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Mobile operators and internet service providers must not be allowed to break the principle of “net neutrality” – that there should be no favouritism for connecting to certain sites online – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, warned at Nokia World this week.
He also said that low cost mobile phones with a data connection were essential to ensure that the 80% of people who are not yet connected to the web could benefit from its ability to bring new information.

Berners-Lee also suggested that concerns over privacy and the sharing of personal data will mean that businesses will have to improve their ability to segment the use of user-specific data such as addresses and where people are using their phones.

On net neutrality – which has become a major talking point in the US, especially as Google appears to have ceded the principle to some of the major mobile carriers there – Berners-Lee was adamant that it must remain a founding principle of the internet.

“Most of us work at a higher level,” Berners-Lee told the Nokia World conference in London’s ExCel centre. “We assume that when we look up a web address and the domain name to get that page that you can get any page because that’s how it’s always been.”

But, he warned, “a lot of companies would love to limit that.”

“If they’re trying to sell you movies streamed online, they’d like to slow down your access to other peoples’ movies, so you’d come back to them. If they sell you telephone services, they’d love to block voice-over-internet connections, or just slow it down so you decide it’s not a very good technology and go and use theirs instead. They’d like to tell you where to buy your shoes by slowing down the service to one site but not another.”

In the US, the issue of net neutrality has been keenly argued over, with Google previously insisting that it was a key principle for sites such as its video-sharing service YouTube: there had been fears that some American ISPs would seek to charge Google to make sure that service to YouTube for the ISPs’ customers was fast enough.

But Google has been criticised in recent weeks because it has appeared to accede to demands by mobile phone operators to give priority to traffic from particular sites. The company denied the claims that it had made a deal with the US mobile carrier Verizon to favour some Google content – though the wording seemed to leave open the possibility that the mobile area might lack the neutrality of wired services.

In the UK, the communications regulator Ofcom published a discussion paper on net neutrality in June – for which the discussion period ended on 9 September.

Berners-Lee insisted that a level playing field for all sites over all forms of transmission is essential: “If you let that go, you lose something essential – that any innovator can think of a new idea, a new data format, a new protocol, something completely novel, and set up a site at some random place and let it take off through word of mouth, and make a business, make a profit, and help humanity in a particular way and it takes off.

“Sure, you have to buy a domain name, but they’re pretty cheap. And once you have that you don’t have to register your server with anyone central. You don’t have to pay money to every mobile phone operator to make sure people can get your site. That’s really important.”

He added that the threat even comes from governments in some countries: “They would like to slow down information going to and from particular political sites.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has again suggested that concerns about online privacy on his social networking site are overblown.The Facebook site has been repeatedly criticised for failing to do enough to protect younger users from abuse.

However, in an interview with The New Yorker magazine Mr Zuckerberg, 26, said: “A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor mistake that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible.”

“We realise that people will probably criticise us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.”

Last year Facebook, which has 500 million users, announced it wanted to change its privacy settings which could mean more of users’ personal information being made public.

Mr Zuckerberg said he was “trying to make the world a more open place” but users and the American Civil Liberties Union complained.

The site, which he started in his bedroom at Harvard, has also been involved in a series of privacy controversies.

In March Peter Chapman, 33, was jailed for life at Teeside Crown Court in the United Kingdom for the rape and murder of Ashleigh Hall, 17, who he befriended on Facebook by posing as a teenager.

Her mother Andrea Hall, from Darlington, County Durham, told the Daily Mail recently:

“Mark Zuckerberg is a disgrace. Privacy is the most important thing and it may well have saved my daughter’s life.

“Facebook has a responsibility to protect the privacy of vulnerable young people who use it.”

The Nationwide Building Society chief executive has come under fire for changing his email address following protests about alterations to the society’s FlexAccount.
Until recently, all members could contact Graham Beale, chief executive of the society, directly through his email address graham.beale@nationwide.co.uk.

But anyone now trying to contact him using that address receives an immediate email from Nationwide’s online security system saying: “It has not been possible to deliver your message to graham.beale@nationwide.co.uk as this account has been closed. If your inquiry is customer service related, please re-send your message to customer.services@nationwide.co.uk. Alternatively if you want to contact our chief executive, please re-send your email to CEO@nationwide.co.uk.”

Although the second address intimates that emails sent to the CEO will get Beale’s attention, Marcus Williamson, an IT consultant and Nationwide customer of 20 years standing, points out that this, too, is an email box with no guarantee that the chief executive will read the contents.

Emails to this address get the following response: “Thank you for contacting Nationwide. We confirm receipt of your email, and will ensure you receive a response shortly. Please note, this email box is only serviced during normal working hours – 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays. This is an automated response, please do not respond to this message.”

Williamson says: “This is not a true way of reaching Graham Beale, but an attempt to kid people into believing that they are dealing with the CEO, when they are not.

“He used to be very responsive but in the last four weeks it seems like he has closed down that address and stopped responding to me.”

Williamson runs a site CEO Email addresses at – http://www.ceoemail.com/ – to help customers contact CEOs directly rather than dealing with customer service departments. He says he has never come across one changing their email address in this way before.

