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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.

Sony, hoping to increase sales ahead of the holiday shopping season, has slimmed down its electronic readers and also given them touchscreens.
The three new versions of its “Reader” line also feature an improved screen with better clarity, the manufacturer said on Wednesday.

Sony was first to the market with its Reader in 2006 but has struggled to keep up with rival Amazon.com.

In July, Amazon undercut competitors by offering a £89 wireless Kindle. The crowded e-reader market also includes traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble and electronics giant Apple, whose fast-selling iPad device has e-reader functions.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit, said the touchscreen was one of the top requests made by consumers, who are willing to pay more for extra functionality.

“Lowering prices to get cheaper and cheaper – that’s not our direction,” Haber said in an interview. “Our plan is not to race to the bottom.”

Haber said the company expected to sell more of its lower-cost pocket version last holiday season, but sales of its higher-priced touchscreen version outsold the cheaper one.

“People stepped up and spent another £66 to buy touchscreen capabilities,” he said.

Sony cut the prices of its last generation of e-readers in July. Prices on the new versions are lower than their predecessors when first launched.

The new pocket version Reader retails for about £125. Sony’s larger 6-inch screen version, which allows for extra memory, costs £149. Users of these two devices must plug in to a computer when it comes time to download content. Both are available immediately.

Sony is also offering a £199 “Daily Edition,” which, like the Kindle, is wireless. It has 3G and a larger screen. The Daily Edition rolls out in November.

Haber said overall sales of its readers are growing at three or four times last year’s levels.

Sony said it is also offering dictionaries in its new Readers and has been adding titles to its e-book store.

It plans to include reader reviews through an integration with social network site GoodReads, and will launch applications later in the year to interface with Apple’s iPhone and Android-based smartphones from Google Inc.

UK advertising  watchdog ASA is to extend it’s powers to include internet websites next year.The digital remit of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to be extended significantly to deliver more comprehensive consumer protection online.

The ASA’s present remit online includes ads in paid-for space and sales promotions wherever they appear. But from next year, the rules in the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code) will apply in full to marketing communications online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children.

The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), the body responsible for writing the CAP Code, has decided to extend the digital remit of the ASA in response to a formal recommendation from a wide cross-section of UK industry.

CAP yesterday published a document detailing the new remit and sanctions.  The new remit will ensure the same high standards as in other media and will cover:

* Advertisers‟ own marketing communications on their own websites and;
* Marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Journalistic and editorial content and material related to causes and ideas – except those that are direct solicitations of donations for fund-raising – are excluded from the remit.

In addition to the ASA‟s present sanctions, which already achieve a high level of compliance, CAP member bodies have agreed new sanctions to apply to the extended remit such as:

* Removal of paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the agreement of the search engines.
* ASA paid-for search advertisements – the ASA could place advertisements online highlighting an advertiser‟s continued non-compliance.

The industry has agreed to apply the standard 0.1% levy on paid-for advertisements appearing on internet search engines through media and search agencies. This is an extension of the existing funding mechanism in other media that pays for the ASA and it will be supplemented initially with seed capital from Google.

The remit will come into force on 1 March 2011 after a six month period of grace to allow the ASA and CAP to conduct training work to raise awareness and educate business on the requirements of the CAP Code, particularly amongst those who may not previously have been subject to ASA regulation.

Website owners and agencies are urged to sign up to CAP Services to receive guidance and training to help ensure their sites comply with the new rules before 1 March 2011.

ASA Chairman Lord Chris Smith said, “This significant extension of the ASA‟s remit has the protection of children and consumers at its heart. We have received over 4,500 complaints since 2008 about marketing communications on websites that we couldn‟t deal with, but from 1 March anyone who has a concern about a marketing communication online will be able to turn to the ASA.”

CAP Chairman Andrew Brown said, “Extending the online remit of the ASA has been a top priority for UK industry over the last couple of years. Our aim has been to extend further in the online world the principles that are already well established in our system, namely those of effective consumer protection and fair competition.”

Dr Search wonders whether this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut over a few websites or a genuine plan for UK websites to lead reputable online marketing.

Eitherway it breaks the UK coalition goverment’s promise to reduce red tape on UK companies.

The BlackBerry services ban has been delayed for at least two months as the Indian government gives Research in Motion more time to comply with it’s requests.
BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion and India’s government have avoided a confrontation by agreeing to extend talks over intelligence agency access to BlackBerry services for another two months.

The Indian Government had set a Tuesday deadline for corporate e-mail and messaging services on BlackBerry to be shut down if the Canadian company did not agree to the demand, but a home affairs ministry statement said that “RIM have made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies.” The situation will be “reviewed” in 60 days, the ministry said.

RIM has previously said that India’s demands for access to its encrypted BlackBerry Enterprise Server email service was not possible because customers control the service’s security codes. Over the weekend, however, talks took place between Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, and home affairs officials.

