Author: Mike Melanson

Foursquare and Bravo announced a partnership today that will attempt to link Foursquare’s users with viewers of Bravo. New features will offer badges and special prizes when Foursquare users check in at locations featured in Bravo TV shows.

The partnership is likely an attempt by Foursquare to fend off competitors in a space it once held as its own but that has become increasingly crowded as of late.

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The location-based social networking service is barely a year old, but has already become one of the most popular in a booming sphere. Just last week, we heard rumors that Facebook was the latest in a line of big-time players getting on the location-based check-in wagon. Just last month, Yelp announced it was adding location-based check-ins to its service, causing many to wonder how the move would affect Foursquare.

Starting today, Foursquare has begun offering new badges when its users visit one of more than 500 locations featured in Bravo shows, including “The Real Housewives,” “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” “Top Chef,” “Kell on Earth,” “Top Chef Masters” and “Shear Genius.” In addition to these badges, Foursquare is now offering tips on restaurants, salons and other businesses from the stars of Bravo’s TV shows. The partnership puts Foursquare, which many had seen previously as a just-for-geeks type of app, directly in the sights of prime time viewers.

As the Bits Blog points out, this partnership will put Bravo and Foursquare on the forefront of attempts to merge mobile with TV, a direction that has proven difficult so far. The service does, however, seem custom tailored to Bravo’s programming, which focuses on fashion, food, and the out-on-the-town section of society.

“With Foursquare people leave content behind for others to find, like tips of the best drink at a bar,” said Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s chief executive, in Bits. “With shows that are tied to real locations in real cities enhancing this with content from contestants and judges on Top Chef or another Bravo show is going to make it even more interesting.”

We’re left wondering how Foursquare’s current user base will react to this move. Do they really want “Bravolebreties”, as Foursquare has dubbed them, suggesting drinks? Or was it the homegrown, user-created flavor that they liked about the service?

In the end, it may not really matter. The move may serve to distinguish the service from the increasing number of competitors while attracting a whole new user base and solidify Foursquare’s presence in the location-based check-in sphere. While the service may have become popular among the techie crowd, a partnership with a major cable network may vault Foursquare into a whole new level – the in-crowd.

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Let’s face it – the camera has become an integral part of our Web experience. We post pictures of beautiful sunsets to share with friends on TwitPic and we post videos of our kids dancing to James Brown on Facebook. And when we aren’t putting video or pictures on the Web, our friends are. They stream live video on Ustream of the concert we had to miss because we had work the next morning.

Minutes after the iPad announcement this morning, we all looked around and asked the same thing: Does it really have no camera?

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These days, we expect more and more that our devices will do everything we need. Take the iPhone, for example. It is a phone, mp3 player, Web browser and digital camera all in one. When Steve Jobs took the stage to announce the new iPad, he made one thing very clear. The iPad was not here to compete with netbooks, as netbooks, according to him, are simply less powerful laptops. We have to say one thing in defense of the netbook – at least it comes with a camera.

The lack of a camera on the iPad is a serious problem, we think. It cuts a big part of the “read, write, Web” we write about here right out of the equation. Are we really going to have to carry a separate camera with us and connect it to the iPad to get it onto the Internet? And what about Skype, undoubtedly one of the favorites when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family in far away places? Video chatting is out of the question.

Images and video are a big part of the interactivity on the Web that people have become used to, and we’re not sure how they’ll react to a device that, on the surface, seems like it should have these capabilities but is instead sorely lacking.

And all of this isn’t even taking into account one of the realms we’ve been most excited about for the upcoming year – Augmented Reality. We’ll have a few of AR’s top players weigh in on the iPad and its future tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that.

In the meantime, is the lack of a camera as big of a deal to you as it is to us? Will you just carry around a camera, too?

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While there are a million rumors over what Apple’s new tablet will do, from having a built-in web cam to doing your laundry (not really), we can be sure that it will at least have a color display and show pictures, right? These simple features would put it well ahead of the Kindle in the newspaper industry’s hopes of finding a savior in new technology.

A study out of the University of Georgia took a look at whether or not the Kindle would be a viable substitute for the traditional newspaper and it found the device lacking in a few key areas.

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The results were pretty much as expected: devices like the Kindle need some basic functionality, like color, photographs and touch screens, in order to bring readers back. According to the study, many of the respondents agreed that the Kindle was easy to read, but for many of the younger participants, the Kindle felt “old” and lacked many of the basic features, such as music and Internet access, they had become used to with smartphones.

Smartphones, on the other hand, while containing all of these features, are not designed for reading as a primary activity. They are made for portability and interactivity. So the size and continued portability of a tablet would allow for increased readability, while retaining the functionality of a smartphone. With the Kindle, users lamented the loss of the crossword and the comics, features we certainly could not do without, either.

