By Michael Alan Hamlin
August 2, 2010

Internet use is increasingly a lifestyle fixture throughout the Philippines according to the latest Internet usage survey conducted annually by Yahoo! and AC Nielsen. Three other findings are especially noteworthy: 1) Search, entertainment, and social networking are becoming tightly engrained in the lifestyles of Internet users; 2) While the digital divide is a concern, users across the age demographic rely on the Internet, but for different reasons: and, 3) Mobile access is going mainstream, likely due in part to low rates of home access.

Conducted in February, the survey had 1,500 respondents aged 10 and above in all regions of the Philippines. Overall, it found that 30 percent of Filipinos— more than 28 million individuals—use the Internet regularly. That’s close to the entire population of Malaysia, about five times the population of Singapore, and roughly four times the population of Hong Kong. Although the Philippines’ per capital gross domestic product is dwarfed by each of these nations, that hasn’t stopped Filipinos from going digital in significant numbers.

While Metro Manila has the highest percentage of Internet users at 40% of the population or about six million users— about equal to the population of Singapore—other urban areas showed increased Internet uage. For example, 37% of individuals living in Tuguegarao in Luzon regularly access the Internet, as does 33% of the population in the Visayas university town of Dumaguete and 29% of sprawling Davao in Mindanao.

As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Dr Google” is users’ principal resource online, although Yahoo! and AC Nielsen didn’t exactly put it that way. Any way it’s described, search is big, with 76% of respondents indicating they use the Internet to find information online, up from 58% in last year’s survey. Internet portals (73%), instant messaging (68%), chat rooms (67%), and e-Mail (65%) are mainstream activities. Social networking wasn’t measured last year, but this year 53% of respondents said they use the Internet to visit these services.

When it comes to search, students aged 15-19 have the highest incidence of use at 84%. However, other demographic groups also rely heavily on Internet search: 76% of 10-14 year olds, 75% of 20-29 year olds, and 77% of 30-39 year olds. In fact, 58% of 40-50+ year olds participating in the study also use the Internet regularly for search. Somewhat more men, 78%, than women (73%) search online.

While 44% of these users are searching for information and documents, most are entertaining themselves, especially younger users. Overall, 62% look for images and 52% for videos, hopefully respecting intellectual property rights in the process. Another 31% are on the look for music and audio clips. Interestingly, relatively few users searched for blogs (13%), jobs (11%), and news (11%) online.

Respondents (69%) overwhelmingly rely on Internet cafés for Internet access. Slightly more respondents than last year, however, access the Internet from home, 31% compared to 27%. Access from school decreased from 7% to 4% and at work from 7% to 5%. That may be in part because mobile access is increasing, from virtually nothing last year to 5%. That shift is prevalent among young adults who can afford smart phones and high access charges. Eight percent of 20-29 year olds and 9% of 30-39 respondents regular access the Internet via mobile devices.

Social networks are prospering, with 53% of respondents visiting social networks regularly, and 30% user generated content sites—such as video sites—regularly. Among social networks, Facebook has grown rapidly in the past year. Only 4% of respondents said they used Facebook in last year’s survey, compared to 83% this year. Friendster remains a popular social network with 84% of respondents visiting regularly, but that is down from 92%. Six percent of respondents use the micro-blogging service Twitter regularly.

These popular online networks are primarily useful say respondents for staying in touch (66%), but they also seem to be taking over other mainstream activities, such as e-Mail (64%) and chat (63%) which can be performed within these networks. About the same number use social networks to pass time (63%), but interestingly, 59% use them for personal brand visibility, or to learn more about the personal brands of their network.

The results suggest that the new government can level the online playing field by providing wider and less expensive access to the Internet. Only 20% of D and E users have access, compared to 93% of ABC and 61% of C2. That may mean reviving the idea of a government- subsidized nationwide Internet backbone. The private sector will fight that move, but the reality is that despite large numbers of Internet users in the Philippines, the country will only be a digital nation when access becomes more universal.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
July 27, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Executives at telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent knew that the company needed to find a better means of internal communication following its formation via the 2006 merger of Alcatel SA and Lucent Technologies Inc.

“There was a problem in that we had no way to communicate across boundaries,” said Greg Lowe , social media strategist and global infrastructure architect at Alcatel-Lucent. “Our CEO had a key message that we needed to be much more collaborative , yet we didn’t have the tools. We were stuck with process-focused tools like Sharepoint. It wasn’t a way to communicate across the company.”

Lowe said the company’s initial moves into the Web 2.0 world in 2008 were facilitated by the fact that many of the company’s 77,000 employees already had personal experience with popular social networking services like Facebook and Twitter .

Alcatel-Lucent began slowly, launching an internal blogging tool based on the free Yammer platform in September 2008. Employees may not have fully understood the corporate benefits of microblogging, but they were intrigued.

The move wasn’t endorsed or promoted by management , and no one was told to use the system. But the number of Yammer users inside the company slowly started to grow — from about 250 people at the end of 2008 to 9,300 today.

“It was a groundswell activity — and it didn’t cost us anything,” Lowe said.

In March 2009, Lowe launched an effort to improve collaboration among workers housed in offices around the world. For 13 months, he gathered requirements, analyzed available technologies, garnered the support of IT executives and secured funding. “It was an exciting, entrepreneurial way of getting things done,” Lowe said.

The result of that effort: In April, Alcatel-Lucent started rolling out a Web 2.0 service from Jive Software Inc. that provides Facebook-like social networking tools, such as updates, people searches and communication channels, to the corporate world. The service also lets employees communicate with customers, partners and suppliers.

Lowe moved slowly again in implementing Jive, first inviting just 125 people to join. Usage spread quickly, though; the company now has about 20,000 Jive users, Lowe said.

His decision to deploy Web 2.0 technologies slowly may have been key to the initiative’s early success.

“If you roll out your platform and send out an e-mail saying, ‘As of Monday, I’ll expect everyone to start posting,’ the chances of that succeeding are minimal,” said Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis. “If you put the tool in the room and let them pick it up and figure [it] out themselves, it’ll be put to good use.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
July 21, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - While Facebook is expected to announce this week that it’s grabbed its 500 millionth user , a new study shows that not everyone is so happy with the social networking site.

Facebook scored a 64 on a user satisfaction scale of zero to 100, according to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). A rating of 64 might not sound so bad, until you consider that sites for filing tax forms electronically to the IRS scored better.

The ACSI report measured 30 online companies. Facebook and MySpace, which came in just below its rival with a rating of 63, were the two lowest-scoring sites out of all of them. The report noted that both sites showed “abysmal performance.”

The big winner in the social media Web site category was Wikipedia, which had a satisfaction rating of 77. YouTube came in second with a 73. This is the first year that ACSI rated social media sites.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success , so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which partnered with ACSI, LLC. on the e-business survey.

“At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience,” Freed said.

“Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution,” he said.

When asked what they didn’t like about Facebook, users reported privacy concerns , advertising, interface changes, navigation problems and constant notifications about “annoying” applications.

“There is no shortage of complaints about Facebook,” the report noted.

Twitter , the highly popular microblogging site was not rated because so many users access the site through a third-party application and not directly through Twitter.com, the report noted.

Dan Olds, an analyst for The Gabriel Consulting Group, said this is tough news for Facebook, which has been dealing with users frustrated over the site’s privacy policies and controls.

However, the results also seem to fly in the face of the fact that Facebook is expecting to grab its 500 millionth user this week, making it the most popular social networking site in the world.

“Facebook is the dominant social network,” Olds said. “The site definitely has been hurt by the turmoil surrounding their privacy policies but there really isn’t a strong alternative right now. So even though their customer satisfaction scores suck, users are going to continue to flock there because Facebook is where their friends are.”

Also, with Google said to be to developing a social networking service, rumored to be called Google Me , which would take on Facebook and grab chunks of its disgruntled users — and a hefty piece of its revenue — signs of Facebook user dissatisfaction could be good news for it.

“Some will definitely see these ratings as an opportunity to come up with something better that could unseat Facebook,” Olds said. “But this wouldn’t be an easy task. It’s would take a lot of effort and a serious sum of money, plus some inspired marketing too.”

And in the portals and search engine category, the ACSI report noted that while Google remained strong with a rating of 80, the company has slipped 6 points from last year. This year’s rating is the lowest since 2002, when Google was first indexed, according to ACSI.

The good news for Google is that it still edged out its main search rival, Microsoft’s Bing , which had a rating of 77. Yahoo , which is in second place in the search market, had a rating of 76.

“Google may be suffering from trying to be too many things to too many people,” the report noted. “In fact, when asked what they like least about Google, survey respondents commonly mentioned issues like advertising, overwhelming search results, privacy concerns, and too many special features (like maps and shopping.)”

Olds said it’s interesting that Google barely edged out Bing in the satisfaction survey, even though it totally dominates Bing in the search market.

“It’s interesting that all of the search engines and portals have satisfaction scores that are fairly close together,” he added.

“It shows that customers either don’t see a lot of difference between them or they are firmly committed to whatever they use and don’t want to change,” Old said. “Google still has way more users, but it looks like the folks who are using other search engines are pretty happy with their choices.”

The ACSI report noted that Google has the most loyal following with 80% of its users citing it as their primary search engine.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index is a national indicator of customer satisfaction with products and services. About 70,000 people are surveyed every year to measure their satisfaction with 225 companies in 45 industries. The Index was founded at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
June 16, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - While oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico and BP Plc. faces PR nightmare, the last thing the company needed to do was make matters worse.

But that, according to industry watchers, is just what BP did by failing to take advantage of social networking to open a clear line of communication with people living on the Gulf coast and around the world.

BP, the third-largest energy company in the world, is at the center of the worst oil spill in U.S. history. In the two months since an explosion aboard an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico triggered the spill, scientists estimate that upwards of 2.5 million barrels of oil have flowed into the water off the U.S. coast.

Not surprisingly, BP taken a public thrashing for not just the environmental and economic disaster but for also not being more forthcoming with the public about the problem. And while it could have used social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to report on the problem and what it was doing to stem the flow and ease the damage, it has largely missed that opportunity.

“BP is in one of the biggest PR crises that we’ve seen,” said Patrick Kerley, a senior digital strategist for Levick Strategic Communications, a PR and crisis communication firm. “I think that the problem they’re having is that it’s an ongoing process that doesn’t have an easy solution and it’s exacerbated by the idea that they’re not showing the sort of engagement with the public that PR in 2010 expects. They were playing by old rules…. Dealing with a crisis has totally changed because of social media. They didn’t get that.”

With the old rules — think of the Tylenol poisoning crisis in the 1980s — companies had time to sit back and devise a strategy. Tylenol, for instance, shut down distribution, came up with a new product and went back to market with a safer pill container.

Kerley said in today’s world of viral videos, bloggers, Facebook boycott campaigns and Twitter , companies can’t go quiet for even a few days to come up with a public response.

“People aren’t waiting for Walter Cronkite to tell them what to think,” added Kerley. “They’re talking with each other online. It’s too late for companies if they don’t’ use social media right away when a crisis strikes.”

BP does have a presence on Facebook and Twitter . It also gets some of its message out through the Deepwater Horizon Response , a group of organizations such as BP, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, responding to the oil spill. Deepwater Horizon Response has its own Web site, along with a Facebook page and a YouTube channel .

Google also confirmed with Computerworld that BP has bought key ad words on the search site. People searching for phrases such as “oil spill” will get a sponsored link to stories on BP’s own site that describe how the company is helping. Reports have also surfaced that BP bought key ad words on Yahoo , too.

The company has taken a lot of heat for spending money to buy key ad words when that money could have gone to containing, or cleaning up, the actual spill.

And BP’s messages largely are getting lost amid the public outcry that is overflowing on social networking sites. Search for BP on Facebook and you’re more likely to find ” Boycott BP ” pages, one of which has more than 600,000 followers, rather than BP’s official site. And on Twitter , a phony BP account that makes fun of the company has more than 162,000 followers, while the official BP Twitter account has less than 15,000.

Stuart Williams, an analyst with Technology Business Research, says BP may be acquiescing to corporate lawyers who most likely are advising the company to watch everything it says - whether it’s from a spokesman during a news conference or someone posting updates on Twitter.

