Facebook reached the 500 million user mark this week, making Facebook’s population just a bit smaller than that of North America. PC World published a witty posting this week to commemorate Facebook’s milestone, check it out.

Dell to Pay $100 Million Settlement

Michael S. Dell and several former executives of the software company have agreed to pay more than $100 million for fraud charges brought on by the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the claims, Dell misled investors by spending investments they received from Intel to pay their quarterly earning statements. According to Christopher Conte, associate director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, “Dell manipulated its accounting over an extended period to project financial results that the company wished it had achieved but could not. Dell was only able to meet Wall Street targets consistently during this period by breaking the rules.”

Yahoo! Reports Disappointing Quarterly Profits

Yahoo! reported a second quarter net revenue of $1.13 billion, falling short of analysts’ expectations of $1.16. The company reported that the reports reflected a decrease in  advertising spending in June.

Microsoft Reports Healthy Increase in Profits

Microsoft reported a 48% in profits in their fourth fiscal quarter with help from Windows and Office operating systems. The company reported on Thursday a net income of $4.5 billion, at 52 cents a share and a year to year revenue improvement of 22% from $13.1 billion to $16.04 billion. Despite these optimistic numbers, shares of Microsoft stock fell immediately after the announcement. To read more on the growing doubt behind Microsoft’s abilities to compete with the likes of Apple, check out John C Abell’s article on Wired.com.

This Week’s Must Read Blog Articles

“If you’re happy and you know it, and you really want to show it, send a tweet.”

Resident tech writer at the New York Times, Nick Bilton, reported this week on an interesting research project, conducted by Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Sciences and the Harvard Medical School that uses tweets to gauge America’s happiness levels at different times of the day and week.  The paper, entitled “Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Through the Day Inferred From Twitter,” is based on more than 300 million tweets collected between September 2006 and August 2009.

The State of the Android Ecosystem

This is a great article for anyone whose been following the Google Android project. Christ Head’s article takes an in depth look into the state the Android platform, probing at the challenges manufactures, carriers and Google face with the smartphone.

Skype Finally Breaks Free on the iPhone

Eliot Van Buskirk authored an article this week on Wired.com’s Epicenter blog, announcing that iPhone users will now be able to use the call feature of the app on their phones. This is a big announcement, as the application has been limited to messaging for years. Buskirk’s article discusses what this announcement actually means for users and weighs in on the recent Fring break up.

Google announced on Monday its new tool, the App Inventor for Android, which is designed to enable non-programmers to create apps that will run on Google’s smartphone operating system. Although many bloggers are claiming that this could be a massive game changer for Google’s struggling Android and the mobile realm at large, I suggest checking out Eric Lai’s blog on ZDNet, in which he questions the promise of DIY programming tools and takes a hard look at Android’s future.

Google Tops Revenue Expectations, but Profits Fall Short

Google grew both revenue and profits in the second quarter, surpassing revenue forecasts, but falling just short of profit predictions. Google generated $6.82 billion in the quarter up 24% year-on-year. Net income was at $1.84 billion, at $5.71 per share, while on a pro-forma basis, net income was at $2.08 billion, or $6.45 per share, falling short of the $6.52 predictions set by financial analysts.

Microsoft Improves Facebook Integration with Outlook

Microsoft’s Social Connector plug-in was updated this week, now allowing users to access messages, photos, wall posts and more from Facebook within Outlook. Microsoft has been steadily adding social media platforms to its Social Connector plug-in, starting with LinkedIn, MySpace and Twinbox for Twitter.

Facebook’s Mobile Usage Increases by 50% Since April 2010

Facebook’s mobile user base has reached an astonishing 150 million users, up 50% from April. Increasing their mobile base is an integral part of Facebook’s growth  strategy. As Eric Tseng stated in a presentation at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco. “We want to turn this whole mobile platform into a Facebook. Mobile is fast becoming our growth lever. As we begin to continue to expand, we’re starting to go into geographies where phones are the predominant way you access the web. Mobile is a way we can get users to be aware of and engage with social services.”