We do wonder, however, if the issue of screen glare when being used outside will be addressed with this new tablet. Sunny or cloudy, we can see a newspaper just the same, but seeing an LCD display can very much depend on the lighting. At least we know a breezy day won’t be an issue, like with a newspaper, and reading on the subway should be, well, a breeze.

Just on these simple facts alone, Apple’s yet-to-be-announced tablet stands out as a much more viable option as a news reader, but even then, we wonder if it can make a difference.

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Web technology that replicates clunky, analog methods for organizing and interacting with information is a terrible practice and we’re glad to see one more example of it departing the Internet with LinkedIn’s new address book functionality hitting the site today.

While still in beta, the new function looks like a leap ahead of the old Rolodex-style functionality we’ve become used to never using.

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The redesign comes with a number of new features, including the ability to browse your connections by tag, company, location, industry and recent activity. This alone blows the old alphabetical organization style out of the water, but then, by adding the ability to interact with your connections and even perform batch functions, it actually moves into the realm of useful.

The redesign also comes with a search feature, which allows you to search by first name, last name or company. The new tag feature lets you organize your connections into custom groups, making it easier to keep track of who’s who.

Clicking on an individual connection opens up a mini preview of that person’s profile in a panel, which includes some standard information you would want to quickly access, like phone number, email address and all those other standards you would find on a business card. You can also select a number of users at the same time, to either edit their tags or send a bulk message.

You can try out the new features on your own account now or opt out if you’d like.

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SourceForge, one of the the primary distribution hubs of the open source software movement, has shut its doors to visitors from a number of countries, saying that it is working to become compliant with US laws. In a post yesterday, the site responded to rumors around the Twittersphere that various users from outside the US were unable to access the site.

The open-source movement has always been community based, working outside of standard boundaries and borders, and some see SourceForge’s move as going against those basic tenets.

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Here is the reasoning in SourceForge’s own words:

“Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list.”

The site began using automatic IP blocking last week and users from a number of countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, are now unable to access the site.

While some are calling foul and declaring that this is the death of the open-source movement, we have to assume that the technologically savvy users accessing the site would know how to get around a simple IP-based filter. Whether using a tool like Tor, or a proxy service like HotSpot Shield, it can’t be all that difficult to access the site.

The SourceForge blog post reminds that “in addition to participating in the open source community, we also live in the real world, and are governed by the laws of the country in which we are located.”

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Both YouTube and the White House announced today that this year’s State of the Union address will be broadcast on the YouTube channel Citizentube, as well as streamed live and broadcast to your iPhone. In addition to these Internet broadcasts, both announced that the average Joe or Jane Citizen would get a chance to ask the president some questions this time around, by way of a contest on Google Moderator.

Sounds like a great day for Internet democracy, right? We wonder if crowdsourcing is the way to get the hard-hitting, journalistic questions delivered to the president’s doorstep or if it will turn into yet another Internet meme. And even if the right questions get asked, will the format result in just another rehearsed, prepackaged answer?

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The whole thing starts on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET, when the State of the Union address broadcast begins, during which YouTube will open up a “Moderator series” for users to submit questions by either video or text, although, as it says, it prefers video. Users will then be given a few additional days to submit questions and vote on which questions they want to see the president answer. YouTube makes sure to note in its blog that all submissions are held to the guidelines under its Terms of Service.

The president will answer the top-voted questions in a live broadcast on a yet-unannounced date. That isn’t to say that the White House press team won’t be closely monitoring those questions over the days leading up to the live broadcast and carefully preparing answers. So while it sounds like a great idea, we would warn against getting too excited that Joe and Jane Citizen are finally going to have their day in the press box.

Internet Voting and the Digg/Reddit/4chan Effect

Using Google Moderator, users will be able to vote up and down questions, meaning that some of the most controversial questions may be buried, while the most average and mundane, and therefore most agreeable, may rise to the top. Then again, we can only wonder about the so-called 4chan or Reddit effect, where a group decides to use its numbers to drastically alter a poll. When social sites like these manage to rally the troops, the effect can be pretty substantial, like when Reddit, Digg and Fark managed to rickroll Shea Stadium. There are numerous examples, with some being funnier than others.

The last time the public was given the ability to ask President Obama some questions, NORML stormed the polls and put marijuana legalization at the front and center of the debate. Even then, however, Obama managed to just laugh off the question before moving on.

In the end, we’re glad to see the Internet being used to create dialogue between the president and the public, but it isn’t as if the State of the Union was hard to miss. Every major television network will be carrying the speech. The YouTube blog compares the opportunity for citizens to ask questions to Calvin Coolidge making history with the first publicly broadcast State of the Union. For our money, we’d much rather see the Prop 8 trial in California broadcast live on YouTube, as we were promised before the Supreme Court stepped in and blocked an earlier decision to show the trial.