“I think their legal department is telling them to be very careful of every word they’re posting on social media or it will boomerang back on them in a court of law or the court of public opinion,” said Williams. “They know they have to be extremely careful about the messages they put out.”

Kerley, though, said a good part of BP’s social media problem during this crisis is that the company didn’t have a significant presence on social networking sites before trouble hit.

“I think BP did not take full advantage of social media during peace time,” he explained. “It feels like BP is behind because before the spill they didn’t have people following them on Twitter or listening to them on Facebook…. Companies have to realize that they need to be proactive and generate a social media audience in peace time and let people affiliate with the brand. When crisis time comes around, then people would know where to go to get information. So now when people go to social media, they find joke sites and parody accounts. It’s because BP was nowhere to be found [before].”

So with Web 2.0 tools and social media sites bringing about a new world for corporate PR departments, are any companies actually using these new tools to their advantage?

According to Kerley, Six Flags Entertainment Corp., a company running 19 parks across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, used social media to help work its way through a recent Chapter 11 restructuring.

“It was one of those things where the public just saw bankruptcy…,” said Kerley. “Six Flags did a good job of seeing that the public was having a knee-jerk reaction and they went online and reached out to people. They used Twitter, primarily, and Facebook pages for all of their parks, and they set up conference calls with their CEO and bloggers. It led to a better understanding of the process and a message that the parks were open and come have fun this summer.”

Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said social networks can be a double-edged sword for companies trying to get through a public crisis. If used well, they can help get important messages out to the public. If not, they can come back to bite.

“I can’t think of another company that has faced as big a crisis as BP recently, or at least since the advent of social media,” added Olds. “This situation with BP could end up being very instructive for companies needing to handle problems like this in the future — either in a positive or negative way.”

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By Michael Alan Hamlin

The somewhat startling title of this column isn’t meant to refer to the Philippines as a top exporter of people, a highly corrupt state, or an incredibly poor one compared to most of its high-achieving neighbors in Southeast Asia. No, instead it refers to the Philippines as number one in terms of the percentage of its Internet population that visits social networking sites in the Asia Pacific. Filipinos also spend more time on social networks than other Asia Pacific netizens.

comScore, a company that measures online activity, announced last month that 90.3% of the Internet population in the Philippines visited social networks in February. The company did not provide an estimate of the Internet population, but other research organizations estimate it to be between 25 and 35 million (Penetration is expected to be the subject of a subsequent comScore report.). Australia trailed the Philippines closely, with 89.6% of its Internet users visiting social websites in February. Indonesia placed third, at 88.6%.

However, both Philippine and Indonesia Internet users spend much more time on social networks and visit them more often than their Australian peers. Visitors in the Philippines spent an average of 5.5 hours on social networks in February during 26 visits. In Indonesia, users averaged 5.4 hours in 22 visits compared to 3.8 hours for the average Australia user in 20 visits. Interestingly, users in Japan—the world’s second largest economy—on average spent just 121 hours on social networks in February, about the same as users in India. Only 42.3% of Japan’s Internet population visited social networks at all.

In primarily English-speaking countries, Facebook was the number one social network, including in the Philippines where comScore found that 84.5% of the Internet population use the service. Google’s Orkut was the number one network in India, Wretch.cc in Taiwan, CyWorld in South Korea, and Mixi.jp in Japan. However, Facebook was the number one social network in Vietnam, where it reaches only about 19% of the Internet population.

Although the Philippines is the well-established SMS capital of the world—generating two billion messages a day— access to social networking sites is primarily via PCs rather than mobile devices. There are reports that sales of prepaid smart phones that can access the Internet and social network sites are on the rise, but a recent study by Gilas—an NGO that seeks to connect high schools to the Internet—suggests that increasing access to the Internet is also deepening the digital divide.

That study—underwritten by the World Bank—shows that 85% of the richest high school students but only 30% of the poorest have regular access to the Internet. Youth from farming families showed the lowest access. Not surprisingly, students whose family members work abroad demonstrated the highest use, suggesting that Internet technology is being leveraged as a tool to keep families digitally connected since they can’t physically connect.

However, both the poorest and the richest students primarily use Internet cafés as their primary access to the Internet, and this is true for both boys and girls. Only about 10% of 11,000 or so students surveyed said that school provides their primary access to the Internet. Boys and girls have similar rates of use, but use the Internet for different purposes. For girls, school work and social networking are the priorities; for boys—no surprise here—it’s computer games. Girls also use e-mail more, but both girls and boys use it primarily to communicate with friends in the Philippines. The study did show that boys typically begin using computers earlier than girls.

One of the most important findings in terms of access to computers and the Internet is that these tools increase knowledge of and contribute to more mature attitudes and practices in several areas. They include studies and academics, health, employment and prospects for economic advancement, self-confidence, sexuality and relationships, and civics and citizenship. Students who have access to the Internet—not just a computer—showed stronger association with positive behaviors and attitudes than students limited to computer access and no Internet.

Naturally, there’s a trade off. Use of the Internet exposes youths to exploitation, and enables access to negative content, especially pornography. Students are also largely unaware of unethical practices such as plagiarism, piracy, and spreading inaccurate information. Those are important concerns, and it’s important that parents and school officials work as partners to address them. The benefits of Internet access are well worth the tradeoff, but the tradeoffs can also be ameliorated. Should the Philippines be proud of being number one on social networks—Girls, what do you say?—I say open communication is always a good thing. And providing a means for mature attitudes to develop is crucial. So crucial that the Philippines can’t afford a big digital divide.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
May 25, 2010

In the early days of the Internet, e-mail used to be the major carrier of spam messages on the Web. Today, according to security solutions firm Sophos, spammers have shifted to social networking sites—where users are many and prevalent—in carrying out their dastardly deeds.

Compromised social networking accounts are just like PCs with botnets installed on them, according to Clarence Phua, ASEAN regional sales manager of Sophos. “[That makes] social networking accounts valuable to hackers, because they can use them to send spam, spread malware, and steal other identities,” he explained.

Social networking sites—notably Facebook and Twitter—have recently been the target of cybercriminals due to their large user base. In February 2010 alone, market research firm comScore pegs Filipino Internet users visiting social networking sites at 90.3%, spending an average of 332.2 minutes (or roughly five and a half hours) on such sites, the highest in the region.

And where there are users, there are those who take advantage. According to Sophos’s 2010 security threat report, at least 57% of social networking users have reported receiving spam via these services, a giant leap of 70.6% from a year ago.

Social networking spam, Phua clarified, include messages, status updates, and wall posts that promote a certain product. Click-jacking—or hiding the original spam URL through a URL shortening service—is also a prevalent method for spam.

Cybercriminals—who, Phua noted, have become more notorious and financially-driven over the years—are also the main perpetrators of malware over social media. Just recently, Facebook users were bombarded by their friends’ compromised accounts with wall posts containing the “sexiest video ever,” a malware that installs an adware on the user’s browser once viewed.

Phua said 36% of social networking users have reported experiencing malware attacks through their profiles, likewise a jump of 69.8% from last year’s data.

Because of the increased incidences of cybercrime through social networking sites, Phua advised CIOs to review their internal policy on social media as well as other Web 2.0 settings. He noted, however, that administrators shouldn’t outright limit access to social media sites, for these can aid in employee productivity. “You [definitely] can’t stop them [from accessing social media sites], but you can control,” he added.

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Computerworld Philippines
May 21, 2010

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, has ranked fourth in the top 10 most popular phishing targets on the web, overtaking even Google, the IRS and RapidShare, leading secure content management solutions developer Kaspersky Lab said in its latest report.

Company experts Darya Gudkova, Elena Bondarenko and Maria Namestnikova who compiled Kaspersky Lab’s 2010 first quarter Spam Evolution Report said it was the first time that phishing attacks on a social networking site has increased extensively.

“Facebook popped up unexpectedly in fourth place. This was the first time since we started monitoring that attacks on a social networking site have been so prolific,” the authors said in the report.

Currently, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites with more than 400 million users globally. Having stolen users’ accounts, the fraudsters can then use them to distribute spam, sending bulk emails to the account owners and their friends in the network. This method of distributing spam allows huge audiences to be reached.

Additionally, it lets the fraudsters take advantage of the social networking site’s additional options, like being able to send different requests, links to photos and invitations, all with the advertisement attached, both within the network and to users’ inboxes. Also, while registering accounts, users enter their data (for example, an email address) which the spammers can add to their databases.Facebook accounted 5.7% of the phishing pie. It is more targeted than top search engine Google, which ranked fifth with 3.1% attacks followed by the United States’ revenue service IRS with 2.2% and one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites, RapidShare with 1.8%.
More than half of the phishing pie was taken by e-commerce payment site PayPal with 52.2% followed by online auction and shopping site eBay with 13.3% and banking institution HSBC with 7.8%.
Meanwhile, the report said that during the first quarter of the year the percentage of phishing emails averaged 0.57% of the total volume of spam email traffic, which averaged at 85.2%.
The report also stated that Asia remained the leading source of spam among continents with 31.7% and followed closely by Europe 30.6% of spam being distributed from its territory.
By country, the United States of America maintained the lead with 16% followed as followed by India 7% and Russia 6%.

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By Tony Bradley
PC World (US)
May 17, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The villagers have pitchforks and torches in hand and everyone seems to be converging on Facebook–the scourge of all things private and personal. I am here to disband the angry mob by asking the question “how did Facebook get your data in the first place?” and telling people to look in the mirror before attacking Facebook.

I agree that Facebook is a little too brazenly cavalier in its attitude toward privacy. I am in no way suggesting that Facebook is completely innocent, or that it is some sort of paragon of information privacy practices. However, the opposite extreme is equally false.

Notable online personalities such as Leo Laporte, Cory Doctorow, and Matt Cutts, and Jason Rojas have deleted their Facebook accounts in protest–some in grand public gestures. What is lacking in all of the self-righteous indignation over Facebook privacy policies is the mea culpa factor.

The situation reminds me of the case where the woman spilled McDonald’s coffee on her lap, then sued McDonald’s because the coffee was hot and McDonald’s didn’t have the prescience of mind to notify her up front that pouring hot coffee on her lap might be bad. It’s like shooting someone and blaming the bullet without stopping to consider who was responsible for pulling the trigger.

Even if there were no Facebook, a vast amount of personal information is already available on the Web just from publicly available documents and records. Just check BeenVerified.com or Whitepages.com to see how much the Internet already knows about you.
When it comes to any additional information that is out there, though, users need to take some responsibility for sharing that data. Privacy and social networking are at opposite ends of the spectrum and it’s up to the individual user to exercise discretion in sharing information, and utilize the controls provided to place the fulcrum in the right spot to find a balance between the two that is comfortable.

Admittedly, much of the backlash isn’t so much about Facebook having the information, or even in how that information is used or distributed. Many users are simply frustrated that the rules keep changing. Every time Facebook introduces a new feature, or unveils a new service or partnership, suddenly data is exposed in new ways that the user did not overtly consent to.

On that point, I refer back to my Open Letter to Facebook on Privacy. I believe that Facebook should be much more open about its development lifecycle, and allow for more pubic beta testing and forewarning before springing new features on half a billion members. I also feel that Facebook should disclose the details of any changes, and make new features and services opt-in rather than automatically moving the line in the sand for existing members.
However, my main point in the open letter still stands, and brings me back to the mea culpa focus of this article. Ultimately, the vast majority of users won’t read the disclosures, and won’t use the security controls provided to them. They will opt-in to take advantage of cool features and they will share information without regard for privacy.
IT administrators need to have clearly-defined policies in place regarding social networking using company computers or network resources. If social networking is allowed, even on a limited basis, user education is a key element of protecting data–informing users what to share and what not to share, and ensuring they are aware of the privacy and data security controls available.

McDonald’s can’t protect every clumsy customer that drives a car with a scalding hot cup of coffee between their legs, and Facebook can’t be expected to be the guardian of every personal detail and sensitive fact shared willingly across its social network.

