While Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen believes that Google+ has recently reached over 100 million users, Google’s social network isn’t driving people to other sites on the Web according to Sharaholic’s data. While the percentage of referral traffic may grow over time as more Google products are integrated with Google+ profiles, the lack of referral traffic suggests that content isn’t being shared on the service or users aren’t paying attention to content that is shared on Google+. However, sites may also see more Google search traffic as Google+ author profiles are linked to articles on the Web and search rankings may potentially increase over time.

Similar to Tumblr, Pinterest is an extremely visual social network. Sites that offer large resolution, beautiful images with smart, intelligent content are far more likely to be shared than sites with lower quality images and poor content. Content from sites around the Web are “pinned” to a virtual cork board broken up into a wide variety of varied categories such as photography, DIY, home, women’s apparel, pets, fitness and architecture. Users can create their own boards on the service and “pin” anything that they see on the Web. Pinterest has also rolled out a variety of tools to pin content including a browser bookmark and on-site buttons.

Similar to a service like Twitter, users can follow other users to watch what they pin. In addition, users can follow specific boards rather than following all of the boards of a particular user. While users can also “repin” content found on Pinterest on a personal board, they can also like content on the site as well as leave comments for other users. On each pin and repin, a link back to the original content is included. This allows users on Pinterest to visit the site where the content originated and look around for similar content.

According to a recent demographic study conducted by Ignite Social Media, Pinterest’s audience is predominantly made up of females between the ages of 25 to 54 and content that appeals to females ultimately sends more referral traffic back to sites around the Web. In addition, Pinterest users are likely to have completed some college courses and make between $25,000 to $75,000 a year. The study also found that Pinterest users are likely to originate in the mid-west United States.

While Pinterest still remains an invite-only social network, Pinterest users are currently allowed to invite an unlimited number of friends to the service through the admin interface. Brands, particularly fashion labels and clothing stores, are also flocking to Pinterest to advertise new products and attract the attention of consumers. Online shopping website Etsy is probably the most successful example of attracting consumers with over 44,000 followers on its Pinterest brand page. Every time Etsy pins a new product to the page, it can directly influence potential customers and attract new sales on the main site. Other brands are also using the social network to run contests or use boards as a virtual focus group through the commenting system.

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Government officials are upset about web pages that are insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Mr Singh and Ms Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

The federal government said there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offences of “promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration”. according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

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The admission comes after GPS devices that use Google Maps began to incorrectly indicate that large parts of the Pacific Highway were closed.

For example Google Maps currently recommends that drivers travelling between Sydney and Byron Bay take an inland diversion through Armidale and Glen Innes.

A Google spokesman said it’s possible that incorrect data or other errors may result in bad directions at times.

“No driving directions, whether printed, displayed on a map, or spoken, should be followed blindly,” he said in a statement yesterday.

Charlie Hamer, 30, is currently on a road trip from Sydney to Airlie Beach and had a narrow escape with his GPS device.
“I punched the details into my iPhone GPS, and then just after Newcastle it started telling me to leave the Pacific Highway, he told AAP.

“Fortunately I’ve done this drive before so I just ignored it.

“But it would’ve been a nightmare for someone who didn’t know where they were going.”

The Google spokesman said the problem was currently being dealt with.

“We’ve flagged it and it will be adjusted soon.
“

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Today, that climb continues and has some tech observers wondering whether Chrome could do the unthinkable and topple perennial leader Internet Explorer from atop the browser rankings.

According to Web analytics firm StatCounter, the most popular version of Google’s browser, Chrome 15, edged out Internet Explorer 8 in early December to become the world’s most used edition of a browser. (For those keeping score, the totals were 23.6% of worldwide browser usage compared to IE8′s 23.5%.)

When all versions are considered, Chrome accounted for more than 27% of all worldwide browser use at the beginning of December, an increase of about 1.5% over the previous month. That’s compared to about 37% for Internet Explorer, which dropped 2% from November, according to StatCounter.

Now in third place, Firefox remained mostly steady with about 25% of the browser market. Trailing far behind is Apple’s Safari, with about 6%.

The numbers can vary in the browser race depending on who is counting. Web surveying firm Net Applications still has Explorer at 52%, Firefox at 22% and Chrome at 19%. But that represents a 10-point drop by Explorer since 2010, while Chrome use more than doubled and Firefox remained flat.

Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith thinks Chrome has gathered momentum because it is a strong product.

“People like it because it’s fast,” he said. “Google has done a nice job advertising it recently, so that’s increased awareness.”

Since its rollout, reviews have been generally positive about Chrome. While some call it a work in progress, many have praised its features and speed.