Google’s New Matchtype Goes Global

Google announced on Wednesday that its new broad match modifier will be implemented globally across most languages. The global launch was approved after a successful open beta test in the U.K. and Canada that began in May 2010. To read more on how this could impact your PPC campaign, check out Alex’s Campbell’s article Adwords+ New+ Matchtype.

Must Read Blog Articles:

Google’s Latest Move Toward Social Shopping

Paul Burani authored an article this week on SearchEngineWatch that discusses the new emphasis Google is placing on seller ratings in their advertisements. These ad extensions, Burani argues, not only give incentive to advertisers to adhere to Google’s best practices , but will also provide Google’s engineers with a better understanding of user search behavior.

Apple Snapping up Small Tech Firms

As Ryan Kim notes in his article, Apple does not have, unlike Google, a track record of aggressively collecting small tech firms, that is, until recently. Only six months into 2010, Apple has already purchased it’s sixth company. Although they haven’t revealed the overall strategy behind these acquisitions, Kim points out in his article the one consistent theme: mobile.

Twitters Early Bird Ploy Takes Flight

In an article published on the Wall Street Journal tech blog, Amir Efrati reviews Twitter’s @earlybird’s first week out in the advertising world and takes a closer look into the advertisers that have already jumped on board.

The Hamburg data protection agency has launched a formal investigation into Facebook’s data policy. The agency claims that Facebook keeps information about non-users without their permission, which is assumed to be gathered through Facebook’s ‘invite’ feature. Johannes Caspar, who runs the privacy agency in Hamubrg, issued an official letter to Facebook on Wednesday. Facebook has yet to respond.

Twitter Launches @earlybird

Twitter launched its new @earlybird account this week, dedicated to serving followers with special deals and ‘earlybird’ coupons. Here’s how it works: Twitter will serve followers of the @earlybird account with special, timely offers from businesses that pay to be in the stream. The account currently has 13,000 or so followers, but that number is bound to grow in time.

What’s interesting about the prospect of the @earlybird is that it may be the first real opportunity for Twitter to capitalize on its growing search base. If the first @earlybird account works as imagined, it could lead to more specific accounts for competitive verticals, like flights, auto insurance, technology offers and so on.

Twitter’s the World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone revealed that Twitter serves more than 24 billion search a month, making it the fastest growing search engine, ahead of Bing’s approximate 4.1 Billion and Yahoo’s 9.4 billion searches.

Apple and Google Fight on the App Front

Google improved the mobile version of the YouTube website this week. The upgrade to m.youtube.com is, according to Google’s blog post on the topic, really fast and incorporates “larger, more touch-friendly elements, making it easier to access videos on the go,” as well as, “the features and functionality you’ve come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists, the ability to designate “favorite,” “like” or “unlike” videos directly from your device.” If the new mobile interface proves to be as good as it sounds, it could make Apple’s YouTube iPhone app obsolete.

YouTube Introduces Leanback

On Wednesday, YouTube announced the beta launch of their new YouTube Leanback service. According to the YouTube’s blog, the new service is more specifically tailored to the interests, tastes of individual users. According to the blog, “YouTube Leanback is all about letting you sit back, relax and be entertained. Videos tailored to your interests play as soon as you visit the site and they play in full screen and high definition, continuously. There’s no need to click, search, or browse, unless you want to, of course. Watching YouTube becomes as easy as watching TV.”

Facebook’s User Growth Plateaus

Facebook’s growth seems to have lost a bit of steam in the last month. According to the monthly growth data published by Inside Facebook, Facebook only gained 320,000 new U.S. users in June 2010 — a dramatic drop from the 7.8 the site accumulated last month. Ryan Singel, from Wired.com, takes a closer look at the causes behind this drop, asking if Facebook’s privacy problems have played a role, or whether Facebook’s U.S. population is simply saturated.

Search Market Share Number: June 2010

Hitwise, a British search marketing analytics firm, released their search market numbers for June 2010. According to their report, Bing gained 7 percent last month, stealing 1 percent from Google’s market share. Google, however, still accounted for 71.7% of U.S. searches conducted last month.