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By Matt Hamblen
Computerworld (US)
April 14, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s comment last September that his company had “screwed up” with Windows Mobile had some theorizing that Microsoft’s handheld team was in disarray and probably unable to take on the Apple iPhone and other devices.

Five months later, at the Mobile World Congress in February, Ballmer gave the world a glimpse at Windows Phone OS 7.0. It offered skeptics some hope that, nearly three years after the iPhone’s successful launch in 2007, Microsoft was getting back in the game.

And then came yesterday’s launch of two new Kin phones based on a distinct OS that Microsoft calls Windows Phone OS for Kin — apparently a derivative of Windows Phone OS 7.0.

The Kin is clearly not a smartphone, because it doesn’t allow downloading of all kinds of apps, analysts said. But it is more than a features phone with texting, because of the way it shares video, texts and other data with a circle of users in three interface capabilities called Kin Loop, Kin Spot and Kin Studio.

Slotting in between a features phone and a smartphone, the Kin is a fairly novel device, one that could reap big rewards for Microsoft and the device’s exclusive U.S. carrier, Verizon Wireless, analysts said. That depends on whether the Kins are priced right and come with attractive monthly data plans when they go on sale in May, analysts said.

In fact, because of the Kins’ recognition of the almost maniacal texting and social networking habits of teens and 20-somethings, Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates thinks that the Kin phones are an even bigger deal than Windows Phone OS 7. The mobile OS is expected to launch in various devices in the fall.

“The potential win for Microsoft is huge if it can capture even a relatively small fraction of the hundreds of millions of social network users,” Gold wrote in a commentary today. “In fact, Kin could dwarf the … tens of millions potential of its WP7 smart phone.”

Gold’s rationale: users attracted to Kin won’t care for all the things a smartphone like the iPhone or a Google Nexus One can provide, including downloads of thousands of apps. The social networking crowd envisioned in the Kin world isn’t oblivious to the value of apps, but favors its own social network above all else, Microsoft believes.

“If it catches on, Kin could usher in a new class of ‘Facebook in your pocket’ devices,” Gold said.

The appeal to social networkers is so important that Microsoft has even engineered a special emoticon key on the lower right of the Kins’ keypads. The key looks like a semicolon/close-parenthesis “smiley,” which CIO blogger Al Sacco reports will open a menu with additional emoticons for using in communications instead of words.

Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said in an e-mail that the Kin Studio best epitomizes the Kin’s social network usability. “Kin Studio is impressive, basically giving you a magazine of your life as you use the device,” he wrote. “Being able to know that everything is backed up [in the cloud] and that you can go back to any time period and look at what you [did] eliminates the family album, so to speak.”

The Kin Studio, as good as it sounds, is also an insight into how Microsoft could make serious money, as the Studio is backed up in the cloud with Microsoft’s Live services, Gold noted. “Kin is a locked-down OS [and] Microsoft controls the ecosystem for Kin as effectively as Apples does for the iPhone,” he said. As a result, Kin users have limited ability to run applications locally and are “virtually reliant on the cloud.”

That reliance means the Verizon network has to be rock solid and that Microsoft must not be perceived as heavy-handed in deciding what applications and services can run on the device, Gold said.

Pricing, yet to be announced, will play a big role in how young users respond and could lure in those likely to be largely indifferent about how much control Microsoft exerts over its Kin Studio.

“The whole thing comes down to pricing,” Dulaney said, noting that if the Kin is priced at $199 and $30 for monthly data service, it won’t appear to have much advantage over the iPhone. But if the device is perhaps $49 with a $5 to $15 a month data plan, “it should do well at Verizon.”

Analysts took note of how all the U.S. carriers have tried to expand on sales of texting/messaging devices to younger users, seeing some limits on growth in smartphone sales but no end to texting and MMS demand. At AT&T, a big push is on for “quick messaging devices” that are less expensive than smartphones, and Verizon might have picked up on that theme with the Kin.

Analysts have compared some of the Kin’s social networking features to the Motoblur service from Motorola. It’s built on Android running on a the Cliq phone sold by T-Mobile USA and on the Motorola BackFlip sold by AT&T.

“Kin is the next step up for the devices that were once listed as features phones in the slider classification used by texters,” Dulaney noted. “This is way beyond SMS or MMS and into social collaboration. It is a much more focused product than the iPhone.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

The 2010 presidential elections in May is going to be an election of firsts, among many others. It’s the first time in almost a decade that a new personality may be occupying the seat at Malacanang; it’s also the first time that the entire country will cast their votes through automated means; and, due largely to the sudden boom of social networking sites in the country, it may also be the first time that the battleground for courting precious votes is shifting to the cyberspace.

While it is apparent that previous elections have seen candidates utilizing the power of the Internet to further their campaigns, it can be observed that most of those who put up Web portals only did on the purpose of information dissemination, and not to actively engage the electorate in conversation.

However, the phenomenal victory of the first African-American US President Barack Obama changed all of that. Launching a campaign that tapped on the grassroots level through social networking, Obama harnessed the inherently collaborative nature of the Web to organize and mobilize his volunteers and supporters, sending him straight to the White House.

The rest, as they say, is history. And with the 2010 Presidential Elections approaching faster than the speed of thought, presidential candidates are scrambling to replicate Obama’s stunning victory, in hopes of landing themselves a seat at Malacañang. And with a majority of voters coming from an age range of 19 to 40 years old—also forming the bulk of Internet users in the Philippines—winning the online vote becomes a critical mission for candidates.

Computerworld Philippines invited the New Media Managers of two presidential candidates to exclusive
one-on-one interviews to discover how presidential bets are harnessing the power of the Web in furthering their candidacies. Other hopefuls were also invited but couldn’t make it within the allotted timeframe.

Channels
After much thought whether he should run for the presidency following his mother’s untimely death, Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III finally broke the news in September, answering the clamor from various sectors of society.

This opened the floodgates for Aquino’s campaign, when an immediate mandate to “dominate the Internet” was given, according to Enteng Romano, head of the New Media Bureau of Aquino’s presidential campaign.

“The first assembly of volunteers happened on Sept. 13, 2009, after Noynoy declared he would run for the presidency,” Romano explains, adding that the plan was to be as “pervasive” and “inclusive” in their online efforts as possible.

This meant establishing presence in every available Web portal there is—from Facebook, to Twitter, and to
Multiply, among others. “We also post blogs posted on the official website (noynoy.ph), and our weekly newsletter is ongoing,” he adds.

Meanwhile, a fervent hope to reach out to the youth and an ongoing thrust for OFW welfare are just some of the reasons why Senator Manuel “Manny” Villar and his team took to the Web. “The online medium is primarily talking to the youth, as well as some opinion leaders,” explains Brian Edang, head of Villar’s New Media Team. “There are close to 30 million Filipinos online. If you want to talk to prospective voters, it’s a no-brainer to go the online way.”

Villar’s new media approach comes at a two-fold strategy: an official website that serves as a repository of relevant information about the Senator, and an active social media presence where voter engagement takes place. “Social networks are much more dynamic, so the interaction becomes personal,” relates Michael Palacios, one of the volunteers for new media campaign. “The website is primarily for straightforward content.”

Palacios said they don’t have a deliberate blogging presence, because blogs are considered “earned media.” “But we have done several blogging events in the past,” adds Natz Jose, another online volunteer. “Villar actually has the most number of engagements with bloggers thus far.”

As of writing, Aquino’s page on Facebook is composed of 621,719 fans, while Villar has 598,081 members. One of Aquino’s two Twitter sites has 30,618 followers, while the other has 1,210 following the account. Villar, however, has 998 followers on his Twitter page.

Investment
Most candidates would admit they leverage the vast potentials of the Internet mainly because it offers minimal burdening costs to its users. In rolling out their campaigns, both Aquino and Villar admit to spending little to no costs on online efforts, emphasizing that time is their only investment.

“We latch on to the spirit of volunteerism from our supporters,” says Aquino’s Romano. “That is why the cost is almost negligible. We just pay for a marginal price for the website’s hosting.”

Villar, on the other hand, is criticized mostly for his generous spending on advertisements on television, radio, and print. New media is not an exception to this, if advertisements on Facebook and Google’s ad program Adsense are to be observed.

Edang, however, dispelled speculations that these advertisements directly came from Villar’s camp. “It may have been started by volunteers, but as far as we are concerned, those ad campaigns have not been run by us.”

Conversation
The Internet being a democratic space where users can freely express their opinion, a variety of messages are easily formed and disseminated, especially matters of national concern. Aquino and Villar’s new media teams say they are satisfied with the way their messages are being received, saying the success of their efforts are evidenced heavily by the mounting number of their fans, followers, and volunteers.

“Most of the people responding to our posts are supporters, but there are also naysayers—also called online trolls—who have opposing views,” Romano says. Dealing with these confrontational users becomes sketchy, Romano explains, because issues of censorship comes to play. “The general rule is to let their messages stay on the site. If they hit below the belt, that’s when we take them out,” he elaborates.

Villar’s campaign, meanwhile, is built on positive vibes, so people are dissuaded from mudslinging. “As much as possible, we focus only on things relating to Villar, and avoid posting messages that attack other candidates,” Palacios clarifies.

But message is rendered inconsequential if not translated to action. Aquino’s Romano admits that even if the Internet presents a higher level of engagement with the voters, the team’s online efforts are concentrated to disseminating quick information to supporters. “We are not that sophisticated yet in our online channels that are used to organize volunteers, just as what Obama had done,” he quips, adding that online efforts of politicians in the Philippines may never come close to what Obama has done in the United States, where his online campaign efforts drew massive donations.

For the part of Villar, Palacios says the efforts have been a healthy mix of information dissemination and calls to action. “Our efforts online get translated to real-life action, judging by the increasing number of our volunteers,” he points out. “We are opening the doors for them to act.”

While they don’t have a stable volunteer management system right now, Palacios says something of the sort may be in the offing. “We are looking into it, so that our volunteers can organize themselves,” he says.

“But right now we are focused on making sure that the message we are sending out stays the same.”

Online Marketing
For all intents and purposes, the presidential candidates’ online campaigns are very much comparable to a burgeoning Internet practice of online marketing, where social media and search engine optimization are heavily utilized.

“Considering that social media is still a relatively new thing for many politicians, those who have an online presence have done a generally good job in using social media to get their messages across,” notes Joey Alarilla, social media editor of Yahoo! Southeast Asia.

Despite stellar initial performance, Alarilla says candidates and their teams still have a lot to learn about the dynamics of the Web. “They have to adjust to the culture and dynamics of online communities, and realize that online users are not just passive consumers, but also news producers in their own right,” he emphasizes, adding that user-generated content propagated by new media users are a more relevant gauge of campaign impact than the simple number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers.

In matters of messages delivered, Alarilla suggests a more passive approach for new media campaign managers. “They should listen more, instead of trying to do all the talking. So instead of bombarding follow ers with their campaign messages, focus more on replying to their questions and following their suggestions,” he says.

Alarilla says campaign efforts should also go “beyond just posting the same long, boring speech online,” since it is mostly the youth who have firmly embraced social media. “They should understand that new media isn’t just the online version of what worked for traditional media,” he adds.

Needless to say, Alarilla believes that the inherent swiftness of new media can’t be easily translated to the speed of services rendered by politicians eventually bagging the positions they campaigned for. “Voters, especially those who are used to real-time results in an online world characterized by instant messages and status updates, should remember that problems can’t be magically solved overnight in the real world. Just as politicians should remember that online popularity does not automatically translate to victory in the elections,” he quips.

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By Rosemary Hattersley
PC Advisor (UK)
March 31, 2010

LONDON - Whether you’re a committed telly addict, a tabloid aficionado or a web surfer extraordinaire, we’re sure you can’t help but notice that every couple of days seems to bring another security scare. Scare stories make for good headlines, of course, but some affect you more than others. Such is the case with privacy - something we’re increasingly expected to manage for ourselves.

There are plenty of straightforward ways to claw back some peace of mind. As we outlined in our in-depth look at the latest online security threats, the little bits of information with which we furnish web apps can be collectively turned against us.