India has recently begun to insist that its security agencies should have access to all communications in the country, which has prompted Nokia to say that it will install a server in India to handle communications from its messaging service by November.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and other nations also fear Blackberry devices could become a tool to plan militant attacks or for those breaking Islamic laws.

The Indian department of telecommunications is now set to prepare a report on a long-term solution under which RIM would locate a server in India. BlackBerry currently has 1 million Indian subscribers and 46 million around the world.

More than 3 million doctors have downloaded a 59p application – invented by Prof Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London – which turns an Apple iPhone into a stethoscope.
Last week Professor Bentley introduced a free version of the app, which is being downloaded by more than 500 users a day.

Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise.

“Everybody is very excited about the potential of the adoption of mobile phone technology into the medical workplace, and rightly so,” said Bentley, who initially developed the app “as a fun toy”.

“Smartphones are incredibly powerful devices packed full of sensors, cameras, high-quality microphones with amazing displays,” he said. “They are capable of saving lives, saving money and improving healthcare in a dramatic fashion – and we carry these massively powerful computers in our pockets.”

Bentley’s iStethoscope Pro application is not the only mobile phone programme lightening doctors’ bags and transforming their practices: there are nearly 6,000 applications related to health in the Apple App Store.

The uptake has been rapid. In late 2009, two-thirds of doctors and 42% of the public were using smartphones – in effect inexpensive handheld computers – for personal and professional reasons. More than 80% of doctors said they expected to own a smartphone by 2012.

However, experts say they are being prevented from exploiting the technology’s opportunities. Bentley says that he is unable to launch a new range of applications because of out-of-date regulations.

“It’s much easier to develop technology than it is to get permission to use it,” he said. “I could create a mobile ultrasound scanner and an application to measure the oxygen content in blood, but the regulations stop me. We’re not allowed to turn the phone itself into a medical device, and what that precisely means is currently a grey area in terms of regulation. That’s the only reason we’re not seeing a flood of these devices yet.”

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – the government body with responsibility for standards of safety, quality and performance in healthcare – recently set up the Medical Device Technology Forum, a group of industry representatives, regulators, users and scientists, to help establish how to regulate novel technologies.

European regulators are also striving to bring their guidelines up to date. A group of regulators from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden and the UK was set up last December to develop guidance for software under the European Medical Device Regulations. They are expected to report at the end of the year.

Just a day after Google ceo Eric Schmidt complained about competitors’ data security issues, Spain has became the latest country to complain to Google over it’s own privacy violations during the mapping for its “Street View” facility.
A Madrid judge has ordered a Google representative to appear in court in October as part of an investigation into whether the company committed a “computer crime” while taking photographs of city streets in Spain.

The service launched in more than 30 countries provides internet users with street level views of public buildings and private homes.

The Spanish probe comes following Google’s acknowledgement in May that the technology used by its “Street View” cars had also inadvertently recorded fragments of people’s online activities broadcast over wireless networks for the past four years.

The company said it had collected information from non secure Wi-Fi networks across the globe, but it maintains it never used the data and said it hasn’t broken any laws.

Judge Raquel Fernandino has issued the subpoena following a complaint filed in June by private internet watchdog and technology consulting agency Apedanica.

Google also is facing investigations or inquiries over this practice, which it says it has now discontinued, in the United States, Germany and Australia.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google- a company which itself is the subject of a number data security investigations, has launched an amazing attack against Facebook.He has issued a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past.

In a startling admission from a man whose company has made billions by perfecting the art of hoarding, storing and retrieving information on us, Mr Schmidt suggested that the enormous quantity of detail we leave online may not be such a good thing after all.

The man who – alongside Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – runs the world’s largest search engine said that young people will need to go as far as changing their identities if they are to truly erase what they have left online.

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I mean we really have to think about these things as a society.”

For a man whose company is built on the ability to store information and retrieve it again in a faster and more efficient way than its rivals, Mr Schmidt’s admission revealed a surprising concern among Google’s leadership over the importance of data privacy.

But it has also provoked a wider debate on the sheer amount of information we give away about ourselves online and how most of that data is virtually un-erasable.

Google has made billions from storing data on its customers’ browsing habits so that it can use that data to target them with personalised adverts. It also runs the kind of websites that have pioneered the open sharing of information online.

They also own You Tube, the world’s largest video sharing website; it handles billions of our emails through Gmail; and – if you live in a big city – chances are that a Google Street View car has photographed your front door. A series of recent acquisitions also suggests it is hoping to move into the social networking market, the area of the internet that most concerns privacy campaigners.

Thanks to the global popularity of social networking – an estimated 600 million people have personal online profiles – friends, prospective employers and enemies alike are able to access photographs, videos and blogs that we may have long forgotten with a few simple clicks of a mouse.Recently one columnist in The New York Times went so far as to describe our current world as an age defined by “the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on”.

Many websites yesterday picked up on the apparent disconnect between Mr Schmidt’s comments and his company’s ethos.

