Recently, internet giants Facebook and Google both admitted to making errors in practice that breached the privacy of many millions of people, whom they knowingly or unknowingly possess information from.
I have been following the debate closely. It has encouraged government response, blogger response and news articles and interviews in the most prestigious news houses in the world.
I thought my best deed of this still-developing debate would be to post links to what I've been reading.
Facebook users deliver a mountain of information about themselves to Facebook via their Facebook profiles. What somebody 'likes' on Facebook or shares on Facebook tells plenty about that individual.
With Facebook Open Graph, websites will be able to pull key information about a visitor using their Facebook profile, and show them information based on their interests, or their friends' interests.
For example, imagine you are about to buy a digital camera online. Next to the 'add to cart' button, you see that 8 of your friends have 'liked' this same digital camera, or better still, actually purchased this digital camera from the same store.
This is a personalised shopping experience for you; and it is also beneficial to the website store, as it increases the likelihood that you will actually purchase that digital camera also.
As with any time Facebook does something, the negative of Open Graph is with the Privacy of Facebook users.
Well, to complainants, I say get over it and get off Facebook. This is just the beginning.
comScore has released data that shows as of February 97,000 Australians are part of the ChatRoulette phenomenon; a figure which grew from 18,000 in January.
comScore also revealed that in the United States, 109,000 users became 960,000 users during the same time frame.
As with Facebook, Twitter and its other user-generated preliminaries, ChatRoulette's users have made it a product that is newsworthy, viral and funky. See video below of what one user did by combining his piano talents with ChatRoulette...
Microsoft's search engine offering Bing, despite heavy advertising campaigns locally and overseas, has failed to woo Australian searchers. Google searches accounted for over 87% of total Australian searches during February, with Bing registering a measly 4%.
Internet businesses need to take notice of this and continue to spend the vast majority of their search engine optimisation (SEO) energy and funds with Google; still Australia's outright search engine giant.
Haig Kayserian is an internet business consultant with clients across Australia, the United States of America and Asia.
The company he founded - KAYWEB - has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York and Manila, providing premium websites and apps solutions to businesses, organisations, government and individuals.