A good example is the Facebook app that asks what single topped the charts the day you were born. I don’t mind admitting that my answer to this is one of those dated comedy tracks. But I’m not about to amuse Facebook’s entire London network (several million-strong and counting) with its details, particularly when doing so narrows down my date of birth to a seven-day period. How many guesses does a hacker need to correctly ascertain and make use of my date of birth (DOB) on an official form, such as applying for a credit card? Not many, given those odds.

Changes to Facebook’s interface now promote the idea of searching, Friends Reunited-style, for old acquaintances based on school years. Again, you’re semi-publicly drilling down into the detail and then proudly displaying the results.

If you and five of your friends all went to the same school, it takes only one person to list their DOB for a snoop to reasonably deduce that you were all in the same school year.

Don’t even get me started on the dangers of posting your full address, phone numbers and myriad other details that only true friends should be privy to. And it’s no better if you have a blog and post the information there. Web crawlers will happily serve it all up on a platter to anyone who knows how to use a search engine skilfully.

It’s great to share; it’s even better to check first who you’re sharing it with.

Plug Facebook information leaks

Step 1. Click Account at the top right and choose Account Settings from the drop-down menu. From here, you can swap your existing password for a stronger alphanumeric one. It’s also a good idea to remove your maiden or middle names if you included them at registration.

Step 2. Click the Networks tab to check you’re happy with the sharing settings for any network you may have joined. You’re no longer required to join a network, however, so you may prefer to remove yourself from it altogether. Also consider unlinking your Twitter and MySpace accounts, your personal blog and so on.

Step 3. The Privacy Settings are equally important; they’re also under the Account menu. Facebook has tightened up some of its defaults, but it’s wise to check what you’re sharing with whom. In particular, don’t let third parties use your profile picture in their advertising, which may fool some of your less tech-savvy friends.

Step 4. If you log into Facebook with a mobile phone number, have signed up for Facebook texts or listed your number at sign-up, be aware that your phone number will be available for all your ‘friends’ to see (plus networks such as Foursquare). If you don’t want them to call you or send you text spam, alter your settings on the Mobile tab.

Step 5. Hackers often seek out a weak link, such as someone who appears to accept friends willy-nilly. Having been accepted, they try to become friends with that person’s friends, who assume the newcomer must be kosher. Go to Accounts, Edit friends for a list from which you can purge anyone you don’t actively know.

Step 6. You’d be surprised what you can learn about people based on their answers to Facebook’s quizzes. Most apps request permission to post your answers to the Live Feed and to your Wall but, even if you ignore such requests, commenting on someone else’s results could reveal more than you intended to.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
March 29, 2010

MIAMI - Facebook is proposing tweaks to its site governance documents so that they will be consistent with new services the social networking company plans to roll out.

Facebook members have until midnight U.S. Pacific Time on April 3 to make comments to the proposed changes to the company’s Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities in this page.

“Not all of these products have been finalized and many aren’t yet built at all. However, we’ve definitely identified some interesting opportunities to improve the way you share and connect with the people and things in your life,” wrote Michael Richter , Facebook’s deputy general counsel, in an official blog post.

“It is important to note that, while we’re still developing many aspects of these products, user control over privacy remains essential to our innovation process and we’ll continue to develop new tools to help you control the things you share on Facebook,” he added.

Among the proposed modifications is one involving a planned “location” feature that had already been referenced in a previous change to the governance documents. Without providing many details, Richter said Facebook has taken out the original description of this feature’s purpose as for adding “location to something you post” to instead center on the idea of “place,” which could encompass something like a Facebook fan Page, and not just an actual physical or geographical location.

Richter also said the document now is intended to be clearer about the fact that users have more control over the broadcasting of some actions than others. For example, some actions, like accepting a friend request, are “a two-way public connection,” so while one of the parties can control how it appears on his or her profile, the notice can be discovered elsewhere as well. Then there are “one-way” actions, like the sharing of a link or a photo, over which a user has complete control in determining who can access it.

Regarding third-party Web sites, Facebook is entertaining the possibility to provide what Richter describes as “a more personalized experience” than is possible today when Facebook members visit them. If this saw the light, it would be with a small set of “pre-approved” partners and would be accompanied by a brand new set of privacy controls, he said.

Facebook is also attempting to further refine and clarify its fairly recent privacy option called “Everyone,” which was introduced in response to demand from members who wanted to make all or part of their profiles more widely accessible beyond their list of friends or members of their networks.

“People still own the information they post to Facebook, but the ‘Everyone’ setting is designed to enable people to share content as broadly as possible. To enable this distribution, we allow others to see, access, display, export, distribute and redistribute content set to ‘Everyone’ and we’ve tried to make this even clearer,” Richter said.

For example, the Privacy Policy states that information labeled “Everyone” is publicly available not only to all Facebook users but also to those not logged into the site. This information can also be indexed by public search engines like Google, likely setting the stage for Facebook to let search engines index members’ status updates and other content that they have set to “Everyone.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
March 18, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - How many times a day to you feel the need to check in on Facebook or Twitter ? Would you interrupt dinner to do it? Would you interrupt a date to do it?

If you answer yes to any of those questions, you might just be a social media addict .

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are occupying more and more of users’ time, according to a study released Wednesday by Retrevo Inc, a consumer electronics shopping and review site.

Andrew Eisner, Retrevo’s director of Community and Content, noted in a blog post that the recent survey of 1,000 Americans showed that many people appear to be obsessed with trading information with their friends, family and co-workers.

The Retrevo Gadgetology study shows that 48% of those polled say they update Facebook or Twitter during the night or as soon as they wake up. And 19% of people under the age of 25 say they update Facebook or Twitter anytime they happen to wake up during the night; 11% over the age of 25 say they do the same thing.

The study also noted that 42% check Facebook or Twitter first thing in the morning, with 28% of iPhone users saying they do it before they even get out of bed.

“Among social media users, it appears almost half are so involved with Facebook and Twitter that they check in the first thing in the morning,” said Eisner in the report. “With 16% of social media users saying this is how they get their morning news, could we be witnessing the first signs of social media services beginning to replace Good Morning America as the source for what’s going on in the world?”

In fact, 54% of those polled said they get their morning news fix by logging onto Facebook and Twitter.

People seem so into their personal tech that they don’t mind being interrupted from dinner, during a trip to the bathroom or even during sex. The study found that 40% of respondents don’t mind being interrupted by a text message; 32% said interrupting a meal for a message is OK, while 7% said they’d even check a message during an intimate moment. Eleven percent of those under the age of 25 would interrupt sex for a message, and 24% under 25 would answer a message in the bathroom.

“Some of this can be ascribed to the newness and freshness of the social networking craze,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “With many people, it will probably smooth out as they become more used to it. However, there will be a percentage of people who become somewhat addicted to social networking — to checking up on it, to maintaining it, to extending it.

“This could cause problems in their real lives as it consumes more and more of their time and attention,” Olds said.

Eisner said he’s not declaring that social networking is a danger to people, but he is concerned about some of the numbers he saw.

“We’re not qualified to declare a societal, social media crisis, but when almost half of social media users say they check Facebook or Twitter sometime during the night or when they first wake up, you have to wonder if these people aren’t suffering from some sort of addiction to social media,” he said.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld . Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com .

Read more about web 2.0 in Computerworld’s Web 2.0 Knowledge Center.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
February 24, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - New numbers from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.

Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets a day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter . Today, though, that number has gone up — a lot.

Weil noted in a blog post on the Twitter site today that 50 million tweets are posted on the site every day. That’s an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.

Twitter use has been steadily climbing.

In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew by 1,400% and reached 35 million per day by the end of the year.

Weil, however, doesn’t say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets-per-day. Are the top 10% of users, for instance, accounting for 80% of all tweets? That’s not clear.

Just last month, a study from RJMetrics Inc. showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.

The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December. According to RJMetrics, only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling company with far fewer users.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.

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By David Taber
CIO.com

FRAMINGHAM (02/18/2010) - At the core of customer relationship management is “who am I talking with?” In a simple SFA or CRM system, it’s obvious: you called them, or they called you. But in enterprise CRM, it’s tricky to identify exactly whom the interaction is with, and every new data source seems to make it harder. The problem occurs at two levels: contact information blur from multiple databases, and avatar confusion from multiple entry points into your company’s web and social networking sites. This week, we’ll cover the top layer of the problem.

Multiple Contact Lists

Nearly every employee in your company has an address list in their e-mail client. On analyzing a large number of those address books, you’ll find a high degree of overlap. Of course, the data entries in each address book will have minor variations, setting the stage for a massive duplication problem if you ever tried to consolidate all that contact information. Fortunately, in most companies there is little reason to try this for most employees’ contacts. The relationships just aren’t relevant enough to the overall business.

But in professional services firms and investment banking/private equity/venture capital, the contacts of nearly every employee can be a valuable asset. It is very tempting to move towards a centralized list of contacts, making all of them visible in the CRM system. But the chaos of data in the individual address books makes that very hard. Here are approaches we’ve seen work, with the pros and cons:

• Using a shared address book for corporate contacts, supplementing the private address books for each user. This approach is simple, can be set up to automatically synchronize the shared address book with your CRM, and doesn’t involve a lot of cost. But it does require a change of user behavior: users have to remember to keep the contacts in the corporate address book updated, and to put new business contacts into the shared address book rather than their own private one. Further, the effort of deciding which people should be in the shared list, and deduping that shared list once created, is a visible and painful startup cost that stops many organizations from using this strategy. Finally, this won’t really work if you’re a Mac shop.

• Using the CRM system in place of the e-mail shared address book. This is simple to understand and execute, but it requires an even bigger change to user behavior. People like to live in their e-mail client, and this approach means telling users to log in to their CRM system to get the contact info they need all day long. This strategy can work in sales, marketing, and customer service, but for most professional services organizations or senior management, this e-mail-plus-CRM approach is the kiss of death.

• Using plug-ins to synchronize your e-mail client address books directly with your CRM system. There are a variety of plug-ins from CRM vendors, dedicated contact management systems, and third party products that try to seamlessly represent CRM contacts as a natural extension of the user’s individual address book. While each of these products has potential plusses, the user experience with them ranges from the acceptable to the horrendous. I won’t mention any names in print, but feel free to contact me if you need the real story. The bottom line over the long term is that none of these products is really satisfactory without implementing careful policy, extensive testing, or expensive integration. Sometimes, all three. And if you’re a Mac shop, there’s almost nothing on the market to support this strategy.

• Using Microsoft Dynamics. You have to admit it, these guys own more than 80% of the e-mail clients, 65% of the e-mail servers, and control of the desktop. Not surprisingly, they’ve done a bang-up job of integrating with Outlook and avoiding the bug-bombs that seem to come with each of their patches. That said, users generally don’t rate Dynamics very high, the system can be overly complex, and they are in no way a leader in SaaS CRM. So Dynamics isn’t on the short list for a lot of companies — particularly if they’re professional services firms where SaaS matters and Macs abound.

• Using people to offset the weaknesses in technology. Believe it or not, this one can work the best because it makes no tough demands for behavioral change. In this approach, an admin or intern is designated as the keeper of the corporate contact file, and they make all updates — typically to the CRM system. Busy executives like this because it means they don’t sit around typing updates. Periodically (probably daily), the admin/intern runs a push program to update the corporate addresses that everyone uses (typically a read-only shared address book). Because all the data is updated in one place, there’s much less risk of duplicates or data corruption. Ironically, this can be one of the most flexible and least cost approaches, particularly if you have the admin/intern in a low-cost labor market.

Even with the best of these solutions, there are still wrinkles. Thanks to Google Mail, BlackBerries, and differing user work-styles, there will be multiple address books that are at best partially synchronized. The bottom line for this layer of the CRM identity crisis: policy and business process need to be refined if you are ever to get this problem under control. So don’t invest deeply in a technical solution until you’ve got the people and policy issues nailed.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
February 10, 2010

MIAMI - Google has given Gmail a social-networking component with its introduction of Buzz, a service built inside of the webmail product that lets users post and share content in similar ways as they do in sites like Facebook and Twitter.

How successful Google will be in convincing Gmail users to shift their social-networking tasks over to Buzz remains to be seen. Google believes Buzz offers enough improvements over existing social networks.