Google News’s Makeover

Google News got its first real makeover in eight years this week. The service, which was previously categorized into Top Stories, World Science/Technology, Health & Sports, now caters towards “News for you,” which encourages users to edit, add, personalize and socialize their news options. As of Wednesday, users now have the option to choose the news channels they want to view first, add additional sites and delete others. Most importantly, Google’s new news service encourages users to share articles via email, Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook.

Google Me Rumors

There is an interesting rumor floating around the tech blogosphere this week that suggests that Google maybe cooking up a Facebook-like social media service. The rumor started with a deleted tweet from Digg CEO Kevin Rose,”Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon “Google Me”, very credible source,” which has lead to some serious speculation from industry chatter boxes, who all point out that Google has tried its hand at social media several times- with Orkut, Buzz and Google Profiles- with little success.

Their main problem is obviously Facebook and Twitter’s overwhelming dominance in the social media realm. In order for Google to succeed, they will have to come up with a master social network that enables users to integrate their social experience across the web, rather than confining them to individual channels, like Facebook or Twitter.  As Ryan Singel, a staff writer at Wired.com, speculates, “The only way Google could put a dent into Facebook is to go after it the same way it’s gone after Microsoft — open and free with no centralized data collection and a decision that it doesn’t have to own your data. Sure, Google will closely tie in a bunch of its own products, but it can’t go the Buzz way and require you to have a Google ID or Gmail address.” Google did start off the New Year with social media as one of their main goals. Do you think its possible to ‘put a dent’ into Facebook? What are your thoughts on how Google could best attack the likes of Twitter and Facebook?

ReputationDefender Secures Venture Capital

Based out of Redwood City, ReputationDefender sets out to help individuals and small businesses take control of their online identities. This week the company secured $15 million in venture capital, with which the company plans to expand its management team and develop new products. The security savvy start-up is a subscription based business, charging its customers $9.95 a month to manage their online identities and protect their privacy.  Such security measures include removing customers from marketer databases and deleting unfavorable online content.

Foursquare Raises $20 Million in Venture Capital

One of the most talked about location-based social media platforms, Foursquare, raised $20 million in venture capital this week from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $95 million. To read more about the growing significance of location-based social media platforms, check out Kate Shaw’s article and corresponding white paper on The Search Agent’s blog.

Facebook Tightens Security on App Developers

After months of pressure to improve their privacy setting and grant more control to users, Facebook launched a new service that forces third-party app developers to request and receive users’ permission to access their data. According to Bret Taylor, CTO at Facebook,  ”With this new authorization process, when you log into an application with your Facebook account, the application will only be able to access the public parts of your profile by default. To access the private sections of your profile, the application has to explicitly ask for your permission.”

Whether this will be enough to claim the nerves of the ACLU, Consumer Watchdog, Consumer Action, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and more remains to be seen.

ComScore released its May 2010 research on online video viewing on Wednesday, revealing that YouTube continues to dominate the growing arena of online viewership. According to the report, YouTube showed 14.6 billion videos in the month of May, accounting for 43.1% of the 34 billion total videos viewed this month by 183 million Web users. Hulu ranked second with 1.2 billion videos, followed by Microsoft, Vevo and Viacom.

Facebook Introduces New VP of Global Policy

Facebook announced this week its hiring of Marne Levine, former chief of staff of the National Economic Council, as its new VP of Global Policy. Levine, who will be based out of Washington D.C., will oversee Facebook’s relationships with international governments and organizations, representing the social network’s interests on copyright, children’s security and privacy issues.

Twitter to Experience More Outages During FIFA World Cup

Since the start of the FIFA World Cup two weeks ago, Twitter has experienced several system outages due to increased traffic from soccer fanatics across the globe. Users are warned to expect several outages during this weekend’s biggest games- Germany vs. England,  U.S.A. vs. Ghana, and Argentina vs. Mexico.

Google’s Android Winning Traction in App Development

According to a report in BusinessWeek on Wednesday, Google’s Android system is winning in the ongoing battle over app developers. According to a survey conducted by Appcelerator, the Android is experiencing the most promising long-term potential among smartphone operating systems. Although Apple’s iOS system continues to dominate the smartphone sector, Android operated devices acquires 100,000 users daily and, according to researcher Garnter Inc., the Android will surpass iOS as the world’s second most popular operating system by 2010.

