No security to Privacy and Identity on the net

No am not talking about hacking am not at all talking about porn sites or low grade sites. I am talking about Yahoo! and Google.

According to a report by a consortium of telecoms and finance companies, including BT, Yahoo and Lloyds TSB, 8% of internet users have been victims of online fraud. Almost double that proportion know someone who has been targeted by criminals through their computers.

In the year 2003, a Chinese pro-democratic activist, Wang Xiaoning was arrested by the police with the help of his private information that Yahoo provided the police. Wang had been using an anonymous e-mail account to participate in a Yahoo Group to disseminate his political views. He advocated open elections, a multi-party system, and separation of powers within the government. In addition, he called the Chinese government despotic.

Google was thought to be very strict and protective in regard to the identity and private details of its users until recently, when three software professionals were arrested by the Pune police with the help of Google India.co. Google traced the telephone number that was indexing the profiles of these people and supplied this information to Cyber crime officials of Pune. All these guys did was they used bad language against a king named Shivaji who used to live centuries ago. This was surely bad behavior but the question here is 'Do they deserve to get arrested?' A Warning from the Google or account removal would have been enough punishment.

Lets put aside freedom of speech and expression and concentrate on the privacy and identity threat onliners are facing. This is indeed an ethical break down on the part of these online service providers. Another example of forgotten ethics by Yahoo is the recent removal of Iran from its list of world countries in its sign up page. Where does the fault lie? Is it with the officials working in the gain companies or is it that the companies should revive and tighten their privacy policy?



> A letter written to Yahoo! by an young Iranian journalist.

20s30socials- A cool Yahoo Group

Real people, real friends from all over the world sending real messages for friendship and partnership activities. This group is different from other Yahoo groups. You wont feel neglected, you wont feel rejected. You wont feel as an outsider. You get real mails from real people who become real friends and partners. You can reach this group at http://sfoutside.com/ . Its a place for people who like to hang out with new people. For those who like adventure and variety in their life, you will find a link to http://www.snowpals.org/ in 20s30socials home page. Hope you find good friends there. Best of luck.

Vodafone adds Google Maps

Vodafone has joined hands with Google to develop and provide 'Maps' to their clients.These maps have the potential to gain huge revenue if local ads are placed along with the results.These maps are not only going to be popular but also addictive because people would use them to locate famous shopping malls, holiday spots, medical shop, book stalls etc through these maps.In some places like Japan, people use their mobiles to organise important business trnasactions and meetings through these mobile search locators.Google maps on mobiles have a large revenue erning potential if Google Ads are Indexed beside the maps.

Yahoo has already introduced advertising on its mobile-specific Web sites display advertising on its mobile-specific Web sites in 19 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The move, which follows a year of aggressive expansion in the wireless space, marks Yahoo's first formal rollout of graphical ads on its sites around the world.

Recent Microsoft mobile 6.0, then Google's and Yahoo! 's interest in mobile industry shows that Internet is no more pertained to computers and to those who are computer professionals.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo has released their new Web 2.0 style RSS mashup tool, called Pipes on Wednesday.It's pretty enjoyable to look at: drag around various boxes and hook them together with 'pipes'. The boxes rip data from around the web ( from anywhere you choose) and process it, spitting out an RSS feed at the other end.This mashup tool gets you RSS feeds of 'anything' that you are interested in right on your desktop.Some authors also call it as 'RSS Remixer'.

'Pipes' recieved an unexpectedly warm and huge welcome as we can see in the words of Yahoo! team.This was their (Yahoo team's) response to WebPro news :
“Wow! We were hoping to have a low key release of Pipes, and we’ve gotten more attention than we could have ever dreamed. Thanks to Tim O’Reilly who called it a “milestone in the history of the internet” but our goal was really just to get developers to test it, play with it, and give us feedback. Now, we need to take the site down to increase capacity. Our pipes, are, so to speak, clogged.”
Find more information on this topic at WebPro News.

