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Google has reported double digit gains in first quarter profit and sales, indicating that it is an early beneficiary of the rebound in online advertising.

The company posted net profits of £1.31 billion, or £4.04 a share, an improvement of 38 per cent on the same period last year. The performance exceeded analysts’ expectations.

The company, which controls around two thirds of the US search engine market, said that revenue in the first quarter totalled £4.51 billion, up 23 per cent from last year.

Net revenue, which excludes sums paid to partners, stood at $5.06 billion, up 2.2 per cent from the seasonally strong fourth quarter and above analysts’ average estimates of $4.95 billion.

Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said that an improving economy and a return of large advertisers helped the company to a “very positive” start to the year.

Mr Pichette said the company expected to hire aggressively through the year. In the last quarter it had increased its workforce by nearly 800 employees, the biggest growth since the first quarter of 2008.

Despite the results Google shares slid 3.1 per cent to $576.92 in after-hours trading last night, reversing a 1.1 per cent gain notched up earlier in the day and reflecting continuing uncertainty over the company’s acquisition of the mobile-advertising company AdMob, as well as concerns over its censorship dispute with China and its ability to add revenue from new formats or platforms.

The company’s shares have fallen by nearly 5 per cent this year, against a 10 per cent rise in the Nasdaq index.

Mr Pichette said last night that the company was still working on the AdMob deal, despite a review of the acquisition by the Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook has opted against adding a safety button on each user’s profile page, despite calls from a leading UK child protection agency, as it doesn’t believe it is an effective way to encourage children to report abuse.

Facebook refuses to add safety buttons claiming that they ‘confuse’ and ‘intimidate’ users.

Dr Search finds Facebook’s argument ridiculous. Every research we have conducted or read repeatedly shows that when buttons are compared to text links, the click through rates for buttons are far higher than text links in producing click throughs.

Facebook has resisted previous Government calls from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, to add the CEOP panic button to its home page.

The social media company, which has had mounting pressure placed upon it from the UK Government and British parents, to amend its child safety strategy, sent its chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, to meet with Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), to discuss Facebook’s security measures at a meeting in Washington DC.

After a lengthy four hour meeting Facebook executives refused to add a CEOP safety button to each user’s profile page, but did announce a raft of new safety measures which it believes will be more effective in protecting children’s safety online.

Instead of the button, UK users under the age of 19 will now be able to click on the ‘Report abuse’ link on each page and have the option to report the abuse directly to CEOP as well as to Facebook employees.

Jim Gamble has openly criticised Facebook, over the last six months, for not following the example of similar sites such as Bebo and failing to introduce a panic button on each user’s profile page – which is linked to CEOP’s site.

The button, a large graphic, provides quick access to 10 sources of help depending on the type of bullying. For instance, if a child has been bullied online but does not want to report it to the police, they will be directed to ChildLine. Users can also find details of their local police station or contact a CEOP officer for more advice.

CEOP says the button, which is also live on Microsoft’s MSN chat and several school websites, receives 10,000 clicks a month and has resulted in over 5,000 criminal investigations.

Gamble, revealed last week that British police officers have seen the number of complaints of alleged grooming and bullying on Facebook almost quadruple this year.

Moreover he disclosed that Facebook’s own safety ‘checkers’, who insist they have a secure internal system, had failed to report a single alleged paedophile to police themselves.

A total of 252 Facebook complaints were made to police in the past three months – at almost quadruple the rate of complaints last year, when 292 were received in 12 months. Gamble said that none of these complaints came directly from Facebook.

Facebook has resisted Government calls from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, to add the panic button to each user’s profile page; instead opting until now to put a link to the CEOP homepage in the site’s Safety Centre.

The site has faced increasing pressure from parents such as the mother of Ashleigh Hall, who was murdered by Peter Chapman – a serial rapist who she met through Facebook. She attacked the company for failing to protect children from predatory adults who create false identities online.

Some argue that CEOP’s button doesn’t go far enough when keeping children safe online. Robert Marcus, director of Chat Moderators, a company which monitors branded social media activity, believes that all social networks need to be more proactive.

Twitter has said it will rollout it’s Twitter101 service and allow advertising on its site for the first time.

The social networking site said advertisers would be able to buy “Promoted Tweets” that will appear on Twitter’s search results pages.

It has been reluctant to allow advertising in the past.

However, co-founder Biz Stone said they would not be traditional adverts. They must be Tweets that “resonate with users” and be part of conversations.

Twitter is growing fast. Currently, the world’s Twitter users tweet about 50 million times a day 600 times a second.

Twitter’s management hopes to apply the Google advertising model to its own micro-blogging service.

Companies using the service, however, will be looking closely at the return on investment that the service will generate. Should they pay per tweet read, per click-through, or per sale-after-click?

