MySpace as cautionary tale

The news on Tuesday that MySpace is laying off nearly half its staff of 1,000 employees is regrettable for the workers who soon will be out of jobs.

But it’s hardly surprising. In less than three years MySpace has gone from being the top social networking site in the world to a site desperately trying to survive, never mind regain its relevance — via redwolf.newsvine.com

ABC News 24 Removes Geoblocking For Flood Coverage

Web streaming of ABC News 24 is normally blocked from access overseas, but the service has temporarily removed that restriction to ensure Australians overseas can access its ongoing coverage of the Queensland floods. Worth mentioning to any friends or family overseas trying to keep up with developments in the ongoing flood disaster — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google Transcoder’s Zooming Feature

If you’re trying to load a web page using your mobile phone’s browser, but the Internet connection is slow and you can’t install Opera Mini, there’s always Google Transcoder. Google’s service shows a simplified version of the page that hides navigation links, removes scripts and compresses images.

Google Transcoder also has a zoom out feature that shows a screenshot of the page and lets you select the section you want to read. This means that Google has at least two databases of screenshots for all the indexed pages and Google knows a lot of about the structure of a web page — via Google Operating System

Privacy Law Is Outrun by Speed of Web’s Progress

Concerned by the wave of requests for customer data from law enforcement agencies, Google last year set up an online tool showing the frequency of these requests in various countries. In the first half of 2010, it counted more than 4,200 in the United States.

Google is not alone among Internet and telecommunications companies in feeling inundated with requests for information. Verizon told Congress in 2007 that it received some 90,000 such requests each year. And Facebook told Newsweek in 2009 that subpoenas and other orders were arriving at the company at a rate of 10 to 20 a day — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan

Mr Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Facebook chief executive and co-founder, may be the man of the moment in the United States and much of the rest of the online world. But here in Japan, one of the globe’s most wired nations, few people have heard of him.

And relatively few Japanese use Facebook, the global social-networking phenomenon based in Palo Alto, Calif., that recently added its 583 millionth member worldwide.

Facebook users in Japan number fewer than two million, or less than 2 percent of the country’s online population. That is in sharp contrast to the United States, where 60 percent of Internet users are on Facebook, according to the analytics site Socialbakers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Need to pee? At cinema? Here’s help

An app a day: RunPee. What is it? Ever missed that crucial part in a movie because you simply had to, well, pee? Or worse, sat cross-legged in the cinema too afraid to leave in case you lost the plot?

Californian Dan Florio has. It was while watching the three-hour King Kong movie, which he uncomfortably endured despite an urgent need to go to the loo. In retrospect he realised he could have missed the boring bug scene and so created RunPee, a website, now an app, of a host of films and their missable parts. The app is available on iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms — via vanessa-wilson73.newsvine.com

Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform

Google isn’t a web application company—they’re an advertising company. That’s what they do best, and that’s what drives their company. Of Google’s $23.6 billion of revenue in 2009, all but $760 million of it was derived from advertising, and nearly 70 percent of it was from Google’s own websites.

Everything Google does must be understood within this context. Google builds services like Google Maps, Gmail and Docs and gives them away for free not because they have a philosophical belief that web applications should be free, but rather because giving them away for free gives them a competitive advantage. Free services, running Google ads, are obviously advantageous because free means more people will use them than if they charged and thus they can realize greater advertising revenues — via redwolf.newsvine.com

UltraViolet could mean you’ll really ‘own’ that movie

A group of Hollywood studios and technology companies has come up with a system for buying digital movies and TV shows that’s supposed to do away with the problem of content being locked to a narrow set of devices by the company that sold it.

They say the system, called UltraViolet, will allow consumers to buy a DVD or digital download and then watch it on almost any TV, computer or games console from any participating manufacturer, regardless of where it was bought — via redwolf.newsvine.com