Specifically, Buzz has been designed to help users deal with the often massive amount of information they receive through their social-networking sites.

“Increasingly, it’s becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise,” said Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president of product management, at a press conference on Tuesday.

The problem is only going to get worse, as people continue to find value in and embrace social media, he said. “We all feel this bombardment, this fatigue of having to go manually through and try to make sense of the torrent of information that’s washing over us,” he said. “This has become a large-scale problem, the kind we’re good at [solving at] Google.”

However, as Google officials acknowledged, Buzz right now has no links into Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site with more than 400 million members. This means that Buzz, at least for the moment, exists in parallel with Facebook, without the two of them intersecting, thus offering no help for users of that site, a major gap in Buzz’s coverage.

As for Twitter, users can’t post to Twitter from Buzz right now, but they can direct their Twitter posts to Buzz, as well as other content they post on public sites, like the Flickr and Picasa photo sharing sites from Yahoo and Google, respectively.

Google opted to build Buzz into Gmail because Gmail contacts lists are an underlying, existing social graph for users, officials said.

“Today, with Google Buzz, we’re introducing a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail,” said Todd Jackson, Google Buzz product manager.

Jackson highlighted a number of areas in which Google believes Buzz improves upon existing social-networking sites. For example, Buzz builds a list of friends automatically, based on the Gmail contacts a person interacts most with. In addition, Buzz lets users include thumbnails when sharing Web links, making them more graphic and attractive. Buzz also lets users attach various degrees of access to posts, from completely public to limited to hand-picked friends.

Leveraging its Gmail core, Buzz makes every post a Gmail conversation that gets updated in real time as friends add comments to it. Buzz also recommends posts from people who aren’t necessarily on one’s list of friends, based on certain “signals” that the content might be of interest. Likewise, it also buries posts from friends that it determines are unlikely to appeal to the user.

“This is Google being Google, doing what they always do: collect everybody’s information, organize it, become an intermediary and serve up ads around it. This plays to their classic strategy,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an Altimeter Group analyst, in an interview.

Buzz will be rolled out over the coming days to all Gmail users. Later on, a version of Buzz will surface in Google Apps, the collaboration and communication suite for workplaces.

Buzz will also be available on mobile devices in various places, including the Google.com mobile home page; at buzz.google.com>, a Web-based application for the iPhone and Android devices; and as a new layer on Google Maps for Mobile.

Google is playing catch-up in the social-networking field. Its Orkut social-networking site is popular in specific countries but doesn’t come close to matching the worldwide popularity of Facebook.

“Google has a history of being late to the game when it comes to social, and they often are hit and miss,” Owyang said.

With Buzz, Google is trying to leverage the connections people have made on its webmail service, a move similar to ones from other providers of Internet communications services, such as Yahoo and AOL, with their respective IM and webmail products.

Owyang sees Buzz going deeper into social connections than the Yahoo and AOL attempts. He predicts the Google product will enjoy a certain degree of success but fall short of being a blockbuster.

“I’m optimistic there will be moderate Buzz adoption. I wouldn’t say this will be the complete next social network,” he said.

Augie Ray, a Forrester Research analyst, said in an e-mailed statement that he expects people to give Buzz a test drive but doubts there will be a massive migration to it from Twitter and Facebook.

“While bringing relevance filtering to the noisy social media world could prove a significant advantage, this doesn’t — yet — seem to be enough to pull people away from the networks they’ve already created elsewhere,” Ray wrote.

“Buzz could end up supplementing rather than replacing users’ other social networks for now,” Ray added.

Competitively, Buzz is aimed squarely at Facebook, Owyang said. “This is a direct blow against Facebook. This is absolutely competitive,” he said.

Facebook has become a serious Google competitor in areas beyond the core social-networking features. For example, in Facebook, people share photos, watch videos, read news articles, search the Web, play games, exchange private messages, text chat and listen to music. Along the way, Facebook has become the fourth-most-popular site in the U.S., where it accounts for 7 percent of people’s time spent online, according to comScore.

Google’s Horowitz said Buzz is in its early stages and that Google has many opportunities to extend and improve it in the coming months.

For example, it would make sense to integrate Buzz with Google Wave, the application that meshes e-mail, IM and document sharing, he said.

Google wants to aggressively provide APIs (application programming interfaces) in Buzz to help external developers build new applications for it and integrate Buzz with existing sites and software, said Vic Gundotra, a Google engineering vice president.

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By Jared Newman
PC World (US)
February 08, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Forget the redesigned homepage and the inevitable controversy it will create, Facebook’s next feature might actually be something its users will adore.
TechCrunch reports that Facebook is overhauling its message service and turning it into full-blown e-mail. Remember when everyone scrambled to get a vanity Facebook URL last June? Your Facebook e-mail address could be vanityURL@facebook.com. The so-called “Project Titan,” launch date unknown, would also include POP/IMAP support for checking mail outside of Facebook.

That’s a good start, but here are five other features I’d like to see in Facebook e-mail:

Multiple Inboxes

Here’s where Facebook e-mail could really flourish: The site already lets you divide friends into distinct lists, such as friends, family and work. An e-mail service could sort incoming messages accordingly, letting you check separate inboxes even when everything’s going to the same address.

Convenient Access

Checking e-mail is often the first thing I do when switching on my computer or fiddling with my phone. Give me a convenient URL for direct Web access, such as facebookmail.com, so I don’t have to hit my Facebook landing page first. Also, a mobile app that loads right into Facebook mail would be helpful.

Optional Threading

As a Gmail user, I’m now addicted to the way it combines all e-mail messages on a single topic into one conversation thread. Facebook already does the same thing with its message service, making me confident that the feature would carry over into e-mail. But those who despise threading should have the option to turn it off.

Pull in Facebook Info

A Facebook e-mail service should make it simple to pull Facebook information directly into messages. Someone wrote something ridiculous on my wall? Give me a button that lets me easily find and link to it. Same goes with photos and albums, which should appear as thumbnail previews in messages.

Manage Everything From E-Mail

If Facebook becomes my e-mail service, it should make administrative tasks easier. Approving friends, sending event RSVPs, and responding to wall posts should all be possible directly from e-mail, without ever visiting a separate Web page.

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By Tom S. Noda
Published in the CWP December 2009 - January 2010 issue

As the population of netizens balloon, so will the number of cybercrimes. It is a challenge major security vendors vow to battle with products and strategies engineered to protect businesses and individuals alike.

In this yearend special feature of Computerworld Philippines, four security vendors—Trend Micro, Sophos, NetPlay, Inc., and Symantec—say in separate interviews, that emerging technologies such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, virtualization, and social networking have led them to intensify their efforts on curbing cybercrime.

“As more companies conduct their businesses online, and more information, transactions and communications are posted online, threats and problems increases, like loss of data due to hardware failure and theft, stealing of confidential information, bogus online transactions, account phishing and spamming, among others will continue to rise exponentially,” says Scott Gonzalo, managing director of Netplay, Inc., the Philippine distributor of Microworld Technologies Inc.’s eScan and Elitecore Technologies Ltd’s Cyberoam.

Similarly, Rob Forsyth, managing director of Sophos in Asia-Pacific, describes 2009 as the social media year for businesses globally, since more enterprises have begun to tap social networking and Web 2.0 to reach out to customers and to transform their brand and marketing strategies.

“The Internet will continue to transform the way people work and play, and its pervasiveness will continue to blur the lines between consumer and enterprise technology with the growing sophistication of an average user,” remarks Forsyth, adding that as enterprises discover new ways of integrating the social media platform in the business, employees are expected to continue initiating and implementing their own social media practices within the enterprise, which may prove unsettling to both network security and worker productivity, if a social media usage policy is not in place or adequately enforced among employees.

“Organizations will be increasingly concerned about malicious attacks originating from social networking sites, and the risks associated with users revealing sensitive and confidential corporate information online,” Forsyth says. “Other than social computing, another major enterprise technology trend is cloud computing which will gain greater prominence in 2010.”

According to Gartner, revenues from cloud computing will reach US$14 million annually by the end of 2013. Typical cloud computing services provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, with the software and data stored on the servers.

“The growing adoption of cloud computing will drive the sharing of corporate data in never-before-seen ways and result in both the immediate exchange of information and increased vulnerabilities for enterprises,” says Forsyth. Because of this, he says more powerful encryption policies and security technologies will be needed to safeguard data wherever it is stored.

Eric Hoh, vice president of Symantec, Asia South Region, tells Computerworld Philippines that attackers will continue to shift away from mass distribution of a small number of threats to micro distribution of millions of distinct threats.

He says that many of the new strains of malware consist of thousands of distinct threats that come from known, unique families through a variety of methods such as file sharing, email and removable media. “These new and emerging threats have given rise to the need for new, complementary detection methods such as heuristics, behavior blocking and reputation-based security models.”

ONLINE PROTECTION

To address online threats, NetPlay has unleashed security software from Microworld and Elitecore that are designed to support businesses that have online presence, and they are: the eScan Antivirus software, Cyberoam Endpoint Data Protection suite and Cyberoam UTM, respectively.

Gonzalo says Cyberoam UTM is a gateway security appliance that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic for threats like hacking, spamming, viruses and provides web content filtering.

He claims it to be the first UTM that is identity based wherein the appliance provides the name and the IP address of its user who has breached security regulations unlike other appliance that only provides an IP address.

Gonzalo adds that eScan antivirus is another endpoint security software that provides proactive virus monitoring of its host PC. Gonzalo reveals they will also be rolling out a Cyberoam UTM software and EPDP for the small and medium-enterprise (SME) markets as well as new versions of eScan antivirus software.

The products complement each other, he says, describing Cyberoam UTM as a gateway security solution while eScan Antivirus and Cyberoams EPDP as endpoint solutions.

INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS

Following its integration with data security solutions firm Utimaco Safeware, Sophos introduced in 2009 a portfolio of security software that includes data encryption, computer security, web security, email security, and network access control that users can manage, deploy and use.

In October 2009, Sophos fully integrated data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities into Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9, which enables businesses to have visibility and control over sensitive data without the need to deploy any additional agents or incur any additional licensing costs.

Forsyth notes that with the rise of cybercrime, breaches, accidental or intentional data leakage, and multi-faceted security threats, business critical information must be fully protected at all times.

He stresses that complexity of securing data stems from the growing popularity of virtualization and cloud computing among organizations and data centers looking to streamline the use of resources.

Accordingly, data centers must comply with enterprise service-level agreements and operating procedures before corporations entrust moving mission-critical applications under their control. To help address these concerns, Sophos has collaborated with Intel to help protect security-critical applications and contribute to compliance for regulations such as financial payments, government agencies and healthcare organizations through integrating Sophos SafeGuard Crypto-Server for cryptography with Intel SOA Expressway for XML security into a single integrated solution to help customers meet industry-specific security regulations and policies.

Forsyth says malware threats and the security landscape have evolved dramatically over the last five years, which bring about a paradigm shift in customer requirements as well.

Today, having anti-malware tools and firewalls in place is no longer enough to protect the dissolving network perimeter. He says the lack of data protection can hurt the bottom line, adding that the Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9 addresses such concerns by integrating endpoint security with comprehensive data protection to safeguard against data loss.

IT, PEOPLE, PROCESSES

Over at Symantec, the security approach for 2010 is three-pronged: technology, people, and processes.

“We understand that technology isn’t the only answer to enable businesses to secure and manage their information,” Hoh says, adding Symantec will continue to bring together an ecosystem of products, services, and partners that will help businesses secure and manage their information-based security models.

“Symantec’s new reputationbased security technology leverages the anonymous software usage patterns of Symantec’s extensive volunteer user community to automatically identify entirely new spyware, viruses and worms,” he says, noting with the increasing threats, businesses will also opt for multilayer and comprehensive protection, such as those provided by all-in-one security suites.

Hoh claims that the Symantec Protection Suites, made available earlier this year, is an all-in-one suite that protects critical business assets from complex malware and spam threats, and rapidly recovers data or computer systems.

And as businesses consider DLP in the coming year, Symantec recommends that they look beyond technology and consider strengthening policies and processes.