Commercial tweets to build brands and create buzz are probably the most promising application of Twitter ads. For ad copy writers, it will present a new challenge: how to hook customers with 140 characters or less.

Twitter has already signed up a raft of big name organisations such as Sony Pictures, coffee chain Starbucks and US retailer Best Buy.

It describes the Promoted Tweets as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users”.

Initially, Promoted Tweets would only appear in Twitter search results, the company said, and only one Tweet would show up on each search results page.

It is the first toe in the advertising water for the social networking site, which has yet to make a profit and has only just begun to do deals to raise revenue from the high profile service.

It is an approach that the company described as a “stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to monetisation”.

It follows Twitter’s announcement over the weekend that it will buy Atebits, the developer behind iPhone application “Tweetie”, which is one of the main user access points to Twitter.

The acquisition means that Twitter will for the first time be able to control directly the service they deliver to iPhone users, instead of relying on third party application developers to do this for them.

However, analysts say it also means that Twitter is turning the remaining applications developers that it has partnered in the past into direct competitors.

This raises the possibility that if Promoted Tweets prove unpopular with users, rival application developers may offer products that filter them out.

The advertising and Tweetie moves are not the first revenue-raising initiatives by Twitter – in October the company announced tie-ups with Google and Microsoft’s Bing under which the two search engines pay Twitter to include Tweets in their search results.

Twitter’s latest initiative is the first phase of its advertising plans. In future, Promoted Tweets will appear in users’ stream of posts, not just on Twitter search results pages.

Keen not to alienate his members, Biz Stone said that if users did not interact with Promoted Tweets by replying to them, “favoriting” them or retweeting them, they would “disappear”.

Facebook has been accused by police of “arrogantly” ignoring children’s safety after it emerged that the number of complaints of alleged grooming and bullying on the site have almost quadrupled this year.

A total of 252 Facebook complaints were made to police in the past three months.

Jim Gamble, the senior policeman responsible for child protection online, said that officers have seen a significant increase in complaints from parents and children reporting alleged paedophiles, bullies and hackers who are exploiting the site.

But he disclosed that Facebook’s own checkers, who insist they have a secure internal system, had failed to report a single alleged paedophile to police themselves.

Mr Gamble said he had “real concerns” about the internet giant’s work to protect children and condemned their refusal to embed a “panic” button to each user’s profile page, which he claimed would deter paedophiles and protect children.

Speaking in London last week, Mr Gamble, who leads the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), said the button was used on other sites and backed by campaigners, expert online groups and charities such as Childline.

He said: “Is Facebook so arrogant that it does not mind what the collective child protection community think?

“They are experts commercially, but I do not see them as being experts in child protection. What Facebook do not understand is prevention, and acting as a deterrent.”

Mr Gamble flew to Washington DC yesterday where he presented a “dossier” of evidence to Facebook bosses.

“We are telling them to do the right thing for child protection,” he said.

Speaking about social networking website in general, Mr Gamble added: “They need to make some decisions. Do they want to be the website of choice for bullies, for dangerous individuals, for rapists and murderers?”

A total of 252 Facebook complaints were made to police in the past three months – at almost quadruple the rate of complaints last year, when 292 were received in 12 months.

Mr Gamble said: “None of these complaints came direct from Facebook. If their system is so robust and they are receiving so many reports and concerns from young people, then where are they?”

Facebook has more than 400m users worldwide and recently overtook Google as the most visited website in the US. It continues to grow rapidly – attracting 23 million new users in January.

The issue of its safety came to a head last month following the conviction of a serial rapist for the murder of schoolgirl Ashleigh Hall.

Peter Chapman posed as a young boy on the site to lure the 17-year-old to her death in Sedgefield, County Durham.

Apple is to rival Google in the mobile advertising market with a new iAd advertising platform to be rolled out this summer.

The announcement follows Apple’s purchase in January of mobile advertising network Quattro Wireless for £196m, demonstrating that Mr Jobs is happy to put his money where his mouth is.

Yet the mobile advertising market is currently tiny, so the acquisition price paid for Quattro is small change for a company currently valued at over £145 billion.

However, analysts say that the potential for mobile advertising is huge and it could transform mobile commerce. Investment firm Piper Jaffrey is predicting a total in-application market for advertising of £450m by 2013, of which iAd could capture £250m.

Mr Jobs’s rationale is that mobile advertising can be tailored to the individual users needs and interests, in much the same way that Google has been able to use data from users of its search engine and gmail accounts to target advertising.

Apple could use the mobile phone user’s physical location as a hook for advertisers – for example Mr Jobs cited a Nike advert incorporating a nearest store locator. But information about a user’s interests can also be gleaned from the applications they choose to purchase.