“Super-fast browsing performance, now with hardware acceleration. Excellent security through sandboxing and malware warnings. Instant site prediction and loading,” PCMag wrote in a review of Chrome 15, giving it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. The review also praised it for strong support for the emerging HTML5 coding system amd built-in Flash player, while dinging it for still not being compatible with a handful of sites.

Smith also said people are more aware than ever that they have a choice of browsers. Internet Explorer has been the dominant browser for more than a decade, at least in large part because it comes installed on Windows machines.

“This was happening even more so when there was a real big difference between what you could get from someone else and what Explorer was,” he said. “Now, that’s not the case. Explorer 9 is pretty competitive with the other browsers, so maybe there’s not as much need to go away from it.”

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen attributed at least part of Chrome’s rise to its increased use among businesses.

“Google announced Chrome for business exactly a year ago and IT administrators appear to have embraced it in a remarkably short time,” he said.

Chrome use already had overtaken Explorer on weekends, when personal use presumably trumps office use, since October. But Chrome 15 became the more popular from Monday to Friday on December 5, he said.

Microsoft, putting a positive spin on the numbers, emphasized that Explorer’s latest (and generally well-received) version, IE9, is rapidly gaining ground as use of IE8 drops. IE9 was released in March.

(To its credit, Microsoft is also celebrating the demise of Internet Explorer 6. Widely reviled by Web developers and many users from the start, use of that version dropped below 1% in the United States last month, with Microsoft spokesman Roger Capriotti writing on the Windows blog that the company is breaking out the champagne and “as eager as anyone to see it go away.”)

The statistics Microsoft used on its blog, which showed Chrome use mostly flat, only looked at browser usage on Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.

The rise of Chrome comes as Google has expanded beyond its core product — its search engine — into such areas as mobile operating systems (Android) and social networking (Google Plus). Chrome has been a high point for Google in what has developed into a two-front clash of tech titans with Microsoft.

While Google tries to erode Explorer’s browser share, Microsoft is taking aim at Google’s longtime dominance in search. Launched in 2009, Microsoft’s Bing has tried to make Web search a true two-way race.

And while Google’s stranglehold on that market is still strong, Bing has chipped away. In December, Bing captured about 15% of the search market, compared to 61% for Google, according to Experian Hitwise.

One victim of Google’s success (not to mention deep pockets) has been Firefox, long a favored browser among tech-savvy types.

“They (Mozilla) were not coming out with a lot of releases and new features for some time,” Smith said. “They’ve really tried to change that in the last year, but perceptions got made during that time frame.

“They were the ones that were the sole recipient of the browser change — they were the alternative browser for most — but now they have to split that role with Google.”

Whether Chrome’s rise will continue remains to be seen, he said. Web users only tend to seek out a new browser if the one in front of them is lacking, and Internet Explorer appears to have stemmed that tide somewhat.

“Three or four years ago, if you wanted tabs, you had to go to another browser. If you wanted something fast you had to go to another browser,” Smith said. “That’s not the case any more.”

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“I think it’s safe to say this is the fastest-growing region in the world in terms of Internet usage and we have a very strong Google business here,” Google’s Southeast Asia managing director Julian Persaud told AFP.

“So I think we would allocate resources in line with where we see the biggest opportunity, which I think would be APAC (Asia-Pacific) and Southeast Asia,” he added after the groundbreaking ceremony.

The Singapore data centre will be the Silicon Valley company’s first in Southeast Asia and second in Asia after construction began for its Hong Kong facility last week.

Google figures show Asia has the fastest growing number of Internet users in the world.

But it faces stiff competition, particularly in China where domestic search engines like Baidu are popular and censorship last year forced Google to move its Chinese search engine overseas.

Google will invest $120 million in the 2.45 hectare (6.05 acre) Singapore facility, with construction expected to be completed by early 2013.

The company is also due to build a third Asian data centre in Taiwan on top of its current six facilities in the United States and two in Europe.

The Asian centres will give regional Google users faster and more reliable services and enable the company to enhance applications like Gmail without being constrained by capacity issues, company officials said.

“Right now a lot of services to Asia are being delivered from, for example, the US because the capacity in Asia is just not enough,” said Simon Chang, Google’s head of Asia-Pacific hardware operations.

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Shutting down Street View in an entire country would be the Internet search giant’s most extreme response yet to growing complaints it is violating people’s privacy.

The Mountain View, California-based company company said Wednesday it will ask the Swiss Federal Tribunal to throw out a lower court decision that obliged it to ensure all faces and vehicle license plates are blurred before uploading pictures to the Street View service. Street Views allows map users to click on virtually any spot in a city to zoom into a series street-level pictures taken by cars mounted with 360-degree cameras.

