We are finally back to normal after a month of miscellaneous Bank Holidays and Digital Shoreditch.
But our normal week has been dominated by huge social media stories. Even the most luddite-living-under-a rock-type person could not have failed to see and hear Twitter at the top of the news for most of this week. An anonymous tweeter revealed a list of celebs who have reputedly taken out super injunctions to conceal their alleged extra-marital naughtinesses.
Unfortunately a few innocents (or are they?!) seem to have been caught up in the furore, but the whole episode has rocked the legal establishment to the core. Social media really has given power to the people and for all their millions and complicated pieces of paper and legal wrangling, the lawyers, the rich and the celebs cannot escape ‘the truth’.
Obviously the lawyers have hit back, and today sees the launch of the first injunction forbidding a case (not a celeb one) to be mentioned on Facebook and Twitter. But it remains to be seen how this will ever be enforceable since the wording of the injunction was: “Who is bound: This order binds all persons and all companies (whether acting by their directors, employees or agents or in any other way) who know that the order has been made.” Therefore people tweeting about it are almost certainly not bound by the injunction as they’ve never seen it. Indeed, Twitter seem to be surfing happily on all the free publicity with their highest ever traffic recorded in the UK.
And there is more trouble in celebrity twitter-land with the news that followers are being turned off by celebs who give blow-by-blow accounts of their every day lives. It’s a hard life being rich and famous innit?
Still, if you have a like hearing from a varied range of people on Twitter, you can always start following The Taliban, who have kindly started putting their tweets in English – ah, how considerate!
In other non-Twitter news, Facebook have been caught with its trousers down after paying a PR company to smear their rival Google and their response to it has, frankly been rather feeble. Facebook have never won any prizes for their public relations activities and crisis management, and don’t appear to be learning from experience.
There have been a couple of other big stories this week, the first being that Google will be selling laptop computers called Chromebooks from June, which will use its own operating system rather than Windows. They have linked up with Samsung and Acer (who previously sold machines with Windows pre-installed) and this is widely seen as an all-out attack on Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
Microsoft on the other hand, have announced a record-breaking $8.5 billion purchase of VoIP company Skype (which by the way is one of favourite bits of tech at the office – we simply couldn’t live without it!). There is huge specualation as to what they are actually going to do with it (for that price) and the possibilities are quite extensive. Just as long as they don’t ruin it….
And finally, Cisco have been hitting the headlines again for all the wrong reasons this time by making huge job losses.
Have a great weekend everyone.