Google to Enter Music Business (Rumored)

This week rumors emerged that the search giant Google may enter the music industry and produce a subscription based service to compete with Apple’s iTunes. According to Scott Morrison from the Wall Street Journal, “Google Inc. is preparing to roll out a music download service tied to its search engine later this year, followed by an online subscription service in 2011, according to people familiar with the Internet giant’s discussions with the music industry.” According to an article published in Rolling Stone, Google’s music service is rumored to focus heavily on a shift to the ‘cloud’ computing system. Rather than accessing music through services like Rhapsody or Spotify, Google’s service may enable users to access music via remote servers in an open, search-like environment.

Twitter Settles with FTC

Twitter reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week in a case over Twitter’s privacy policy. Charges were brought against the micro-blogging site last year, when Twitter allowed hackers to view private “tweets” and send fake messages from the then-President elect Obama’s, Fox news’ and others’ accounts.

Suggested Blogs/Articles/Podcasts:

• On this week’s NYTimes Tech Talk Podcast, Bettina Edelstein sits down with Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, and Ed Sanders, senior marketing manager for YouTube, to discuss their most recent collaboration to bring Art videos to YouTube through a project called “YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video.”
• Kevin Kelleher authored a witty post this week on gigiacom.com entitled “App Creep and the Case for the Mobile Browser,” in which he discusses the overwhelming number of available mobile apps and the need for a functional mobile browser.
• Dan Tynan poses the question of whether Facebook would be able to offer a better privacy policy if they charged for their services.

This week, the green monster of jealously reared its ugly head with Google’s homepage design looking suspiciously similar to another search engine’s – Bing. Google’s typically white background exploded with vivid photographs this week, as Google attempted to spruce up its typically minimalist style. The style apparently confused, and even outraged, several users prompting Google to drop the switch.

No More ‘Tweets’ in The New York Times

The New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett banned the term “tweet” from articles in the publication. According to Corbett, “Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.”

Twitter Acquires Analytics Company

Twitter acquired the analytics company Smallthought Systems’ Trendy this week. Smallthought System’s technology enables website owners to access information from their Google Analytics account. Their technology will be integrated into Twitter’s own analytics system and will be used to develop new products.

Yahoo Expands Facebook Integration

On Monday Yahoo announced further Facebook integration features that will enable users to link their accounts across networks. The integration also includes a new “privacy dashboard,” called Yahoo Pulse, that will make it easier for users to control how and with whom they share their data across both platforms. To read more about Yahoo and Facebook’s latest integration, check out Ryan Singel’s article on Wired.com.

Twitter Outage

Twitter experienced several outages this week on Wednesday and Thursday. Users were served an automated message from Twitter’s whale mascot stating, “We are experiencing site availability issues — additional latency and errors — this morning. We’re working to address these issues.”

Facebook Continues to Receive Criticism Regarding Privacy Policy

For weeks now Mark Zuckerberg has been heavily criticized for his apparent apathy regarding users’ privacy rights and the flaws in the social media network’s privacy policy. Although nothing new happened this week on the Facebook privacy front, the blogosphere has been erupting with new criticism.

Here’s is some of the must-read commentaries on Facebook’s policy and Mark Zuckerberg’s public image:

1. Rich Jaroslovsky authored an article this week on Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek website entitled Facebook Founder Has Nothing to Hide Except Privacy Blind Spot, in which he poses the question, “Just what is it with Mark Zuckerberg and privacy?”
2. National Public Radio’s book review of David Kirkpatrick’s newly published book The Facebook Effect that investigates, among other things, the impact of Facebook on internet privacy norms.
3. Nicholas Carlson takes a look at all the ‘stupid things’ Mark Zuckerberg has said to date regarding Facebook’s privacy.