The ruling last month by the Federal Administrative Court in Bern — following a complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog — ordered Google to obscure identifying features such as skin color and clothing from people photographed in the vicinity of “sensitive establishments,” such as women’s shelters, retirement homes, prisons, schools, courts and hospitals.

If Google fails at the higher court and goes through with its threat, it would be the first time that the company has permanently switched off Street View anywhere in the world, though it has faced privacy concerns in many of the 27 countries where the service is available.

Last year, it bowed to demands for users in Germany to be able to blur entire houses in Street View. And in March the company received a euro100,000 (US$143,570) fine in France because the cars used to take photographs for Street View had illegally collected personal data from Wi-Fi networks, something it has apologized for.

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The disclosure made by Google on Tuesday in a quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission serves as the latest reminder of the intensifying regulatory scrutiny facing the Internet’s most powerful company.

European regulators have opened a wide-ranging probe into whether Google unfairly manipulates its search results to favor its own services and rigs its ad system to drive up prices. The Texas attorney general also has been looking into complaints about whether Google’s search recommendations stifle competition.

The SEC documents filed Tuesday provided few details about the nature of the Justice Department’s inquiry except that it involves how Google’s automated system has been treating some unnamed advertisers. Google’s ad network, which primarily delivers short text ads alongside search results and other Web content, is the main way the company makes money. In the first three months of this year alone, Google sold $8.3 billion in advertising.

Google, which is based in Mountain View, declined further comment late Tuesday.

Dealing with the Justice Department’s ad investigation apparently won’t be cheap. In its SEC filing, Google said its management decided earlier this month to set aside $500 million to cover a possible settlement.

That move resulted in a charge that lowered the first-quarter earnings that Google announced in mid-April. With the change, Google’s net income fell from the previously reported $2.3 billion, or $7.04 per share, to $1.8 billion, or $5.51 per share.

Even before the revision, Wall Street had panned Google’s first-quarter results because of rapidly rising expenses that are outpacing the company’s revenue growth. Google’s stock price has fallen 6 percent since the original first-quarter earnings came out while the technology-driven Nasdaq composite index has gained 4 percent during the same stretch. Google shares closed Tuesday at $542.66.

Investors also have been worried whether all the regulatory scrutiny will make it more difficult for Google to counter emerging competitive threats from hard-charging rivals such as Facebook. The Internet’s largest social networking site has built an audience of more than 500 million users that is attracting more advertisers and creating a trove of content in walled-off social circles that can’t be indexed by Google’s search engine.

The Justice Department has previously raised concerns about Google’s market power in court filings. The agency objected to Google’s attempt to win the digital rights to millions of out-of-print books, helping to persuade a federal judge to deny a settlement that would have granted the company’s wishes. The Justice Department also demanded concessions before approving Google’s $700 million acquisition of airline fare tracker ITA Software last month in an effort to preserve competition in the online travel market.

News of the latest investigation also could cast a cloud over a developer’s conference that Google is holding in San Francisco. The conference is scheduled to conclude Wednesday.

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Google has destroyed the information: the company was threatened with damages imposed on a daily basis in case of non-compliance. The privacy watchdog says Google vehicles, which were taking photographs of Dutch streets for its Street View service, collected information which included medical and financial details.

Picking up the information is just one of the complaints the privacy watchdog has about Google. The company also collated the addresses or identification numbers of 3.6 million secure and insecure WiFiRouters. The CBP says these in combination with their location amount to personal details because they can be used to trace people.

Publically accessible
The CBP says addresses and locations of the WiFiRouters collected by Google are to be found in a publically accessible database in the United States. The CBP is insisting Google take steps to inform the owners of the routers that addresses have been collected.

“It was a programming error which we reported as soon as it became apparent to us. We’re enormously sorry,” said a spokesperson for Google in the Netherlands. He stressed that the information had not been examined or used. When the GPS signal is poor, the wireless signals can allow mobile phones to be located.

Criticism
Google’s Street View has faced criticism throughout the world, with governments and organisations voicing doubts about the way Google collects the details of internet users. It is thought that Google has not had to inform the owners of WiFiRouters in other countries, such as France, the United Kingdom and Germany, where Street View vehicles have also been active.

The CBP launched its investigation into how Google was collecting private information in the Netherlands in May 2010.

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THE Russian security service denied it had plans to ban Skype and Gmail after one of its top officials said such services posed a serious security risk.

The information and special communications director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) told a Cabinet meeting on Friday that he was growing “increasingly concerned” by the use of services with foreign-made encryption technology.

The comments sparked an immediate furor in the Russian internet community and were dismissed as a “personal opinion” by a source close to President Dmitry Medvedev – a tech-savvy leader who is often seen with an iPad in hand.

