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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.

BT has been forced to compensate viewers after a techical glitch left hundreds of people unable to access its new Sky Sports TV service despite paying over £30 a month to sign up.
Sky Sports went live on the BT Vision service last Sunday, and immediately customers flooded BT’s internet forums with complaints about the picture freezing after only a few minutes of viewing.

BT admitted there was a technical problem with the viewing card which subscribers need to insert into their BT Vision set-top boxes to access the Sky Sports service, and has now been resolved.

ITV uses the same technology as Freeview to broadcast the Sky Sports channels, but encrypts the signal so that those channels can only be watched by paying subscribers who have the correct viewing card.

Viewers also complained about BT’s customer service.

“Shambolic,” posted one customer on BT’s internet forum , “If I was able to watch Sky Sports 1 (which clearly me and hundreds of others cannot) the crowd would be singing ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’,

“I want my money back, and BT you shouldn’t advertise a service you can’t deliver on. You’re idiots.”

BT said that it would compensate people who had been affected by giving them a month’s free Sky Sports, which would normally cost £6.99 or £11.99 a month. However customers must also sign up for a BT phone line and BT broadband, taking the total cost to over £30 a month.

These problems will be a significant embarrassment to BT, which announced the new service with much fanfare last month as a cheap competitor to Sky’s own digital satellite service. BT’s move followed a decision by Ofcom, the media regulator, which forced Sky to wholesale some of its sports channels to competitors, including BT, at discount rates.

BT is looking increasingly accident-prone, after Sky wrong-footed it by increasing its own retail prices when BT had already fixed the amount it would charge for its new service.

While the Sky increase made the BT package more attractive to potential subscribers, it meant that BT would have to pay a higher wholesale price to Sky, cutting deeply into BT’s potential profits.

Google has ended support for its Google Wave real-time collaboration and communication because of a lack of users.
Google has confirmed that it will no longer be developing Google Wave following disappointing take-up among users

Google, which unveiled Wave at its annual I/O developer conference last year to whoops and cheers, said that it would no longer be working on the real-time collaboration and communication tool.

The company acknowledged that despite huge internal excitement over the possibilities offered by Wave, users did not display the same enthusiasm.

“Google Wave set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser,” wrote Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations at Google in a blog post.

“We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop – even “playback” the history of changes.

“We were jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication,” he admitted.

“But despite numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product.”

Hölzle said that Google would continue to support the product until at least the end of this year, and would enable the technology that underpinned Wave to be used in other Google projects, and by third-party developers. He also said that Google would develop a tool to help existing Wave users to “liberate” any content they had archived in Wave so it could be saved elsewhere.

“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” said Hölzle. “We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

Although many in the technology industry had long believed Google Wave was underperforming, the news that Google was ending support for one of its most innovative new products came as a surprise to most.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, played down the significance of the Wave announcement. “Our policy is, we try things,” he told delegates at a technology conference in Lake Tahoe, California.

“We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.”

A network of thousands of compromised computers that is being used to gain online banking details has been uncovered in the UK.Cyber criminals in Eastern Europe, who have control of the machines, are collecting personal data from the PCs. This includes login details for online banks, credit and debit card numbers and other passwords.

“The fraudsters are very familiar with UK banking systems,” said Amit Klein, chief technology officer at Trusteer, the firm which uncovered the network.

Mr Klein said that he had contacted the Metropolitan Police central e-crime unit to alert it to the scam, as well as affected banks.

“We’re aware of an allegation,” said a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police. “We are working with UK Payments and Trusteer and inquiries are under way.”

A spokesperson for UK Payments, which tackles financial fraud, said attacks like this had “become the norm”.

“100,000 computers being targeted by a trojan does not necessarily mean that 100,000 UK customers will have had their details successfully used by the fraudster.

“In the highly unlikely event that any one of the 23 million UK customers who bank online is an innocent victim as a result of this attack they can expect to get their money back.”

The 100,000 Windows machines have been infected with a trojan known as Zeus, said Mr Klein.

There are currently hundreds of networks of computers infected with Zeus. However, Mr Klein said this one was unusual because it used a new variant of the malware and also predominantly targeted people in the UK.

Researchers at Trusteer were able to identify the geographical location of victims, he said, after they gained access to the command and control centre of the network.

“One of the nice features of that is that it provides you with stats regarding operating systems and the geographical information of the bots. We actually used the fraudsters’ own data to assess the botnet and determine that it actually targets the UK.”

The dashboard also allowed the firm to identify which banks had been targeted, but Mr Klein declined to name them.

He said victims’ computers had probably become infected by clicking on a link in a spam message or by visiting an infected website.

“When you initiate a transaction, they may change the destination and the amount of money that you wire,” he said. “Rather than sending £100 to your aunt, you may find that your account balance is sent to Ukraine.”

Mr Klein said that the scam was difficult to spot, but that people should be suspicious if there was any change in their bank’s login procedures or they were prompted to resubmit password and other details.

Mr Klein said it was likely that the criminals had targeted the UK because it had a developed banking sector.