Google missed the deadline with German regulators to hand over personal data collected over WiFi connections by Google’s StreetView cars and bikes. The delay will cost Google hundreds of thousands of euros of fines and has already increased pressure and suspicions from Germany and the European Union.  Google argues that they want to comply, but German law prohibits them from handing over private information. According to Google, “We want to co-operate with [the Hamburg information commissioner's] requests … but as granting access to payload data creates legal challenges in Germany which we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal and logistical process for making the data available. We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue.” Google refusal to hand over this information to the German government is creating quite a stir on the continent. As Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International told the NYTimes, “Google’s refusal to hand over the data will be seen as a declaration of war by European regulators. This is about sovereignty and a country’s right to determine on its citizens’ behalf what is right and what is wrong.”

Facebook Revises Privacy Policy

After weeks of heavy criticism from users and privacy defenders, Facebook has revised their privacy policy to be easier to navigate, and provide users with more control over their private information. For the complete story, including the details of Facebook’s revisions, critics feedback and more, check out The Search Agents’ article Facebook Introduces New Privacy Controls.

Google Buys AdMob

Google closed the $750 million deal on its acquisition of AdMob. The next step will be to bring the two teams together to improve on Google’s mobile strategy. According to the blog, “It’s clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients’ and partners’ strategies and with this acquisition, it’s now a central part of our own business.” The deal is being seen as a push from Google to incorporate more search into mobile. On this note, Google writes, “As smart phones have proliferated, we’ve seen dramatic increases in mobile search volume. Over the past two years, Google’s mobile search volumes have grown more than fivefold, at an accelerated pace,”

Apple Passes Microsoft as #1 Tech Company

It was a revolutionary week on Wall Street, as Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable technology company. The torch was passed on Wednesday when Apple’s value reached $222.12 billion, beating Microsoft at $219.18 billion. As The New York Times notes, Wall Street has just witnessed the end of an era and the beginning of the next one: The most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand.

Third Grader Wins Google Doodle Contest

Google named Makenzie Melton the winner of its fourth annual doodle contest on Wednesday. Ms. Melton will receive a $15,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for her school in El Dolaro Springs, Missouri.

Google Buzz Adds Reshare Option

Google added a new reshare option to its social-conversation service Buzz. The new option functions similarly to retweet, allowing users to reshare information to their own networks without having to cut and paste.

At a press conference held at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s publicly criticized CEO, stated that he and his colleagues had heard the feedback and criticism they had received over the last several weeks and had implemented it to make a more efficient, user-friendly privacy policy.  “The No. 1 thing we heard is the settings have gotten complex and it has become hard for people to use them and control their information,” Zuckerberg said. “We listened to the feedback and agreed with them.” Facebook claims the new privacy settings will make it easier for users to elect what information they share and with whom. As Zuckerberg stated on Wednesday, “Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.”

Let’s take a look of those three points in a bit more detail:

• Easier defaults settings
  • This speaks to the overall simplification of Facebook’s privacy settings and an improvement of the general navigability of the system. In other words, users are no longer required a degree in semantics in order to understand who, how and where their information will be published.
• Restoring the option of a private profile
  • This reflects one of the more problematic changes Facebook implemented in April 2010 and received a lot of criticism. Back in April Facebook removed its users’ ability to choose who could see their personal information, such as interests. A user’s current city, hometown, education, work and like and dislikes were all put under the header of “connections” and were to be shared with the public. The idea behind this change, according to Facebook, was that it would enable users to more easily find like-minded “friends” on the web.
  • With the new privacy settings, users now have the option to censor the “connections” part of the profile.
• “App gap”
  • The “app gap” was coined by the American Civil Liberties Union and refers to a change Facebook made in December 2009 that required users to share information with third-party applications. The concern with the app gap is that users didn’t have the choice to share their information.
  • The new policy allows users to opt out of sharing personal information with apps. However, many critics feel that the new policy still violates personal privacy rights, because choosing the protection feature disables all applications, rather than just the ones you distrust.

Initial impressions do suggest that Facebook has made privacy settings simpler and easier to understand. Whereas before users had to navigate between 8 pages of options, 50 settings with 170 separate options, the new privacy policy has 8 pages and only 15 settings. Indeed preliminary screen shots suggest that Facebook’s privacy controls will become more transparent as the changes are integrated over the next few weeks.