An FSB spokesman said on Saturday the agency was not proposing a ban on the popular services.

“Quite the contrary – the development of advanced technology is a natural process that should be welcomed,” the security service spokesman told Russian news agencies.

Several analysts noted that the unexpected proposal revealed another chink in the policies being pursued in recent months by Medvedev and his presidential predecessor and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

A spokesman for former FSB chief Putin called the ban suggestion “well-reasoned” and requiring further debate.

Both Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev can potentially run for president in polls set for next March and their comments are increasingly being read for signs of which of the two has the upper hand in domestic policy issues.

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A major Chinese portal announced last week it would no longer use Google for search, compounding its rapid loss of market share since March last year when it closed its local search engine. The future of a Google map service that is a key part of its remaining appeal in China is in doubt.

Google’s main presence in China has become its advertising sales offices, an unusual situation for a company that dominates the Internet elsewhere.

Google risked being completely shut out of China after it angered Beijing by announcing last January it no longer wanted to comply with Web censorship. It dodged that fate but without a flagship local online presence, analysts say Google will fall further behind local industry leader Baidu Inc. as a search provider, while the controversy makes it hard to line up Chinese partners for other ventures.

“Chinese companies will think twice before they can have any kind of relationship with Google,” said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, a research firm in Beijing.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, says it sees its biggest opportunities in China in selling advertising on behalf of local websites or to companies that want to reach customers abroad through its global sites.

Google was allowed to keep advertising sales offices in China. Beijing had an incentive to let those stay, because they benefit local websites and advertisers.

“Google’s revenue in China has grown year-on-year,” said a company spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, in an e-mail. “Our business in China is doing well. We have hundreds of partners — large and small — who we continue to work with.”

Yet its public relationship with Beijing is chilly. After Chinese authorities stepped up Web censorship following pro-democracy protests in the Middle East, Google said last month the government was obstructing access to its Gmail e-mail service and trying to make the blockage look like a technical problem. The government denied the accusation.

This week, the government newspaper Economic Daily said three Google units that deal with research and development, customer support and advertising were under investigation for possible tax offenses. State media played up the report and one newspaper called the company “Brother Trouble,” a play on its Chinese name. Google said in a statement, “We believe we are, and always have been, in full compliance with Chinese tax law.”

Mainland users can reach Google’s Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, a self-governing Chinese territory without Web censorship. That comes with a big drawback: Beijing’s filters can make access sluggish, reducing the site’s appeal in China, which has more than 450 million people online.

Google does not break out sales by country, but Analysys estimated its 2010 China revenue at 2.6 billion yuan ($409 million) — or less than 1.5 percent of Google’s global revenues of $29.3 billion.

Last year’s dispute testified to the complex Internet landscape in China, which promotes Web use for business and education but has strict controls on content and blocks social media sites including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s China site still offers music downloads, business services and other features that are not subject to censorship. Users can click a link to reach the Hong Kong site.

Google’s share of China’s search traffic fell to 19.6 percent in the final quarter of 2010 from 30.9 percent in the first quarter, according to Analysys. It said Baidu’s share rose to 75 percent.

Citigroup analyst Alicia Yap said data from other researchers show an even sharper plunge in Google’s traffic share to 11 percent in the fourth quarter while Baidu rose to 84 percent.

Google still is China’s second-most-popular search service based on use of the Hong Kong site and others abroad. It leads rivals such as Sogou, Tencent Soso and Zhongsou, which have market shares at or below 1 percent.

But the lack of a local presence will hurt as competition for new users spreads to mobile phones and the countryside, where users speak little English and will want a Chinese search engine, Yu said.

“Baidu is in a very good position to grab more market share,” he said.

In a new blow to its public visibility, a leading a Chinese portal, Sina.com, said this week it would no longer use Google. The search giant has ended a series of such partnerships as it stopped providing censored results.

Baidu has expanded aggressively, rolling out new services in the past year in an effort to differentiate a company long seen as a Google imitator.

New competitors including state media also are jumping into the market with search and social media products. The government’s Xinhua News Agency launched a search engine last year in a partnership with state-owned China Mobile Ltd., the world’s biggest phone carrier by subscribers.

Google faces another challenge from new regulations that tighten control over online map services. On Thursday, the deadline to apply for licenses, Google said it was “in discussions with the government about how we could offer a maps product in China.”

“Google maps is one of the services that people still like a lot,” said Yap. “If they can’t provide the service in the future, people will use Google less and less.”

Yu said Google’s situation might change if a planned handover of power next year from President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders to a younger generation leads to a shift in official attitudes.

“New officials will be in place,” he said, “so things could change at that time.”

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