This past week has been quite an interesting week, the four co-founds of ThePirateBay were found guilty in Sweden and sentenced to 1 year jail time and more than $3million in fines for copyright infringement.  Basically all PirateBay did was index the torrents that could be used to download the feature film of TV Program, how ever if you run a search on Google for ‘Wolverine Torrent‘ you will also find results linking you to torrents which will download the game.

So now surely if PirateBay can be prosecuted Google will also now be open for prosecutions? I certainly think so and look forward to it, I don’t think there is anything wrong in providing the indexes to these file locations and certainly the music industry is looking in the wrong place.

A report from  BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t. Now this is very intersting and again I agree with, one of the only reasons people will download songs be it legel or illegal is because its easy. If I can download the song I want at the click of the button I’ll do it, but the music/film industry can’t sort out the ‘rights’ issues and therefore doesn’t make this very easy to do. 

If iTunes or Amazon was globally available I think it would put a big dent in online piracy but the film/music industries are too thick headed to see this. Pity…

On a last note, Nokia South Africa opens its own music store tomorrow offering songs at R10 a song which isn’t too bad.

Earlier this week Gmail crashed for half a day and caused quite an uproar as personal and business accounts couldn’t be accessed. Now if we compare the Twitter Trends over the last couple of days against the same time as the inauguration of Obama happened. Interesting stuff:

Something else that is interesting is that their is now a Google account on Twitter, does this mean that Google does not intent to acquire Twitter or is merely testing it out. Either way it would have helped if Google had the account on Monday to let us know whats happening with Gmail as a blog post about it took quite a while to come up.

Facebook offered $500million for Twitter last year… wonder how much its valued at now especially after it received another round of funding at $35million. There is a lot of talk that this could be the next ‘google’.

Wow, who would have thought how many people would be affected by Google’s Gmail going down for a bit. You’ll be pleased to know if you are reading this now that it is back up and working but no official explanation as to what happened.

When trying to load Gmail earlier you were greated with this image:

People who were tweeting about it on Twitter actually brought Twitter search down also due to the sheer number of people searching for similar tweets etc. I wonder what sort of spike Hotmail received today…

They way its going it certainly looks like it… I wonder where the common sense is in these big corporations when they just don’t get together and launch one common App store? Do they really think that developers will create and maintain Apps for each different store – what a nightmare!

So far the following have or are indicating that they will launch an App store soon:

Wow, talk about timing – both were released yesterday almost at the same time even. For once I think Google was out done a bit as Facebook was a bit more organised having allowed some big websites to implement and test the features way before its release so that on the day sites like TechCrunch had already implemented Facebook Connect.

I’ve been playing around with a both and here is a quick early summary:

Google Friend Connect is very very easy to implement and adds nice structure to quickly have a login system that works pretty well and allow users to write on a wall or make reviews but it stops about there. For it to be so simple its gone and created widgets to just implement and so for me even though it only took me 30min to implement it is not enough…

Facebook Connect now here is something powerful… just go look at TechCrunch and see how nicely it works! The 2 things that make this the better option for me are:
1) the posting to your Facebook wall of your activities outside of Facebook
2) the ability to see what your friends have done on the website when browsing it, makes it a lot more trustworthy when you see your friends have been using it.

I will be following this up some more after I’ve used both a bit more.

This morning when logging into Facebook via Google Chrome I received a warning notice indicating that the social network site maybe a phishing site.

I was a bit sceptical at first and tried to login again but received the message again, I then clicked ‘proceed’ and was logged in. I get no error message when I use Firefox but according to an article on Techcrunch the problem also occurs in Firefox. The domain name that is causing the problem is ‘http://fbcdn.net’ which is registered by Facebook.

Have been a few reports of it happening in Safari also, seems like it may be something to do with the roll out of Facebook connect.

