still is, it's barely put a dent in Google's.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is dropping $75 million to $85 million on the new campaign. A representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews, "the $75-$85M spend range is a subset of the $100M Yahoo! announced last year." The campaign is kind of an extension of that "It's Y!ou" campaign they launched last fall. "You" are still the focus. Take a look at Yahoo's new ad:
We're living in an increasingly open and revealing world where people are eager to tell you where they are, where they've been, and where they're going. Not everyone is so eager, but location-sharing is a rising trend that is not to be ignored. Naturally, the phenomenon will have a growing impact on search.
There is still plenty of room for conversation about what location means to search. Tell us what you think.
Now that the masses have access to Google's newly redesigned results pages, it's time to consider this in an SEO light if you have not already been considering it.
How do Google's New SERPs Affect SEO?Comment here.
Google has had its search options available for about a year, but they have not been in the face of the user like the newly redesigned SERP is. With this new design, users don't have any choice but to notice the options that are available. It's not too different from Bing or Yahoo in that respect (Danny Sullivan notes that Ask pioneered this design). The difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis (in fact, last month Google reportedly dominated the search market by even more than usual).
"Today (20 April 2010) the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google."
Four million businesses have already claimed their Place Page on Google through the Local Business Center, which enables them to verify and supplement their business information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons, product offerings and more. It also lets them communicate with customers and get insights that help them make smart business decisions.
The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.17 [Wojmamni ama woobusani]. This is a priority release to correct two issues in version 1.5.16. Although there are no security issues fixed in this release, we consider it a security release because a security-related bug has been fixed and because many sites may be upgraded directly from 1.5.15 to 1.5.17.
The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.
The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.16 [Wojmamni ama busani]. It has been about six months since Joomla 1.5.15 was released on November 4, 2009.
The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.
Twitter Does 19 Billion Searches Per Month, Beating Yahoo & Bing (Sort Of)
How many searches does Twitter handle per month? We’ve finally got a figure: 19 billion. That has Twitter doing over nearly five times the queries that Bing handles and about 20% of those that mega search star Google processes. But hang on. Even Twitter cofounder Ev Williams says the figures aren’t all apple to apples.
Google Showing Clickthrough Data In Webmaster Tools
We don’t know yet know if it’s a test or a permanent addition, but at least some webmasters are seeing clickthrough statistics in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts. We assume this is strictly organic clickthrough data. This appears to have been noticed first by Dutch search marketer, Karel Geenen.
Google announced earnings, showing a 23% increase in revenue from the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010. Google earned $6.77 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2010. Google’s operating income was $2.49 billion, or 37% of revenues and net income was $1.96 billion up from $1.42 billion the year prior.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook is expected to submit paperwork to regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering and has selected Morgan Stanley and four other bookrunners to handle the mega-IPO, sources close to the deal told IFR.
LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc has hired Dixons Chief Executive John Browett, who revived the British electronics retailer by emphasizing customer service, to lead the iPad maker's global retail expansion.
Online retail giant Amazon has announced a sharp fall in profits and warned about worse than expected results this year.
Steve Jobs believed that people should “Think different.” His vision for Apple has changed the way the world works. But, Jobs had plans just prior to his death to make a leap forward in one particular area.
Yahoo!'s brand new chief executive Scott Thompson promised urgent action to turn the company around on Tuesday after it reported another quarter and year of falling income and profits.
Facebook announced today that they will begin shoving the timeline down users’ throats. It’s being pushed to everyone over the next few weeks, and once you get it you have a week to make it presentable.
Apple just posted its earnings for its fiscal year 2012 first quarter.
An increasing amount of homework requires use of the internet
Brazil’s Facebook audience has close to tripled in the past year and engagement on the site has soared. The huge growth spurt has helped the site overtake Google-operated social network Orkut for the first time within the country.
A new 
CMS Tree Page View is a plugin for WordPress that adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages, like the view often found in a page-focused CMS. It's a very useful WordPress plugin that adds AJAX tree overview of all your pages in WordPress administration area.
The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta (
The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.16 [Wojmamni ama busani]. It has been about six months since