Steve Jobs’s announcement comes at a time when rival Google’s own mobile advertising initiative has become hamstrung by the US anti-trust authorities.

In November, Google outbid Apple to purchase leading mobile advertising company AdMob for £500m.

“Google came in and snatched them because they didn’t want us to have them,” said the Apple head. Admob already operates on Apple’s handsets.

However, Google’s plans immediately ran into trouble as the Federal Trade Commission chose to review the deal. Months later, a decision is still pending.

The iAd initiative also seems designed to provide a fillip to the growth of new applications for Apple’s handsets.

The Apple chief executive said that 60% of the advertising revenues raised will be passed onto the application developers, creating a major new financial incentive for programmers to generate new functionality for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

“The revenue sharing opens the floodgates for a lot more free applications,” says Mr Wood. “This is an extremely astute move by Apple. I would expect both the number and the quality of applications to grow much more rapidly because of this.”

The rivalry between Apple and Google will partly be decided by the direction that mobile phone technology takes in the future.

Apple stakes its future on the continuing development of applications as the main forum for mobile software, whereas Google expects applications to be supplanted by a web browser that gives users access to the entire internet.

Google has finally recognised the flaws for it’s users’ privacy in it’s controversial social network Buzz.

The company has started asking all of its users to confirm or change their privacy settings, starting this week.

The firm was forced to make a series of changes to Buzz just days after launch, following a backlash from users worried about privacy intrusions.

Last month, US Congress members urged regulators to investigate the service and the private information it exposed.

The latest tweaks will also show every aspect of a user’s profile, from public settings to the websites users are connected to, and who they are following or being followed by.

“Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realised we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience,” said Buzz product manager Todd Jackson in a blog post.

“Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us.”

Dr Search questions this pious statement. If Google were so concerned about privacy, why has it taken them six weeks to get their act together?

Google launched Buzz at the beginning of February and integrated it with the company’s e-mail product Gmail, which is said to have over 170m account holders.

Amid concern over how much personal information was being made public, Google made changes to Buzz to make it more clear how information was being shared as well as simplifying the process for blocking or following other users.

Those early fixes did not go far enough for some critics.

Last month, nearly a dozen members of Congress signed a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate privacy concerns associated with Google’s social networking tool.

“We are writing to express our concern over claims that Google Buzz… breaches online consumer privacy and trust,” said the signatories, led by Representative John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat.

The service is also the subject of a class action lawsuit, and a leading privacy group has called for action from the FTC.

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre has alleged that Buzz is “deceptive” and breaks US consumer protection law.

Say goodbye to your transistor radio – labour’s digital switchover is killing it off.

The controversial Digital Economy Act, passed as one of the current labour government’s very last pieces of legislation in the “wash-up” process before Parliament is dissolved next week, enacts a legal framework to end FM, AM and Long Wave radio transmissions – despite huge practical objections and warnings that pressing ahead may result in a “public backlash”.

For almost 90 years through wars, royal weddings and moon landings, British radio has relied on the traditional analogue signal to bring news, music and entertainment to millions of listeners.

But now the hiss and crackle of the analogue radio set are finally set to become a thing of the past, with a new law passed yesterday paving the way for digital radio switchover in 2015.

Recent statistics show that the vast majority – 94 per cent – of radio listeners are satisfied with the service they currently receive and that less than a third of radios sold in the UK are digital.

The influential House of Lords Communication Committee, chaired by Lord Fowler, has also warned of the consequences of a digital switchover for the millions of perfectly functional analogue radio sets in Britain. Up to 100million existing sets will effectively become useless, while radios in 30million cars will also need to be converted – at a cost of upwards of £55 a time.

Switchover has also been the subject of fierce opposition from some radio campaigners, including 14 operators of local commercial radio stations who have today written to The Daily Telegraph saying that their “ability to operate in the future is directly challenged by the digital radio switchover proposals” in the Act.

These small stations – from West Berkshire to the Shetland Islands – said that they face being excluded from the new digital service and therefore starved of listeners and advertising.

The House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee this week warned of a “digital divide” in radio, with coverage patchy at best in rural and remote areas.

The organisation leading the proposed switchover, Digital Radio UK, says that the benefits of digital radio include a greater choice of services, improved sound quality and new functionality such as being able to pause, record and rewind radio broadcasts. Switchover will also lower costs for radio broadcasters, who currently have to pay to transmit their services twice – once on FM, and once on digital.

Digital Radio UK says that the new law provides a framework for digital radio coverage across the country to be improved, and for car manufacturers to start fitting digital radios as standard. “Radio deserves a digital future and this legislation is the first key to unlocking that,” said Ford Ennals, its chief executive.