Twitter is a buzz with this

Wow, they certainly are keeping me on the run. I first encountered viruses coming via MSN Chat earlier in the year and because of that I had a lovely little spam bot on my pc sending out thousands of mails all the time (sometimes a gig in a day). Eventually I got rid of that and left MSN mail and chat alone and moved over to Google cause there would never be any chance of viruses there…

Then along comes Facebook and Facebook Chat and Facebook messages and millions of users so the little people who make viruses focus their attention their and presto – viruses on facebook in the forms of messages sent to your entire friends list and posts on your friends walls with links etc… I still use Facebook how ever.

Now to my horror people have cracked GMAIL and are sending spam/viruses to all your contacts – I got a mail from a good mate of mine the other day and this was the subject line
‘Dear Sir/Lady: Sorry to disturb you. We are a wholesale company in China. We mainly sell…’

Obviously I knew my mate hadn’t moved to China suddenly and started a wholesale company so I ignored it. Sure enough later that day another one came…

Seems that no-one is safe once the hacker community turns their eyes onto you.

Jerry Yang has or is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! and today the shares of Yahoo! rose by 11.19% to a whopping $11.82…

My how the shareholders must still dream about Microsoft offering them £33 per share… I wonder if their was some conspiracy between Google and Microsoft to wipe Yahoo out a bit as they have both dropped Yahoo in the last couple of months.

Yesterday while trying to do some work I was listening to 5fm Radio and DJ Fresh’s show which I do enjoy. During they show they started talking about the old Simba packet design and how Simba just changed it back in the early ’90s. Fresh was complaining about the fact that Simba did not consult him in their change and their design choice…. Now a major company like Simba back then was not going to go out and consult the average Joe as Fresh would have been back in the ’90s.

They also spoke about products that were discontinued for some unknown reason back then and how they would like it back.

Now, we fast forward to the present day and look at major companies changing things and what happens when they do:

1) Facebook changes their profile design and has millions of people join groups complaining about the change

2) Yahoo makes changes and adds in a centralised profile page and has countless complaints pouring in while they are still only testing it.

3) Google makes changes to the iGoogle page and thousands of people start complaining, one chap was even quoted as saying:

How can I be rid of this ugly piece of crap?” asked one forum user about the iGoogle overhaul. “Google has decided to unilaterally change the layout of my page. If I can’t find a hack or a Greasemonkey script to undo this, good-bye Google, hello Yahoo!

Will Google, Yahoo or Facebook bring back the old designs? I don’t think so, the only difference now from 15 years ago is that we can make our voices heard. It now depends if the big boys decide to listen to us or not…

So Google continues to buck the trend in my eyes against their ‘Do no evil’ motto!

Recently reported on TechCrunch.com that one of their readers who currently spends $100,000 a month on Google Adwords was contacted by a lawyer from Google, the lawyer said he represented Google in their Yahoo advertising deal.

Here is a copy of the voicemail left by the lawyer:

Hi Darren my name is Donald Burke. I’m calling on behalf of Google to talk with Adwords advertisers about the new proposed Google/Yahoo Advertising Agreement. If you have a couple of minutes to talk with me, my number is…Thanks very much. Take care.

The reader phoned the lawyer back immediately and was asked to make a public testimonial in support of the deal:

I received a voicemail from an attorney representing Google yesterday so of course I called back (voicemail attached). We spend about 100K a month on AdWords so we’d apparently been targeted because of that. He was looking for large advertisers who use both Google and Yahoo (we do) who would be willing to provide public testimonials in support of outsourcing Yahoo’s search ads to Google. I told him I’m a free-market competition kind of guy so he tried to address my concerns for about 15 minutes and then called it quits.

According to the reader the lawyer was looking for people who advertised on both the Google and Yahoo networks, now either the Google lawyer was just guessing that the reader just advertised considering the amount they spend on Google. The problem would be if Yahoo provided Google with a list of companies that advertise on their network.

This is a deal that if Google wants to keep their heads above the water and not go against their ‘do no evil’ motto they should just walk away!