Kevin Muldoon

Well it looks like Google’s Street View is coming to the UK. Expect to see a small bald fat man with a camera the length of his arm at a street near you pretty soon. This will be followed by months of stories of privacy invasions, complaints and more.

Personally, I have no issue with it and I’m sure it will come in handy. Though I can appreciate the situations which have arose which have annoyed some people. A SEO webmaster recently talked about this on his blog (apologies, for the life of me I can’t find the story again so have no link).

The guy lived on a private estate which he explained meant that only residents, guests and the postman could enter. Door to door salesman, religious guys and whatnot are not welcome and it is clearly marked in several areas around the estate that it is private. Well Google didn’t care about this and they were found entering the private estate and taking pictures for street view. Of course, situations like this will arise with a service like this but it does seem that Google does take chances with certain things and will rather take the pic and remove it later than not take the pic.

There have been other situations where google have had to retake pics because of privacy issues. Like when this young lady forgot to wear jeans that fit her!!

What do you think about Google Street View?

Looks like YouTube is going to get taking to the cleaners. I don’t see how they will get out of this one. They have been showing copyrighted clips online with adsense ads at the side. They do remove copyrighted videos but it’s claimed they have been too slow and in the meantime made a lot of money with advertisements next to the videos.

It will be interesting to see how this develops

Mediaset Sues Google, YouTube, Seeking EU500 Million

I’ve read a few articles today about the launch of Amazon’s new payment system. Their payment system allows developers to use Amazons back end. I for one welcome. According to the New York Times there are 81 million customers in the USA with their credit card details in the amazon system so it would be beneficial for some websites to add this feature in that respect.

Many are not so keen on using this system though.

One advantage PayPal has over Amazon is that many large retailers see Amazon as a competitor. Companies like Toys “R” Us and Borders, the book chain, have retreated from selling products on Amazon.com, complaining that the company was undermining their sales on the site and using their sales data to compete more effectively with them.

“Many larger retailers express concern about partnering with Amazon because Amazon is one of their largest competitors and they don’t want Amazon to know their information,” said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, a company that helps retailers sell online. “On the other hand, eBay and PayPal aren’t going to use sales data to go source product themselves because they are not a retailer.”

When you think about it, this is a very smart move by Amazon. With over 80 million people with their details online with them in the USA alone, they are in a great position to get a head start into the payments industry. I can see why some retailers are a little reluctant though.

Google reported the other day that their servers have now indexed over 1,000,000,000,000 URL’s. Compare this with 26 million pages when they launched in 1998 and one billion in 2000. It’s a pretty good estimate on how much the web has grown in the last 10 years.

I see no reason why this growth will slow down. Internet usage is still increasing in developing countries and every day millions of more pages are generated. It’s amazing when you think the internet was originally used by academics to communicate with each other.

I switched on my pc this morning to see that I had a message from Sun to update my Java. They update quite frequently so I didn’t think anything of it. When I was skipping through the steps of the installation I noticed that they had an option to install Yahoo’s toolbar on my pc and it was already clicked. I tried to unclick it but I had stupidly already clicked the next button and the hourglass was there telling me I was too late.

This is a technique which software companies have used for years however I have noticed recently that many huge mainstream multinational companies are trying to get an extra buck by bundling crap with their scripts. I admit that in this instance I should have went through the installation procedure more carefully however it doesn’t change the fact that they are bundling it with Java in the first place and it doesn’t excuse them checking the box by default.

Of course, this is a very common method on the internet. Shopping sites nearly always sign you up to newsletters unless you specify otherwise and scripts from smaller companies sometimes don’t even tell you the crap they are installing on your computer.

The modern internet has been around for about 15 years however it remains a place which is rarely regulated and questionable methods of making money are still being used by billion dollar companies.