Effective DLP, Hoh says, establishes reputable processes and procedures that reduce the risk of data exposure throughout an enterprise. He says a comprehensive, long-term, sustainable DLP is based on: “Threat coverage, business process integration, and risk reduction measurement.”

TECH OF TOMORROW

At Trend Micro, the game plan is to develop the “technology of tomorrow,” as the level of threats in the world has vastly outrun existing technologies. “Everybody right now is unable to face the threats of tomorrow that’s why we have to go to the technology of tomorrow,” says David Perry, global director of security education.

“We just released our smart protection network over the course of last year, but we got a whole lot more product releases all through next year, starting right away, and some before Christmas this year,” he says.

Perry says Trend Micro is seeing an advancement of many web-based threats that cannot be pursued with traditional methods. “We have invented whole new ways of detecting web-based threats and blocking people from going to them.

This should protect them from Facebook, MySpace, on Twitter, and all of the different places that they’re going on the web,” he says.

Although he declined to name some of the future Trend Micro products, Perry says the company has new products in the SME space, particularly those involved with cloud computing. “We foresee security problems in the cloud so we’re looking at protecting the cloud and placing protection in it.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

In the dog-eat-dog world of the competitive enterprise, keeping up to pace with the latest developments in technology becomes vital for survival, especially after a crucial time of economic crisis. For the coming year, experts therefore agree: agility and mobility becomes the core battleground of competition for companies to stay afloat. In the workplace of 2010 as predicted by top network vendors interviewed exclusively by Computerworld Philippines, executives have relevant information at their fingertips, employees utilize the power of the Web in collaborating for their work, and everyone will be connected to their home base whenever and wherever they may be. “There is an increasing movement towards the ‘Connected Life’,” quips Stephen Misa, country manager for Cisco Systems Philippines. Misa sees personal technologies such as smartphones and social networking infiltrating the corporate sphere, simultaneously as the workplace begins to move out of the conventional office building.

A Networking Facelift

Due to the increasing demand for content—especially video, which Misa describes as “the killer application” that will drive the next generation of productivity and innovation—corporate and service provider networks would have to be upgraded. The potentials of Web 2.0, specifically social networking, will ring in more demand for bandwidth, especially as consumers—who are also employees—continue to drive the popularity of such tools. “Companies need to re-evaluate the tools they offer their employees, and service providers need to re-engineer their networks,” Misa notes.

Social networking, however, will remain a marginal portion of the company’s network bandwidth, as bandwidth-hungry video redefines bandwidth requirements and Internet traffic for most firms. “Our Telepresence offering once again grew in excess of 100% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2009, proving that customers truly understand the productivity and value that video delivers both internally and with their own customers and partners.”

With this incessant hunger for richer content delivered through the office, Misa says providers must graduate from merely providing basic voice or data services, and move to become “experience providers” delivering an integrated set of data, voice, video, and mobile services to retain customers.

The Everywhere, Every Time, Everyone Office

However, pushing content to the office—a stable and stationary placeholder of content—is just half the battle for network administrators and providers. As more and more devices offer portability and mobility not only to consumers but to professional users as well, the four walls of the office become irrelevant.

“Corporate users want all information at their fingertips, and to stay connected with the office and clients while still being able to do business in the field,” posits Desmond Toh, marketing director, D-Link.

As corporate users continue to access the Web even outside their offices, Toh says the demand for Internet connectivity on-the-go will ramp up by next year. “Broadband and the network have [actually] become the fourth utility after water, gas, and electricity,” asserts Cisco’s Misa.

More importantly, as new innovations break barriers in terms of access, productivity is heightened due to the liberalizing capabilities of collaboration. “Tools are being developed to enable workers to communicate and collaborate seamlessly with one another, with their partners and with their customers,” Misa explains. Bart Burstein, vice president for product management and business development of Ruckus Wireless, would like to call this innovation as “distributed computing.” “Businesses are becoming more mobile, enabling corporate users, for example, to edit a speech or a press statement on the go, in real time, and in collaboration with other workers,” he shares. For such enablers, Burstein says connectivity requirements are heightened. “High-quality and reliable broadband access is therefore needed to do distributed computing,” he adds.

3G as Enterprise Enabler

3G technology, currently touted as the messiah that will integrate both mobile computing and high-speed access through wireless broadband capabilities, will become increasingly important in the coming years, and may even trigger the growth of more mobile users.
“In terms of access, 3G is increasingly being used by businesses,” claims Mantosh Malhotra, Philippine country manager, Qualcomm, a 3G technology innovator for device manufacturers. “With 3G, information can be fed real-time to the server.”

According to Malhotra, 3G enables companies to drive up its productivity output and ensure that downtime is kept to a minimum. These innovative products, D-Link’s Toh said, will allow users to enjoy broadband experience with full mobility. But aside from the access side, Malhotra notes how more and more targeted devices utilizing 3G technology are slowly becoming mainstream. “With the robust 3G ecosystem, manufacturers are increasingly becoming secure that their investments in 3G are protected, thereby ramping up the production of 3G devices, and driving down its costs, making it more affordable,” he explains.

Ruckus Wireless’ Burstein, on the other hand, sees a similar trend in devices, as more and more gadgets move towards “miniaturization.” “The trend for miniaturization of devices will mean more work will be done on smartphones and netbooks, as these devices become more affordable,” he says, adding that due to this, the percentage of smartphone usage in the enterprise will escalate.

Virtualization to Continue as a Trend

On the other half of the network spectrum, vendors see virtualization going through most of 2010, with a slight entrance of cloud computing as it slowly captures more industries. “Most technologies will be based on Internet delivery and infrastructure,” details Jojo Colina, head of product management and development group, ePLDT. Colina said cloud computing will play the largest part of organizations’ network bandwidth, as utility computing infrastructure sitting on top of their virtualization strategies become commonplace. “Companies who don’t have the infrastructure to deploy applications can look to providers in provisioning the needed software,” he adds.

With an increasing demand for faster access, richer content and a more mobile environment, Cisco’s Misa concludes that virtualization has finally become the hot topic for CIOs. “They are increasingly being challenged to manage more and more computing assets while keeping a cap on complexity and costs,” he explains.

“Virtualization, therefore, will mean better management of IT resources, enabling companies to become more agile and respond more quickly to macro-economic and customer shifts.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
January 27, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

While the rate of new user growth peaked last July at about 7.8 million a month, that number has dropped to about 6.2 million new users a month now, according to a study from RJMetrics Inc., which develops online metric analysis software. The past six months, the study also noted, have shown a steady falloff in the number of new accounts.

“When you look at new account registrations, no one can deny that Twitter is still growing like a rocket ship. That’s good,” wrote Robert J. Moore, CEO and founder of RJMetrics. “However, upon closer inspection, the rate of new user signups has dropped meaningfully from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts. That’s bad. Furthermore, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months. That’s worse.”

Actually, the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in all of last December hit an all-time low.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

However, Moore pointed out that because of Twitter’s “rapid user growth”, even with only 17% tweeting last month, that still adds up to more Twitterers than ever before.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active Twitterers.

Today’s study echoes a report released last week. HubSpot, a Web analytics company, noted in its own report that the number of users joining Twitter started to drop off dramatically last fall. While Twitter grew rapidly over the past couple of years, HubSpot said in its latest “State of the Twittersphere” report that the company’s growth rate dropped to 3.5% in October, compared to 13% just seven months earlier.

This slowing growth rate stands in stark contrast to the micro-blogging site’s staggering growth numbers just a year ago.

ComScore, Inc., a Web analytics company, reported that the number of people using Twitter in February 2009 had jumped a dramatic 700% compared to the same month in 2008.

Twitter also saw a 131% increase in U.S. visitors between February and March of last year, according to another report from comScore. Twitter had 9.3 million visitors in March of 2009 - a whopping five million more than it had the month before.

According to today’s RJMetrics report, people who have joined Twitter aren’t creating much of a presence there. The average Twitter user has 27 followers, which is down from 42 followers in August, according to the new study. About 25% of users - up from 20% last August - have no followers at all. Upwards of 40% of users only have between one and five followers.

“A third of Twitter’s user base has joined up in the past four months, and we know that users acquire more followers the longer they are on the system,” wrote Moore in the report. However, he added that it’s “impossible” to tell at this point if so many users have few followers because they’re new to the site or if they’re simply not engaged.

And a lack of engagement is showing up.

The study noted that about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, up five percentage points from just five months ago.

Moore pointed out in the report that if new Twitter users stick with the micro-blogging service through just the first week they have a much higher rate of engagement with the site over time.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
January 8, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Will 2010 be the year Facebook and Twitter take over the business world? The social networks are growing in popularity by the day, both for personal and business use, yet many IT and business executives remain wary of the risks posed by the online services and skeptical about potential benefits.

A number of Web-savvy CIOs are using Twitter to spread their views, engage with colleagues and discuss technology, yet a survey shows that more than half of CIOs in the United States do not allow employees to log onto social networking sites “for any reason” while they’re at work. Another survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that nearly three-quarters of the top brands had no official presence on Twitter, despite the service’s potential for reaching customers. (See related story, 12 CIOs who Tweet.)

Business users are logging onto public social networking sites far more often than social networks sponsored by their employers, but attempts to block such activity simply will not work, says IDC analyst Caroline Dangson, who researches enterprise collaboration and social technologies.

As workforces become more distributed, and even office workers spend time working at home, people will use personal devices for business use and it will be difficult for IT to make blanket proclamations banning tools as widely used as Facebook and Twitter.

“This concept of trying to control or block [social media usage], it is not going to work,” Dangson says. “There’s going to be a divide, with some companies that shun public social networks and are fearful of using them, and some who embrace it and take the risk.”

An IDC survey of 4,710 U.S. workers in October found that 34% use consumer social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, and 9% use microblogging sites like Twitter for business purposes.

Yet many of their employers are trying to stop them from doing so.

A Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies with at least 100 employees found that 54% completely prohibit use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work. Nineteen percent allow social networking sites for business purposes only, while another 16% allow “limited personal use.” Just 10% permit use of social networking sites “for any type of personal use.”

Some brands have begun using Facebook and Twitter to reach consumers, both to promote themselves and communicate about company failures. Rackspace, for example, has used Twitter extensively to communicate with users after several power outages knocked customer services offline.

But large companies are also avoiding social networking sites in droves. New Media Age, a United Kingdom publication, analyzed the top 500 U.K. brands and found that 74% have no presence at all on Twitter, and just 10% use the site daily.

Dangson believes Facebook is a good setting for businesses to reach consumers, but that there is a greater business opportunity in Twitter, particularly in business-to-business markets, because “everything is public and open.”

Twitter “is a fantastic direct marketing tool,” she says. “People have opted in to follow you and follow your messages.”

Others tout the potential of LinkedIn, another major social network that is business-oriented, and often used to build business relationships and find new jobs.

Users of Facebook and Twitter likely care only about the sites’ usefulness, but many financial analysts have wondered how these social networks can create a compelling business model. Out of all of them, LinkedIn may have the greatest financial future, and potential to be acquired by a larger company, says Robert Armstrong, a financial analyst and senior columnist at Dow Jones Investment Banker.

Major Web properties like Google and eBay have been successful because their business model is based upon transactions, he notes. Facebook and Twitter seem to lack that advantage, but LinkedIn is centered around a pretty major type of transaction – the hiring of a new employee.

Even if you’re not seeking a new job, LinkedIn may be the best place for IT folks looking to exchange information with colleagues. An IDC survey of 204 IT decision-makers found that LinkedIn is the best social network for finding information to support IT purchases. Twitter was ranked second, followed by Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

Clearly, use of social networks will continue to increase in 2010. Company executives need to accept this reality – they don’t have to take a hands-off, anything-goes approach, but they do need policies governing employee use and a strategy for corporate use, analysts say.

In the next year, CIOs will get more involved, and “we’ll see companies writing policies and guidelines,” partly to protect workers, Dangson says. Businesses will also increase use of Facebook and Twitter for CRM, she predicts, saying CRM is “the most compelling business case for public social media sites where customers frequently voice their opinions on matters of everyday life, including the brands in which they interact.”

Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who studies social marketing, says companies like Best Buy and Comcast are have done a good job interacting with customers on social sites. This is necessary in part because consumers’ attention has been distracted from traditional forms of advertising.

“They’re embracing it because they have to,” Ray says. “Brands that do get it, understand that they can engage with and have a two-way dialogue with consumers.”

Companies need a strategy that takes into account who their audience is and how they prefer to be reached, Ray says. Social media efforts can’t be half-baked. Starting a company Facebook page, putting a lot of effort into it up-front and then never updating it again is not effective marketing.

Businesses should also have a plan for how to use social media in times of crisis, because Facebook and Twitter are often the most direct ways of reaching customers. The moment a public relations crisis happens is not the time you want to be asking the question “how will we respond?” Ray says.

Companies looking to improve brand image via social marketing also need to be wary of the legitimate privacy concerns their customers may have. Marketers need to be transparent about what data they collect and how they are using it, Ray says.

“As individuals become more concerned about information they’re giving up and how they’re using it, that’s going to have a big impact on companies,” he says. “There’s certainly some concern in the marketplace and government entities about use of marketing data. … Marketers just want to be fully transparent, which they haven’t always been.”

Privacy and security concerns also have businesses wondering how they can use social networking to improve collaboration among internal employees, without exposing themselves to risk. Companies are wary of employees releasing sensitive information like layoffs and acquisitions.

“The risk that comes with social media is how viral it is,” Dangson says. “It’s the risk of scale that can work both ways.”

That’s why many businesses will opt to create their own internal social networks, which can be controlled and open only to employees, and perhaps to business partners.

In 2010, you’re likely to hear the phrase “Facebook for the enterprise.” Salesforce.com recently announced “Chatter,” a social-networking application that is designed for internal business use but can also incorporate content from public social networking sites by taking advantage of the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Therefore, employees can receive in the same feed a mix of private content from their bosses and fellow employees, and public content from Facebook and Twitter that is related to their jobs.

Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy for Salesforce, says he doesn’t know anyone without a Facebook account. Eventually, he thinks employees will develop extensive corporate profiles as well, and relationships between the public and corporate profiles will develop.

“The question we are asking everyone is ‘why is it you know more about strangers on Facebook than you do about your colleagues and employees?’” Francis says. “You know who has gone to the movies, but you don’t necessarily know about when one of your key sales reps has just visited a major account.”

Even though many CIOs seem wary of social networking in the workplace, Francis is confident that IT executives will ultimately embrace the trend.

“I think that every CIO is looking at what’s been going on with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” Francis says. “Companies are wondering, ‘how can I capture that energy, that relevance, that better way of managing all the information that’s important to me, how can I capture that for my company?’”

Just as in Facebook, Chatter allows people and applications to send users news in real time, but the security model will allow IT to determine what types of information employees can see. Salesforce believes this granular privacy control will help assuage concerns businesses have about the security of public social networking sites.

There are also private alternatives to Twitter, such as a service called Yammer, which lets companies create streams available only to their own employees. New privacy controls for Facebook, which have been criticized by many users for making too much information public, may ultimately make it easier for people to present different information to business colleagues and personal contacts.

“What companies are really asking for is a better way to collaborate,” Francis says.

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By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 18, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Ten privacy and consumer groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S.Federal Trade Commission, saying that Facebook’s newly revamped privacy settings are deceptive and unfair.

Facebook unveiled the new privacy settings last week, saying that they were giving users more granular control over their settings, but critics immediately jumped on the fact that Facebook’s new default settings push information that may previously have been semi-private onto the Internet and they now give users no way to block their friends’ Facebook applications from accessing personal data.

“Facebook is engaging in unfair and deceptive acts and practices,” that are “likely to cause substantial injury to consumers,” says the complaint, which was posted to EPIC’s Web site Thursday.

In an e-mailed response to the complaint, a Facebook spokesman said the company was “disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.” Facebook discussed these changes with regulators, including the FTC prior to going live with them.

Since the changes went live on Dec. 9, Facebook has made some adjustments. The company now gives users a way to prevent their list of friends from being publicly available.

Among those who signed the complaint are the American Library Association, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

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By Sumner Lemon
IDG News Service (Singapore Bureau)
December 11, 2009

SINGAPORE - Social networking site Friendster accepted a buyout offer from Malaysia’s MOL Global, which hopes to generate revenue from the site using micropayments.

One of the first social networking sites, Friendster was among the most popular Internet sites before it was eclipsed by new entrants, including Facebook and MySpace. While Friendster eventually lost traction among users in most major markets, the company remained popular in Southeast Asia.

Friendster says 90 percent of its traffic comes from Asia. In August, the site had 20 million active users from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

MOL and Friendster, which is privately held, did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition deal.

The buyout extends a partnership between the two companies, announced in October. Under the terms of that deal, MOL will provide a payment platform for Friendster’s e-commerce services, Friendster Wallet and Friendster Gift Shop, where users can buy virtual gifts for friends.

Friendster Wallet allows users to make purchases at the online Gift Shop using virtual currency. Users buy the virtual currency, called Friendster Coins, using top-up cards sold at physical shops, such as convenience stores.

“The new combined entity will now build upon that initial set of products to deliver a content distribution network and e-commerce platform,” the companies said in a statement.

In addition, MOL plans to use the other business interests of its main shareholder to attract more users to Friendster. Those businesses include franchises in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia for Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Borders, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s, and Papa John’s Pizza, the statement said.

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By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - What do phishing, instant messaging malware, DDoS attacks and 419 scams have in common? According to Cisco Systems, they’re all has-been cybercrimes that were supplanted by slicker, more menacing forms of cybercrime over the past year.

In its 2009 Annual Security Report, due to be released Tuesday, Cisco says that the smart cyber-criminals are moving on.

“Social media and the data-theft Trojans are the things that are really in their ascent,” said Patrick Peterson, a Cisco researcher. “You can see them replacing a lot of the old-school things.”

Peterson is talking about attacks such as the Koobface worm, which spreads via Facebook and Twitter. Koobface asks victims to look at a fake YouTube video, which ultimately leads to a malicious download. Cisco estimates that Koobface has now infected more than 3 million computers, and security vendors such as Symantec expect social network attacks to be a major problem in 2010.

Another sneaky attack: the Zeus password-stealing Trojan. According to Cisco, Zeus variants infected almost 4 million computers in 2009. Eastern European gangs use Zeus to hack into bank accounts. They then use their networks of money mules to wire stolen funds out of the U.S. They have been linked to about $100 million in bank losses, some of which have been recovered, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said last month.

With that kind of success, older types of attacks such as instant messaging worms and phishing are now on the decline, Peterson said.

Traditional phishing is becoming harder as consumers become wary of suspicious banking sites and the banks themselves are now adept at getting these sites taken off the Internet.

Those factors make password stealing Trojans like Zeus even more popular, Peterson said. “They’re focusing on other ways to basically accomplish the same thing.”

One scourge that’s not slowing down, however, is spam. Cisco expects spam volume to rise between 30 and 40 percent next year, even though countries such as the U.S. have knocked some spammers offline. In fact, U.S. spam dropped 20 percent in 2009, and the U.S. lost its traditional position as the world’s number-one source of spam. More spam now comes from Brazil, Cisco says.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
December 2, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five years, and that’s just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning.

Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

The 650% enterprise data growth over the next five years poses a major challenge, in part because 80% of the new data will be unstructured, Cappuccio said. IT executives have to make sure data can be audited and meet regulatory and compliance objectives, while attempting to ensure that growing storage needs don’t break the bank. Technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and automated storage tiering can help reduce costs.

“If you’re not doing thin provisioning in storage today, you need to start,” Cappuccio said. “It’s an easy, logical way to reduce storage consumption.”

Deduplication is another technology IT officials have to examine. Many IT shops are seeing storage reductions of 50% to 60% with dedupe, which eliminates duplicate copies of stored objects and files, he said. Another money-saving technology is automated tiering, which makes sure data is stored on appropriately priced boxes. As much as 80% of data on high-speed drives is almost never used and should be moved to less expensive storage tiers, he said.

Cappuccio listed 10 key issues for IT managers to examine: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing.

Social networks are coming into the enterprise whether CIOs want them to or not, Cappuccio said. Twitter use grew an amazing 1,382% in 2008 and the majority of new users were between the ages of 39 and 51, he said.

“It is a growing phenomenon which we can’t shut down,” he said. Employees and customers are using wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter and “it’s affecting you now whether you know it or not.” Businesses need to examine Web-based social software platforms because they are transforming interactions with both customers and employees, he said.

IT managers are also being forced to look more at energy use, as many organizations are moving the energy bill from the facilities department to the IT department. “What’s happening now is CFOs are asking embarrassing questions [about power use],” Cappuccio said.

The energy cost of two racks of servers, at full density, can exceed $105,000 a year, he said. And servers are only growing denser, with new blades that incorporate servers, storage, switches, memory and I/O capabilities. At today’s prices, the money spent on supplying energy to an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three years, he said.

IT managers are accustomed to being asked to “do more with less,” but that need is taking on new levels of meaning as IT is forced to curtail energy use, Cappuccio said. The energy bill has not traditionally been a part of the IT budget but CIOs can expect it to be incorporated into their spending plans soon, he said.

Energy costs are the main reason businesses are pursuing server virtualization. Despite what hypervisor vendors might have you believe, virtualization typically doesn’t reduce complexity or management costs but the energy savings from packing multiple virtual machines onto a single box are very real, Cappuccio said.

Gartner analysts noted that there is declining level of trust in the IT market on the heels of the recession, but the research firm expects global IT spending to rise a modest 2.3% in 2010. “There’s no denying that it’s been a tough year,” Gartner analyst Joe Baylock said. Enterprises are extending the life of old equipment to save money, but this is also subjecting users to higher failure rates caused by aging hardware.

Future spending growth might be driven by cloud computing, but Gartner analysts are predicting that most cloud spending will initially focus on building private cloud networks rather than outsourcing services to external cloud providers.

“We think private cloud services are going to be 70% to 80% of the investments over the next few years,” Cappuccio said.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
November 27, 2009

The undeniable popularity of social networking is making a huge impact on the call center, transforming the way businesses deal with their customers, industry experts and analysts said during a recent contact center summit held Wednesday.

The sheer number of social networking users around the globe, according to analysts, is slowly getting to a magnitude that companies cannot simply ignore.

“Social networking is not just centered in the United States,” said Shivanu Shukla, industry manager, ICT practice for Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan.  “Indonesia ranks 7^th among the top Facebook users globally, with the Philippines coming at 17^th with 2.7 million users and still growing.”

Shukla, speaking at the Customer Contact Philippines Summit 2009 organized by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, said social media has therefore progressed from being a mere fad into a tool which helps firms listen to customer experiences and make a significant business impact.

“Social media helps you be proactive with customer care,” Shukla notes.  “Having that ability is critical.  People are spending more than 25 minutes on Facebook pages-and that’s a lot of time.  If you put a dollar value to that, it’s a significant dollar loss; but you can make that into an opportunity, if you can reach out to them.”

Every day, Shukla points out, customers are talking about products and services over the Internet.  “We need to listen to that conversation.  When people are talking about your products and services to their friends, how can we take that info, and do something about it for the good of the company?” he said.

A dynamic world
This change in the rules of the game has given rise to a dynamic contact center, which enables customers to have more ways of communicating with the enterprise.

“The coming of the millennials-the younger generation born or have been raised at the turn of the millennium-will signal a change in the way customers deal with various companies, changing the face of customer care as firms know it,” posed Kevin Panozza, CEO, Engagement Matters, and erstwhile chief of Australia’s SalesForce.

These changes, according to Panozza, are very difficult for most companies to adopt.  The recession, however, provides the best opportunity for firms to transform their businesses.  “The new marketplace is very different,” he said.  “Yesterday, companies competed with each other.  Today, they are competing just for the opportunity to speak and to be heard.”

Panozza said the enterprise space is lagging in terms of utilizing new technologies to further their businesses.  “The enterprise is not keeping up with the world.  There are many things the enterprise won’t allow customers to do, because they would like to sit in a cube.  Right now, there are a lot of channels available to people which the companies can utilize,” he suggested.