Here’s a screen shot of Facebook’s new privacy setting menu:

For those of you who aren’t Facebook addicts, this image suggests a major improvement over the old privacy setting system. The ‘before’ screen shots don’t do justice to how overly complicated the system was.  I highly suggesting checking out the map the New York Times published last week on their tech blog that charts the previously 5,830 word long policy to understand just how tangled the experience was.

While it seems promising that Facebook, and specifically Zuckerberg, is taking to heart the concerns of their over 500 million users and government officials, many critics seem skeptical about whether these modifications will generate real change. Moreover, these changes don’t directly speak to one of the major concerns regarding Facebook, namely whether or not the site shares personal information with third party sites, i.e. marketers.

This became a major issue when Facebook introduced its Open Graph Protocol back in April, which enables third party sites to directly connect with users’ profiles. Many critics, specifically the ACLU and several U.S. Congressmen, have argued that this is a direct violation of users’ privacy rights and a violation of an assumed privacy relationship. Facebook executives have adamantly argued that the Open Graph Protocol and “Like” button are not designed for monetary gain, but rather to enrich user experience. As Debbie Frost, U.S. Director of Facebook’s Public Affairs stated in a recent press conference, “There are lots of rumors floating around that the more you share [on Facebook], the more money we make. That’s just wrong. Advertisers target people according to their [listed] interests. They only get anonymous reports, not personal information,” However, whether the new changes prove sufficient in prohibiting the sharing of private information to advertisers, and alleviating critics of their concerns, remains to be seen.

What is your take on the state of Facebook’s privacy issues? Are the new changes sufficient enough to quiet down critics or does the social networking site have to modify their policies according to privacy norms?

The opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues.  Everywhere else I’ve worked, Marketing has been an important function, but not core to the operation.  In my role at The Search Agency, I have the opportunity to interact with some of the some of the brightest minds in online marketing and see how they drive results for companies in a wide range of industries.  Online marketing is so dynamic and it’s fascinating to see the best practices continue to evolve.  I could never gain that perspective working at a typical B2B company.

Question: Congratulations on the one year anniversary of our blog, The Search Agents. You recently authored a blog post discussing the 10 most important lessons you learned over the last year in running the blog. What’s the most important of these lessons for marketers to consider when starting their own corporate blogs?

Make sure your content is topical and non-promotional, make sure you have the resolve and resources to keep it going, and make sure you engage as many people in the organization as possible to contribute.   The breadth of perspectives really makes our blog unique.   That comes from having a lot of really smart, insightful people willing to make the time to contribute.  If you give everyone a forum to share their experience (and make it easy for them to participate), you can create some valuable content to drive your inbound marketing efforts.  If you only have a few people writing all the posts, eventually they will get burned out and the content will grow stale.

Question: Besides the blog, what new marketing initiatives are you excited about?

We just launched a contest to give The Search Agent an identity.  We’ve had this anonymous mascot for about a year now.  So we finally decided to take him out of the shadows and give him a persona.  I invited everyone in the company to submit their stories and I was absolutely blown away by the response.  I had to narrow it down to five entries, and they are up on the blog for voting.  Please take a look and cast your vote in the comments.  Once we have decided who the search agent really is, we’ll feature him in some short videos and continue to build his biography.

Question: As our resident “social media hater,” how do you interpret Facebook’s recent privacy issues?

I think I prefer the term “social media abstainer.”   I definitely don’t hate social media; I love it for business networking and as a marketing vehicle, and recognize that it has connected the world in immensely powerful ways.  I just don’t want to live my life with such transparency, and don’t have the time to actively manage a private and public persona.  And the fact that you need to manage both is where Facebook has really missed the mark.  My guess is the majority of Facebook users barely understand the Facebook privacy settings and implicitly trust that their personal wouldn’t be shared, unless they overtly chose to make it public.   It seems Facebook takes the exact opposite view – that the default setting should be “public,” and the user should have to decide what becomes private.   Hopefully the new privacy features they rolled out this week will make it easier.