The pipes site is down due to excited webmasters rushed to get their own Yahoo! pipe.It says "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
At 7:20 Pacific time on Thursday, Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny updated his blog on Pipes."Pipes is currently down. There's a lot of interest, so things are getting tweaked on the backend. I'll post more when we have an update."

Microsoft's AdCenter

Microsoft has launched adCenter where advertisers can place their ads at targeted sites.A new release of adCenter is expected in the next 2 months, with many of the new features resulting from testing and customer feedback collected through adLabs.

Silient features of adCenter are

• Advertisers can see when the clicks (on their Ads) lead to sales.
• Ads can be targeted to places and constumers of the advertisers' choice.
• Built in tool to get keywords.
• Detail reports of Ads to the advertisers.
• Chose your own price for your Ads.
• Pay only when the Ads are clicked.(the last two are same as any other advertising service)

Keyword service platform :
Keyword optimization efforts are built upon the Keyword Service Platform (KSP), a set of services that third-party developers can use through APIs to build Web applications to analyze keywords.
Product manager James Colborn says "We're making it an open network by publishing and sharing the algorithm" "We're excited to see how our partners will build on the KSP."
This feature gives adCenter a clear competitive advantage over Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft also previewed video hyperlink technology, which will allow marketers to create ad links on products shown in videos. The company said it will make that technology available on MSN starting in the spring.

Colborn also said "For now, Microsoft is testing the feature on Microsoft's network of sites, but the company plans to extend it to other publishers"

While Microsoft has an advantage over its competitors through KSP,MSN is suffering from low search engine popularity and search engine users.This poses a great threat to adCenter because search engine indexing plays very important role in targeting traffic to its Ads.This is one of the main reasons for the success of Google.
comScore reported that MSN garnered just 10.5% of search traffic, compared to Google's 47.3% and Yahoo's 28.5%. This clearly shows that MSN is lagging behind in the race and will have to take lot of pains inorder to compete with Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo! Publishing network - In Beta

Yahoo Publishing network (YPN) is in beta phase.Yahoo announced that it is taking a very limited number of new publishers at present but hopefully,YPN will be available to general public once the beta testing is completed.

To maximize your chances for approval (as per YPN)

• You have a valid U.S. Social Security or Tax ID number, and web site content that is predominately in English and targeted at a U.S. user base.
• Your site provides a good user experience. Please see our complete list of guidelines for a positive user experience here: https://publisher.yahoo.com/legal/prog_policy.php.
• Your site does not contain problematic content. Please see our guidelines for displaying our ad results here: https://publisher.yahoo.com/legal/prog_policy.php

Certainly it is a dissappointing news for larger number of overseas publishers who are waiting for YPN.But once YPN is launched to the public,everyone eligible can have it.On the other hand,Yahoo which announced that its profits have gone down by 61% when compared to last year,expects Panama and YPN to save the day.

How to get the Google and My Yahoo Buttons on your Site

If you do not know your Site Feed URL,and want to get the Add to Google and My Yahoo Buttons,

1.First Signup at feedburner.com
2.Copy paste your site URL at Feedburner and activate your site's feed URL.
3.Once you get your Feed URL,go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html
4.Copy and paste the Feed URL in the and click on 'Create HTML' Button.You will get the HTML code. Copy and paste that Code in your site where you want to see the Google Button.

For My Yahoo Button,Copy paste your Feed URL at http://my.yahoo.com/s/button.html the HTML code.Copy paste that code on your site to see the My Yahoo Button.

YPN - Better than Adsense

Yahoo is about to release 'The Yahoo Publisher Network' (YPN) which is said to be better than Adsense.We know that many people got their Adsense disapproved with some reason or the other (even i got it disabled when i was new to Adsense,now i dont place adsense ads because i have too many third party ads here and am not supposed to place adsense ads along with them),I think this is what all are waiting for.
You can have the details at YPN
Just create an account and wait for approval.