Chris Williams, of the online tech news website The Register, said: “Recording everything and making it knowable by everyone all the time is Google’s stated mission, and it is profiting handsomely from the fact that society doesn’t understand the consequences.”

Other blogs remarked that one previous instance when Mr Schmidt had admitted concerns over the amount of personal information stored online was in 2005 when Google blacklisted the online technology magazine Cnet for an entire year.

In an article discussing privacy concerns generated by Google’s data mining capabilities, Cnet’s reporters published Mr Schmidt’s salary, named the neighbourhood where he lives, some of his hobbies and political donations. All the information had been gleaned from Google searches.

But while bloggers and web forums reacted with tangible scepticism to Mr Schmidt’s comments, others welcomed his frankness.

“His comments are a little ironic but they are also timely,” said Dylan Sharpe from Big Brother Watch, which has campaigned against Google collecting wifi data on web users while taking photographs with its Street View cars.

He added: “Google is a company that specialises in knowing where you are, what you are doing and who you are talking to. That’s a scary prospect even though Google’s users sign up to this sort of data collection willingly.

“But Mr Schmidt is completely right on how much information we are giving away online. Right now there are millions of young kids and teenagers who, when they apply for jobs in 10 years’ time, will find that there is so much embarrassing stuff about them online that they cannot take down.”

Those who wish to delete what they have put up online, meanwhile, may find it next to impossible to entirely erase their cyber past.

Privacy campaigners say more needs to be done to stop young people in particular depositing information online that may come back to haunt them.

Online marketing with social media is not just for large companies- any business can prosper.Any small business that invests its time wisely can improve it’s customer or client loyalty and word of mouth marketing with an effective social media strategy.

Social media is useful for almost every type of business. Cafes, retail stores, and even B2B professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust.

By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections.

Facebook is the most popular social networking website on the internet, and often the first site that comes to mind when people mention social media.

Establishing your business presence on facebook requires an ongoing effort, but can have some great rewards if done well.

Here’s Dr Search’s advice for getting started with Facebook.

1. Create a business page – Creating a page for your business is really quite simple and gives you an instant presence on facebook to share information about your company.

To get you started visit www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages and click Create a Page. Here’s a few suggestions for populating your page with relevant business information:
* Overview of the business
* Website and contact information
* Your logo and pictures of the business
* Videos
* Press releases and blog posts
* Company news and updates
* Your contact details

2. Interact with your fans – Once you’ve setup a page for your business, the most important step is to interact with your fans!

Try and post updates to your page at least weekly which can include new blog posts, competitions and links to new products or special discounts.

It’s also important that you engage with any customers that leave a comment on your wall or wall posts. Remember that facebook is a public forum so take care with your replies and show potential customers that you provide excellent customer service.

3. Promote your facebook page – The tricky thing about facebook pages is that you can’t friend someone the same way you can from your personal profile. People can elect to become fans of your page, but only if they know about it.

Here’s a few ideas on different ways to promote your page:

* Identify contacts from your personal profile that are business contacts and invite them to become fans of your business
* Include links to your facebook pages in the footer of email communications with customers
* Include a facebook icon on your website or blog and give customers some incentive to become a fan (special discounts, coupons etc.)
* Promote your facebook page using other social networks that you participate in like Twitter and your blog posts.

India may shut down Google and Skype messaging services over security concerns as the government threatened a similar crackdown on BlackBerry services.
The Financial Times quoted from the minutes of a July 12 meeting between telecommunication ministry security officials and operator associations to look at possible solutions to “intercept and monitor” encrypted communications.

“There was consensus that there more than one type of service for which solutions are to be explored. Some of them are BlackBerry, Skype, Google etc,” according to the department’s minutes. “It was decided first to undertake the issue of BlackBerry and then the other services.”

On Thursday, the Indian government became the latest of several nations that have threatened to cut off Research In Motion’s encrypted BlackBerry email and instant messaging services if the Canadian company does not address national security concerns.

India has set an August 31 deadline for RIM. It wants access in a readable format to encrypted BlackBerry communication, on grounds it could be used by militants. Pakistani-based militants used mobile and satellite phones in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

India’s demands follow a deal with Saudi Arabia, where a source said Research In Motion agreed to give authorities codes for BlackBerry Messenger users. The United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Algeria also seek access.

Officials say RIM had proposed tracking emails without sharing encryption details, but that was not enough.

The Financial Times report said representatives from two of the telecom operator associations present confirmed the details of the meeting earlier this month.

“At the last security meeting, the agencies were talking about BlackBerry. They were also coming out heavily on Skype and Google,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India.

A shutdown would affect one million users in India out of the smartphone’s 41 million users. India is one of RIM’s fastest growing markets.

RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries, such as Britain.

In a matter of a few weeks, the BlackBerry device – long the darling of the world’s CEOs and politicians, including US President Barack Obama – has become a target for its sealed email and messaging services with governments around the world.