The target date of 2015 for switchover to digital radio was described by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw in the House of Commons this week as “an incentive not an ultimatum”, with the precise date remaining to be set by the incoming government after the general election. The switchover date will not be set until more than 50 per cent of radio listening is via digital means, and national digital radio coverage reaches a comparable level to the current FM signal.

Controversial elements of the Digital Economy Bill will face further scrutiny as the bill is passed, Commons Leader Harriet Harperson has said.

Part of the bill, which refers to how copyright holders can block access to websites hosting pirated content, will be subject to further consultation.

Several MPs called for the whole bill to be delayed until after the election.

Despite objections, the bill was given a second reading and will be rushed through its final stages today.

The Tories have said “big questions” have been left unanswered while the Lib Dems are seeking greater scrutiny of some aspects.

Closing the debate, Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms said: “The choice we have is to act on unlawful downloading or not to act. That is the choice the House needs to make.

Ms Harman revealed to Parliament that one element, known as Clause 18, will be subject to “a super-affirmative procedure” – meaning the details of it will require further Parliamentary scrutiny.

Clause 18 was hastily rewritten by the government. It was intended to future-proof the law against new methods of accessing pirated materials.

It grants rights-holders the power to force service providers to block access to websites hosting pirated content.

The Liberal Democrats have called for a similar procedure to be applied to the issue of how public wi-fi will be affected by the bill.

Currently, if the bill passes into law, the owners of publicly-accessed wi-fi will be held responsible for content that is illegally downloaded by individuals using the hotspot.

Which would effectively shut down all public wifi access in the UK. Reducing the UK back to the dinosaurs.

The second reading of the bill was somewhat overshadowed by the earlier announcement of the general election and few MPs gathered in the Commons to hear Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw introduce it.

However, a heated debate followed with several MPs, including Labour MP Tom Watson, calling for the more controversial elements of the bill to be removed.

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt branded the bill a “digital disappointment of colossal proportions”.

For the Liberal Democrats, culture spokesman Don Foster condemned the government for allowing a “totally inappropriate” amount of time for debate on such a major piece of legislation.

The SNP’s Pete Wishart, a former member of Celtic rock group Runrig, told the Commons that internet file-sharing was not unlike a person walking into a record shop and taking whatever albums they liked – for free.

He said: “The cream of the UK’s creative industries want to ensure that we have this bill and these measures. Then we can continue to have the best creative industry and digital economy.”

But Mr Watson, a long-standing Labour opponent of the bill, urged the government to rethink rushing through the legislation.

“In the last seven days, 20,000 people have taken the time to e-mail their MPs. They are extremely upset that it won’t have proper scrutiny,” he said.

There has been mounting public opposition to the bill, particularly the plans to give Ofcom the power to cut off the internet connections of persistent pirates.

Apple’s latest product, the iPad tablet computer, has gone on sale in the USA.

The first generation model has wi-fi but not 3G connectivity, and unlike other tablet devices, it is not yet available outside the US.

Queues for the new iPad were considerably smaller than the crowds which gathered for the launch of the iPhone in 2007, according to reports.

In Palo Alto, California, tech expert and former Microsoft “technology evangelist” Robert Scoble, who spent the night outside a store with Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy, said there were only around 30 in the queue

Mother Jeanney Mullen said she was planning to buy one for herself and her 11 -year-old daughter Giovanna.

Her own mother had come along to buy a third for Ms Mullen’s boss, as store customers were limited to two devices each.

Journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has attacked the iPad for being too locked-down.

“Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump starting the realisation that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals,” he wrote on website Boing Boing.

While Apple has pitched the iPad as a “third” device between a phone and a PC, the tablet does not synchronise easily with the two according to Ian Fogg, an expert analyst at Forrester.

“Apple has left too much in the hands of consumers to transfer and manage manually,” he wrote in a blog post. “Tethered sync is a 20th Century product feature.”

Apple have also run into problems with the name as ipad has been trade marked by Fujitsu several decades ago.

Google’s controversial Buzz social web offering seems to have hit the buffers already as searches ignore it.

Although it was only released last month, it seems that the hype surrounding Google Buzz is all but dead.

Online ad network, Chitika reported that the web searches on the internet in general and on its network of 80,000 sites has definitely died for Google Buzz.

The Chitika blog post explains:

February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries. The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147. From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.

The graph below shows Google Buzz’s fall in popularity.

And it’s not just Chitika that is seeing this trend. Google’s own research tool, Insights for Search tells a similar story.

According to the Google tool, by the 15th of February (only 5 days after the launch) searches for the service had dwindled to less than ten a day, and since February 26th there had only been about one search per day. While the chatter on Twitter about Google Buzz remains quite constant.

According to the data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.

In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55.

Dr Search’s message to Google is simple- before you launch you next project protect your users’ privacy first- don’t frogmarch them into submission. Or risk another failure!