The Internet for the customers, Panozza illustrated, is like going to a shop with no one to assist them in making their choices.  “You’re on your own, there’s no one to help you,” he admitted.  This setup, he said, allows companies to be proactive in their approach to business dealing.

Integrated contact center
But the addition of social media to the plethora of channels available for contact centers poses a challenge to its managers.  “Social media means knowledge and systems are now distributed,” explained Rob Delnoj, business communication management head, SAP.  “It becomes important that when a customer calls, agents already have access to vast information and expertise needed to serve the customer.”

Most CRM (customer relationship management) issues can be traced to processes involving human communication, Delnoj clarified.  “These challenges can be seen in a non-optimal call center.  If you have one system in place, it becomes easier to manage,” he added.

It becomes increasingly important, therefore, to blend communications with the business process, because brick and mortar call centers are becoming a thing of the past, Delnoj concluded.

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By MIS Asia staff
MIS Asia
November 20, 2009

SINGAPORE - Mobile devices are the preferred tools by social network site (SNS) users over PCs in at least four Asian countries, according to a recent IDC survey report.

The report titled Examining Usage, Perceptions, and Monetization: The Coming of Age for Social Network Sites in Asia/Pacific said more than 50 per cent of respondents in China, India, South Korea and Thailand access social networks such as Facebook weekly via mobile phones.

In China and Thailand, 62 per cent and 65 per cent of the respective respondents use mobile phones to get news alerts and notifications, receive and reply to messages, upload photos, or update personal status and profiles on popular SNS.

On the other hand, 19 per cent and 25 per cent of the respondents in Australia and Singapore, respectively, registered the lowest percentage of users who access mobile versions of SNS on a weekly basis.

“The prevalence of owning a cellular phone over a PC in China, India and Thailand has directly boosted the popularity of mobile SNS access,” said Debbie Swee, market analyst, IDC Asia/Pacific Emerging Technologies Research.

The number of mobile users in South Korea is also large but the growth has been attributed to another factor.

“The [South Korean] market is technologically advanced and has already seen mass adoption of mobile Internet as compared with all other countries surveyed in the study,” Swee explained.

Despite a similar technological status of the Australian and Singaporean markets, “the overwhelming importance of the PC over mobile has created strong inertia against adopting regular mobile access of SNSes,” the IDC analyst added.

Lower telco rates

According to the IDC report, there are indications that mobile operators’ pricing strategies are preventing non-users from going to mobile social networking.

“For mobile operators in China, India and Thailand, IDC believes a low flat-rate Internet access fee would complement and increase mobile SNS adoption,” Swee said.

Most users who have never accessed SNS through mobile phones said they are prevented from doing so because of the costly data tariffs in the form of mobile Internet, SMS or MMS access.

However, they also expressed intention of trying out mobile versions of SNS if telcos offer more affordable data rates. To a lesser extent, the availability of user-friendly mobile applications is also perceived as a notable area of improvement.

For other countries, increasing the number of users of mobile SNS might just be a matter of marketing approach.

“In Australia, South Korea and Singapore where data tariffs are already relatively low, operators need to correct users’ misconceptions of pricey data plans through advertising and other marketing efforts,” Swee said.

She stressed that failing to do so could mean that mobile Internet applications and services, not just mobile SNSs, will take longer to take off.

Undertaken by the IDC’s Asia/Pacific End-User Research and Statistics Group (ERS), the survey involved 1,400 social network site users, aged between 15-35 years old, from December 2008 to January 2009. It is part of a series of studies that evaluate the impact of Web 2.0 on Internet users in Australia, India, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
November 11, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - An anonymous group calling itself “Control Your Info” has taken over hundreds of Facebook groups to highlight what it claims is a major security weakness on the social networking site.

Facebook downplayed the incident and said no hacking or confidential information was involved.

As of this morning, more than 200 Facebook groups were hijacked and renamed “Control Your Info” . Pasted on each group’s Wall was a message announcing that it had been “hijacked” and reminding members to be careful about controlling personal information on social networking sites.

“This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image,” the message said.

“For example we could rename your group and call it something very inappropriate and nasty, like “I support pedophile’s rights,” the message said while going on to assure group members that the group wouldn’t do that. The message also promised to restore each hijacked group’s name by the “end of next week” and promised not to “mess anything up.”

A separate Web site set up by Control Your Info claimed that the group’s action did not constitute hacking, but was a demonstration of how a legitimately available feature on Facebook can be used to easily hijack Facebook groups.

According to Control Your Info, when the administrator of a Facebook group leaves, anyone can register as a new administrator for that group. To take control of a Facebook group, a user only has to do a quick search on Google to identify public groups with no administrators.

Once someone signs up as a group administrator, that person then can do “anything” with the group, including changing its name, sending e-mails to members and editing information on it.

“This is just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media. If you chose to express yourself on the internet, make sure the expressions are your own,” the group urged.

In an e-mailed statement, a Facebook spokesman downplayed the incident and said there had been no hacking and no confidential information was at risk.

“The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group,” the spokesman said.

The spokesman further stated that Facebook group administrators have no access to confidential information. Administrators can edit a group name, moderate discussions or send a message to members only in the case of small groups, the spokesman said. “The names of large groups cannot be changed, nor can anyone message all members,” he said. In cases where Facebook finds that a group name has been changed inappropriately, it will disable those groups, which is what it plans on doing in this case, he said.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
October 28, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The experimental Google Social Search service , which went live today, adds opinions from friends and others to information a search engine provides on products and services like a new restaurant or smartphone.

The new service, created in Google Labs , adds a long-missing piece to the search pie, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products told Computerworld last week following its unveiling at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“We came up with a way to have social networks influence your search results,” Mayer said. “If you’re signed into Social Search, you get content from your friends.

“There’s a huge amount of data on social networks,” she added. “Think about social networking and it’s really about people as sensors. Is the power out over there? How is the snow there? Are the speakers good at this conference? If I can search this massive amount of data, a user can find out what it’s like over there right now. That’s very exciting.”

Google announced Social Search last week at the same time it disclosed that it had inked a real-time search deal with Twitter . Mayer noted that the two announcements are related in that users will eventually see Twitter posts , or tweets, in Google search results.

For today, however, all search focus is on the addition of Google Social Search to Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to let searches return traditional results along with updates and tweets that their friends and other people they follow on various social networks have posted. For instance, a user might want to buy a specific car. They can search for information and reviews of the car on a regular search engine and then use Social Search to find pertinent posts from their friends and colleagues.

Dan Olds, principal analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said the experimental new service has the potential to make social networking more useful.

“With it, you can mine your own circle of contacts for information, whether it’s for recommendations on a handyman or a pointer to a company that’s hiring,” said Olds. “It will also encourage people to expand their networks, since more friends and a wider range of friends mean more useful information.”

Olds noted that Google Social search is a good example of networks becoming more valuable as they get larger.

“Let’s say that I’m looking for a new LCD TV,” he added. “I’m researching models on the Web and happen to see some results pop up in my Social Search. Out of all of my contacts, it’s pretty likely that a friend or acquaintance has bought a TV in the last year or so, and they’re chock full of useful advice. The bigger my network is, the more potentially useful information it contains.”

How will Google know who your friends are?

Mayer explained that users will be able to fill out a Google Profile , which would be used to link to friends on Facebook , LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networks. If they use Gmail, Google will have access to their contacts.

“You opt in to using Social Search and then we look at who your friends are and what content they might be publishing,” she said, adding that Google is aware of people’s privacy concerns. “We tell you which data source we used in order to find that friend. We’re doing our best to be transparent about how we found the relationships. And people have the choice of whether they want the feature or not.”

Google did not disclose how many people have so far signed up to try out Social Search.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
October 22, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members’ public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business, made the announcement on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes “tweets.” Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of “tweets” but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query, Mehdi said.

“This is a big deal we’ve been working on for a long time,” Mehdi said.

To rank “tweets” by relevance, a feature Microsoft calls “Best Match,” Bing will take into consideration a number of factors, such as who are the authors of the messages based on a “social relevance” score Bing will assign to them, Mehdi said.

Bing will also evaluate the message’s quality, noticing, for example, if it contains a link to an online article or Web page. It will also take into consideration how popular the message is by calculating how many times it has been “re-tweeted” by others.

In addition to providing links to Twitter messages, Bing will extract the URLs of the pages that the messages are making reference to, so that users can go directly to that source of the information.

When providing links to “tweets” that contain a shortened URL, Bing will put in parenthesis the main Web domain of the link, so that users know, before clicking, whether it’s a reputable site and thus avoid landing in a malicious phishing or malware-laden site.

Bing will also display a tag cloud of the most popular Twitter topics, so that users can click on and dive deeper into them.

The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, and hours later rival Google announced its own agreement with Twitter.

“The ‘tweets’ will be integrated universal-search style, ranked alongside the other [different types of] results, and you’ll be able to click on those results and go to a page that shows only ‘tweets’ and real-time updates,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, in an interview after her appearance on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit to announce the news. Users will also be able to restrict results to Twitter posts from the get-go using the engine’s filtering controls.

Google has so far been crawling Twitter posts on its own, but the subset of content available in this manner has been very small, she said. With this Twitter partnership, Google gets access to what Twitter calls its “firehose” API (application programming interface), which was recently released, she said.

“So we can do this really comprehensive coverage and indexing of ‘tweets’ integrated into Google search,” Mayer said.

Like Microsoft, Google has identified what Mayer calls “relevance signals” in Twitter posts, such as the links they contain and the people authoring them. The latter remains constant, so a Twitter author’s level of competency in a given topic can be analyzed and evaluated, she said.

However, Google is looking at social-networking content in a broader scale beyond Twitter. When asked if Google is interested in striking a deal like this with Facebook, Mayer said, “We’re interested in comprehensiveness, which is a fundamental element of search. We need to have all the answers in order to find the answers for people.”

Along those lines, she said that Google is working on a new search feature to let users view content in their Google search results that their friends have shared with them on social networks.

“We can use social networks and analyze them to improve search quality. When you’re signed in and have a Google Profile established, we’ll look at the different social networks you associate with, understand who your friends and connections are, and surface content written by them on your results pages,” Mayer said.

The Twitter search-result integration and the new social-networking results feature will be implemented “very soon,” Mayer said, declining to be more specific. Google’s announcement of the Twitter agreement states it will be ready “in the coming months.”

Still, it seems Bing is for now ahead of Google with an optimized search experience for Twitter that is already live.

Although Google remains by far the most popular search engine, Microsoft is making a big push to improve its position in this market, starting with Bing’s launch in May and the broad search deal with Yahoo, which is awaiting regulatory approval.

In addition to its core microblogging and social-networking features, Twitter has emerged as a repository of real-time testimonies on whatever is on people’s minds, such as news stories of global importance, celebrity gossip and hot-button issues. As such, being able to capture, analyze and make sense of Twitter’s stream of posts is seen as an important new area in the world of search engines.

“We’re super happy with the Twitter partnership,” said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, who was also on stage being interviewed by conference moderator Tim O’Reilly. Lu declined to disclose financial details of the deal. He also said he wasn’t sure on its duration.

Neither Mehdi nor Lu said much about the Facebook arrangement, other than to indicate that it will be similar in nature to Twitter’s but that it will be implemented at a later date.

It will be interesting to see what shape the Facebook agreement takes, considering that Facebook allows individual members to make only basic profile information available via search engine results. Facebook has indicated it may let members make their profiles open to anyone on the Web, including their status updates, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a much more open service and most of its users make public their “tweets,” messages that can’t be longer than 140 characters.

Facebook expects its deal with Bing to become active early next year, a Facebook spokeswoman said via e-mail. Before Bing can make Facebook status updates searchable, Facebook has to first roll out to all users its new Publisher Privacy Control system, which is now being tested with a small group of users, the spokeswoman said.

“As you may recall, the new Publisher Privacy Control enables users to define who can see the content they publish on a per-post basis. For example, they may want to make some posts available to everyone, while restricting others to their friends and family,” she said.

Microsoft and Facebook have an existing partnership through which Microsoft provides Web search and search ads to Facebook.

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