“When I spoke to Nationwide, they claim they have had to close the address because of the large amounts of spam received. This cannot be true.

“I believe that Nationwide has closed Graham Beale’s email because of the large number of customers who have emailed him recently protesting about proposed changes to the Nationwide FlexAccount. This used to be the best account for use abroad but Nationwide intends to take away these benefits.”

Nationwide announced a few weeks ago that from November it will raise the charges for spending and cash withdrawals using the FlexAccount card to 2% both in Europe and the rest of the world. Previously only those using their card outside Europe were charged for the service, and even then only 1% of the transaction cost.

Williamson observed: “The Nationwide used to be very good, very responsive, but it’s now more like a bank. It used to be proud to say that it was different, But it’s not that different anymore.”

An uprising by the US regulators and software developers who create apps for the Apple iPhone has forced Steve Jobs, the company’s chief executive, into a rare and humiliating public climbdown. Five months after Apple imposed tough new restrictions on app developers and Mr Jobs posted a 1,600-word justification of the move on its website, the company said it was softening its stance and promised to be more transparent about how it chooses which apps, or programs, to allow on its iPhones, iPods and iPad devices.

The U-turn comes after the company attracted scrutiny by regulators and the US Justice Department, and amid complaints that Apple was covertly creating a monopoly and stifling competition.

It represents a significant victory for Adobe, the software company with which Mr Jobs has been engaged in a vicious public feud, and it means that videos that require Adobe’s Flash technology to run might soon be available on the iPhone. Adobe shares surged 12 per cent yesterday.

While Apple’s iPhone may attract the most publicity of all the smartphones in the market, many developers want to create apps that can run on all kinds of phones, including Blackberries and the increasing numbers of phones that use Google’s Android operating system.

Indeed because of Apple’s restrictions more app developers are concentrating on developing software first for the Android system and only secondly for Apple’s iOS.

Apple’s U-turn means that developers can use third-party tools to ensure their products are compatible across different types of phone. “We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart,” Apple said.

Adobe, whose own tool for developers appeared to have been a target of Apple’s clampdown earlier this year, called on the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to investigate.

Mr Jobs responded with an essay that lashed out at Flash, saying, variously, that the video technology was the number one reason Macs crash, compromised the reliability of smartphones, and was useless for touchscreen devices. And he concluded: “Adobe should focus more on creating great… tools for the future, and less on criticising Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Apple also responded to growing criticism over its processes for approving apps for sale through its App Store, which remains the only official place users can buy programs for its devices. It revealed the list of 113 guidelines it uses to review apps before they are allowed on sale, and also the preamble it sends to developers.

“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store.” the guidelines say. “If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted. If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.”

Internet blogs

Students who use Facebook while studying for exams score significantly lower grades than those who do not, according to a study.
The exam results of students who used Facebook while working – even if only intermittently – were on average 20 per cent lower than people who did not, psychologists have found.

The results call into question the belief that young people’s brains are adept at performing several different functions on electronic devices at the same time.

But three quarters of those who used the social networking website while revising did not believe it had a negative impact on their studies, according to the survey.

Professor Paul Kirschner, who wrote the paper, said many students would have Facebook or other similar websites, their emails and instant messenger programmes all running simultaneously while working on their computer.

He said: “While people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes.”

Researchers in America examined 219 students aged from 19 to 54, and found that Facebook users scored a grade point average of 3.06 out of four, while those who did not use the website while studying scored on average 3.82.

Non users of the website were also found to spend 88 per cent more time studying outside of lessons.

The study by Prof Kirschner, from the Open University in The Netherlands, will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour.

Google unveiled a new version of its search engine yesterday- Google Instant, which produces results before you have finished typing and offers suggestions for what you wanted to look for.
‘Streaming results’ will save two to five seconds on every 25-second query, says search executive Marissa Mayer – but SEO people may be less happy

Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search and user experience, said that until now, each search typically lasts 25 seconds – 9 seconds of typing, 1 second in which the query reaches Google, is processed and sent back, and 15 seconds during which the user considers which search result to click on.

But with Google Instant the average search will be shortened by two to five seconds per query – which, given the billions of people who use the service every week, would mean 11 hours of searching saved every second.

The service will also display a series of its best guesses as users type, and searchers can then scroll down to the most appropriate.

The service began being rolled out to users in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Russia on Wednesday evening.

However, like the playful logos shown off by the company over the past two days – on Tuesday a set of animated balls which evaded the cursor, and on Wednesday a grey logo which changed colour as you typed – the new system will only be available on modern browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Google’s own Chrome, and Apple’s Safari.

You will also have to be signed in to a Google account to get the results. Older browsers, and users who are not signed in, will not see the auto-completing results.

Mayer acknowledged that the idea that the search engine might know what you’re looking for before you finish asking it – in fact, which will begin offering results as soon as you type a letter – seems so bizarre that 10 years ago it was the subject of an April Fools’ Joke by a large company. The company in question? Google.

“In 2000 we thought the idea of being able to search before you typed was so weird we made it our April Fools joke,” Mayer, one of Google’s longest-standing employees, noted. “Just 10 years later we’re seeing that it’s actually possible.”

