Twitter encountered considerable backlash and criticism after making an announcement that it would be forming a new policy for country-by-country censorship largely aimed at blocking Tweets perceived to be in violation of local laws and governmental viewpoints. But now, it has emerged that Twitter was not the first online entity to devise a far-reaching framework for ‘conditional censorship’. Read the rest of this entry »

Would you really be worried if your mobile number or other sensitive private data on the Web was becoming accessible to any site you had just visited? And, imagine if someone from us had happened to put a sort of embarrassing photo or video online, a few months ago, which had been forgotten by now, suddenly resurfaces! Would you not want to remove all traces of it forever? Read the rest of this entry »

The world’s most popular social networking site, with over 800m active users, has filed for an IPO amidst much frenzy and speculation. It’s going to be among the biggest ever initial public offerings by a technology firm in the world. Investment experts point out that the sentiments are quite similar to those at the time of the Google IPO. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook will soon start the ambitious journey of transforming itself into a publicly-listed entity. According to market estimates, the world’s most popular social networking platform is roughly being valued between $75 and $100 billion. It has already filed the papers for the IPO with the US financial watchdog. The subsequent flotation exercise slated to take place some time later this year would help it raise close to $10bn. Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting development at the beginning of the year bring out how emotional connect has become as important as interweaving ads, marketing strategy and content in the search and social realm. The idea seems not only to maximize revenue generating opportunities but also to make the products appear as an integral part of everyday life for people. With this in mind, Google has gradually made a shift in strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Clickjacking’ has emerged as a point of worry for Facebook. The world’s popular networking site, dealing with the hassles of spam, privacy and censorship issues, has allegedly suffered at the hands of a company based in Delaware that it claimed to have  reaped more than $1 milion a month by employing bogus pages hosted on the social network to coax users away to other sites. Read the rest of this entry »

The FBI, according to media reports, intends to step up the social networks’ monitoring, and sought more assistance to build an app to constantly watch the sites like Facebook and Twitter. The bureau has already published RFI (a request for information) looking for companies to frame an elaborate social site monitoring system. The proposed measure to increase the monitoring of communication on social networks has upset privacy advocates. Read the rest of this entry »

As already reported, Twitter has announced its step towards making ‘sensitive’ content selectively available to users across the world on basis of geography, and the local government’s concerns while entering countries that might harbor ‘different ideas’ about the concept of freedom of expression. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a couple of days after Google announced a major change to its current privacy policy, the company is facing severe criticism. From now on, it will be sharing a greater quantum of user data across its own services something that has greatly antagonized privacy advocates and a few official data-protection agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s new weapon in its tussle with Facebook for dominance of the Web has drawn circumspect reactions. It’s step to include more of users’ personal information in their search results has wider connotations, experts point out. There are valid reasons to believe so. We give you a quick grasp its background and ramifications: Read the rest of this entry »