Posted by Susanne 
Privacy and regulation are dominant this week – maybe not quite as exciting as shiny new product launches, but hugely more important.
Take this piece of news from Google, for example: they are going to merge data from across their platforms (YouTube, Google+ . Gmail, Google Maps, Google search and Android mobile) into a single profile that can be used to alter the person’s search results and target them with advertising and services Google are saying that they do have measures in place to help individuals ‘opt out’, although they couldn’t specific and frankly, from a business perceptive it doesn’t actually make much sense to make it easy to do so. This has interesting repercussions for businesses marketing online -watch this space for a more comprehensive look at that.
It has also been reported this week that in the future businesses would be able to charge more for products that people have liked on social media Would you charge your fans more for something they have liked, or is this a crazy idea?
Still on Google and the way they are skewing search results to favour logged in Google+ users, the engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have come with a browser add-on ‘Don’t be evil’, which shows what the original organic Google search should look like. Interesting how much the search results are being skewed and it’s bound to have huge repercussions for SEO and digital marketing going forward – lots more to come on this story we think.
McDonalds have been all over the press this week for their Twitter fail when a hash tag on a jolly promotional campaign backfired and was hijacked by disgruntled customers moaning about all manner of customer service issues. Also, a barrister lost his job for tweeting insults about professional rivals and an MP learned his lesson by leaving his Twitter account logged in, only for an intern (and you know what we think about Twitter and interns) to make a series of inappropriate tweets.
Hardly a week goes by without Apple in the headlines and this week is no exception as they announced better than expected profits and are now officially the world’s largest company. Sadly Nokia couldn’t post good results, in fact they reported a €954m fourth-quarter loss and a 31% decline in sales – however, they are positive that they can turn things around with new products this year. And after the catastrophic Blackberry outage last year, RIM has given into shareholder pressure and appointed a new CEO who thinks he can restore confidence and prosperity.
The good news for all smart phone manufacturers is that the web economy in the G20 countries is due to double in 2016 to a whopping to £2.7 trillion. In Google’s survey, the noted that 200 million new people per year are logging onto the internet, but the majority of those will do so from a mobile device, not a computer with a fixed line. You have been warned!
Meanwhile in privacy issues the EU have said that people have ‘the right to be ‘forgotten’ if they should wish and Facebook and others (including all internet and company databases) will have to delete data that they hold if someone requests it, while over in the States the FBI plans to monitor social media channels for suspicious goings on.
And after the uproar last week about the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills, that have been dropped (probably), along comes ACTA which some reckon could be even more dangerous. And Twitter has said that they have the technology to selectively censor tweets, country-by-country which is causing concern in some quarters, especially as Twitter has been so instrumental in helping ‘the people’ in world events like the Arab Spring.
And in the week that the Facebook’s timeline has become mandatory, our friends over at Mashable have put together a lovely gallery of the best Timeline covers. Enjoy!
Have a good weekend.
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