Users who begin typing will be able to get completed words from a single letter by hitting the tab key, or choosing from a list that will be presented as they type. The letter “w” begins a search which includes “weather” – one of the most common searches.

Mayer showed it off by typing “SFmoma wom” and was presented with a result for the painting “woman with a hat” at the museum – without hitting the return button. “The results are just streamed straight to you without you hitting the return key.”

She added: “We’re really excited about what Google Instant means for search – faster search, and providing results in real time before you’ve even had the opportunity to type your query.”

But the impact could be dramatic on another group who have previously relied heavily on Google’s old search results page. “Search engine optimisation” (SEO) experts have built a gigantic business from analysing what results appear for a particular set query, especially to Google.

However the new system, with its live updates of queries, means that it will be more difficult for SEO analysts to work out which results will do well from which query, because the results will keep changing as the user types. It will also be harder to examine the results mechanically.

Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt suggested in an interview in August that “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant.”

With the first Barclays Premier League matches taking place during the weekend of August 14 and 15th, the football season is now truly underway.

As you would expect, UK Internet visits to key football related websites increased significantly during the week ending 15/08/2010: the Official Fantasy Premier League site by 186%, Sky Sports by 15%. There was also a 12% increase in traffic to BBC Sport, but it has yet to reach the same level of traffic it experienced during the World Cup.
All of the three sites mentioned above ranked amongst the top 100 most visited in the UK for the w/e 15/08/2010, with BBC Sport in 13th position and Sky Sports at number 15.

Joining them in the top 100, in 70th position, was the Sky Digital TV Shop, the place where people go to either purchase Sky TV or upgrade their packages.

The site is most popular in the North East, although Walsall is the individual postal area that currently most over-indexes in terms of traffic.

This perhaps reflects the fact that there are four teams from West Midlands (Aston Villa, West Brom, Birmingham City, Wolves) competing in the top flight of English football this season – the first time this has happened for 27 years.

The main driver for all this traffic was clearly the demand for the Sky Sports channels, and searches for the terms ‘sky sports’ and ‘sky sports football’ increased by 38% and 22% respectively over the same period. These were the two most popular of 3,700 different ways in which people searched for the channels during the week ending 15/08/2010.

Aggregating all of these together using Hitwise‘s new broad matching tool, shows that all of these variations accounted for 1% of all UK searches during this period – i.e. 1 in every 100 searches in the UK was related to Sky Sports.

From: http://images.hitwise.com/newsletter_images/uk201008-news-master.gif

Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK- in June it accounted for 7.14% of all UK Internet visits and over half (54.48%) of all visits to a social networking websites. In terms of total visits it continues to trail Google UK (9.59% market share in June) and, as previously highlighted, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

However, using the measure of total page views rather than visits, Facebook is way ahead. The social network accounted for 16.73% of UK page views during June.

In other words: 1 in every 6 Internet pages viewed in the UK was a Facebook page.

Facebook continues to grow around the world (during July 2010 it reached half a billion registered users) and there is no doubt that it leads the social networking pack in the UK.

However, with 26m British users already, when will it start to reach saturation point? Facebook’s market share of UK page views has trebled over the last five years, but growth has slowed significantly over the last six months.

During July 2010 there was even a slight decline in share, but this may well be down to seasonality (the August / September back to school / college / university period is significant for Facebook).

Another metric is average time spent on the site, a key metric for user engagement on social networks.

Facebook has a very high average session time (almost half an hour) but, this has also stabilised over the last six months after increasing rapidly during the site’s ascendency.

Clearly Facebook is not losing traffic in the UK, but do these stats point to a stabilisation? The rapid period of the site’s growth is now probably over in the UK, but does that mean Facebook has reached saturation point?

From Hitwise at: http://images.hitwise.com/newsletter_images/uk201008-feature-feature_image.gif

Google has been accused of manipulating its rivals’ myTriggers, SourceTool/TradeComet and Foundem search rankings.
Regulators in Texas have launched the first broad anti-trust review of Google’s search and advertising practices in the US.

While federal regulators in Washington have investigated the impact on competition of Google’s business deals in the past, Greg Abbott, Texas attorney general, is the first regulator to look more broadly at its core search business, amid growing concerns about the power the online business wields.

In the Texas case, Google said in a blog post on Friday that it had been asked for information about three different firms that have raised complaints against it.

The three – myTriggers and SourceTool/TradeComet in the US, and Foundem in the UK – have accused Google of reducing their traffic by pushing them down its search rankings.

“The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower-quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.”

He added that companies such as Amazon, Shopping.com and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s search results “because of the quality of the service they offer users”.

The company has faced a flurry of legal challenges and lost a copyright case in Germany against its YouTube business.

It also paid $8.5m to settle a class action lawsuit in the US over alleged privacy violations at its Buzz social networking service. It also faces a lawsuit from software company Oracle, which accuses Google of patent infringement with the Android mobile operating system and officials in Brussels have also raised the prospect of a possible inquiry into anti-competitive behaviour by Google.