Question: What are your interests outside of online marketing?

I spend most of my non-work time with my family.  I have two young boys that I’m brainwashing into rooting for the Dodgers, Lakers, and UCLA.  My wife and I try our best to minimize their video game and computer time and spend more time together outside – at the beach, skiing in Mammoth, and playing soccer.   I like to go running in the morning which gives me a chance to clear my head, come up with new ideas, and catch up on my favorite podcasts.

Google has been the topic of several conversations this week, ranging from industry gossip to threats of criminal investigation, regarding their recent privacy breach. This week Sergey Brin admitted that Google’s Street View had accidentally gathered personal information via people’s private Wi-Fi connections. Google has gone out of its way in terms of damage control, insisting that the information will never be released or used by the company. Google also claims that it is working with the government on the best way to dispose of the information.

Despite these apologies, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, stated this week, at the Zeitgeist conference in the UK, that there was “no harm, no foul” in the company’s collection of web activity via people’s Wi-Fi. Schmidt continued on to say, “Who was harmed? Name the person.”

Google seems to be alone in their opinion that the data collection was a victimless crime. Two class action suits have already been filed in Oregon and Washington. Representatives Edward Markey and Joe Barton have brought this issue before the Federal Trade Commission, calling into question the legality of Google’s actions. In Germany, France, Spain and Italy criminal investigations are already underway.

To read more about the implications of Google’s privacy breach, I would suggest “Privacy and the Internet: The Lives of Others,” an article published in The Economist this month that takes a critical look into the new state of privacy in the era of Facebook and Google.

Google Tries to Take The Lead in Their Competition With Apple

Google held their annual I/O Conference this week, where they announced their plans to release an Android 2.2 (Android Froyo) for phones with Flash support, Google TV, web-synced apps and music. While in the past, Apple has out paced Google in the synchronization of music, television, mobile and more, Google obviously is trying to make it a two-horse race. As Gizmado reports, “Google, too, has a hunger for domination, but they’ve finally got vision of their own to accompany it: A vision of cellphones and desktops connected seamlessly—revolutionarily, magically—over the internet; a vision of media that streams when you need it, and disappears when you don’t; a vision that sees TV as an extension of the internet, not simply a dumb screen.”

Other news from the  Google I/O Conference:

• Google provided new details on their Chrome Web Store. Sundar Pichai, the director of product management for Google, revealed some information to reporters regarding the marketplace. According to Pichai, Google’s plan is to have the store launch with support for Chrome/Chrome OS, however rumors have it that Google is in talks with other browsers. Developers will reportedly receive 70% of the revenue from apps.
• Google has been getting friendly with Adobe. At the conference, Google announced a new video format- VP8, which will be supported by Adobe. Another stab at Apple?

Bits

1 in 5 U.S. Conumsers Plan to Buy an iPad

• The latest customer reports suggest that 1 in 5 U.S. consumers plan to purchase an iPad, eventually. Almost 3,400 customers were polled by ChangeWave Research, which found that 7% of consumers asked were “very likely” to buy an iPad at some point, and 13% were “somewhat likely.”

Dell Posts 52% Increase in Profit

• Dell reported their first-quarter results on Thursday, a pleasant 52% improvement over their last quarter. The improvement still pales in comparison with the quarterly results of other leading tech companies, like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Intel. Analysts suspect that Dell’s profits suffered as a result of limited corporate spending.

Facebook Privacy Concerns, Leading Users to Quit?

• A survey conducted by Sophos revealed that 60% of Facebook members are thinking of quitting the site due to privacy concerns.

Twitter Fights Subpoena

• Pennsylvania’s attorney general requested on May 6 that Twitter reveal the identifies of two of its users. A grand jury subpoena ordered Twitter to give up the identifies of “casablancapa” and “bfbarbie” both of whom reportedly criticized the Pennsylvania attorney general, Tom Corbett. A group of advocates is working with the American Civil Liberties Union on the case, claiming “any subpoena seeking to unmask the identity of anonymous critics raises the specter of political retaliation.”