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With new jobless claims rising unexpectedly, desperate job seekers can use any tool they can get. If you’ve ever spent any time job hunting, then you know how quickly those wanted ads can get filled, especially these days. What you need is something to let you know about job listings the second they’re posted.

Earlier todayTweetDeck announced it has partnered with Twitter-based job search engine TwitterJobSearch, and together they’ve created JobDeck, a specially branded version of TweetDeck that will happily “ding” at you every time a new job listing is posted on Twitter.

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If you’ve never used TweetDeck before, it’s a desktop application that can combine Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn into one central, off-Web location. For those of you already running TweetDeck, you’ll notice that the new version is basically an update that adds a bit of branding across the top and bottom of the screen and two new columns. The rest of your TweetDeck, with any custom columns or what have you that you may have added, will be just as they were before.

One column follows a list of “Job Search Experts”, a list containing 25 Twitter accounts of experts in the field. The other column shows all the tweets from @TwitJobSearch. Surely, you could just do this yourself, but the quick download makes it easy for the less savvy.

An article last year on Clickz.com noted that Twitter was becoming a cheap alternative for businesses to recruit new talent, so JobDeck just makes it a little easier to get on that train. The smartest part of the whole move, we think, might be that TweetDeck just cornered an unfortunately growing market – the unemployed.

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A host of reasons conspire against the general population in whether or not they use a cell phone – smart or otherwise – to use the Internet. According to research by UK-based Essential Research, 76% of mobile phone users don’t use their mobile to access the Internet and there are several barriers keeping them from doing so, whether actual or perceived.

The study, which focused on 2,000 people over the age of 16 living in the UK, found, among other things, that only 10% of mobile phone owners access the Internet on a daily basis. How can this be and why?

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The Majority: Unconnected and Unconcerned

While we might wonder who wouldn’t want to have a GPS-enabled Google Maps at their fingertips while they’re out and about or the ability to unchain themselves from a desk and still respond to those important work emails, the study finds that 60% of respondents claim their phone is not capable of accessing the Internet and just 30% of those respondents would like to change this fact.

Even the most basic phones offered these days have Internet capabilities, but the fact that people believe they don’t is key. In actuality, of those questioned, nearly 90% had at least GPRS internet connectivity. How can you lead a horse to water if the horse doesn’t believe there’s a path down to the stream?

In addition to this, cost and perceived usefulness are two of the biggest factors in keeping the mobile web at bay. Over three quarters of respondents said that they thought it was too expensive to use, while 60% said that the effort necessary to learn how to use a smart phone wasn’t worth it to them.

Who Is Using the Mobile Web?

A majority of mobile Internet users are young, affluent, urban-dwelling professionals. That is, they are on average between the ages of 16 and 34, living in a city and making more than $65,000 a year. Nearly three quarters of daily users are professionals.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest drivers of mobile Internet use is social media – web sites like Facebook and Twitter. For daily mobile-Internet users, 70% user their phones to access social networking sites.

Overall, the study seems to contrast the general hype around mobile Internet and serve as a gentle reminder that, while we may surround ourselves with the technologically affluent, this isn’t yet the norm for the whole of society. There is a definite demographic that uses the Internet on their mobile phones and, outside of that, it remains a costly, unusable, and unavailable option in the public’s eyes.

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As news of more aftershocks hitting the already devastated Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince keep coming in, YouTube and a laundry list of other web sites have announced that tonight’s “Hope for Haiti Now” benefit concert will be broadcast live on the Internet.

According to an AFP report, the Google-owned company will be joined by Hulu, MySpace, Fancast, AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Bing.com, BET.com, MTV.com, CNN.com, VH1.com and Rhapsody.

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Tonight’s benefit concert will help raise money for a number of organizations, including Oxfam America, the Red Cross, UNICEF, the UN World Food Program, Partners in Health, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and Yele Haiti, a charity foundation set up by the Haitian-born hip-hop star Wyclef Jean. Last week, we outlined a number of other legitimate avenues for helping with the situation in Haiti.

YouTube offered this video on its blog, previewing the benefit:

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The Russian cop who went on YouTube and alleged rampant corruption throughout the police force has been arrested on fraud charges today, according to the Associated Press. We first reported on his story in November, when the videos first appears, and then again in December when the fraud charges were filed against him.

According to the AP report, Russian courts sanctioned his arrest today on charges of embezzling $800 while working as a narcotics officer.

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Alexei Dymovsky first put his message on YouTube in early November of last year, in three separate videos, and quickly gained notoriety. The videos were viewed over 700,000 times within days of posting. In the YouTube videos, he accused superior officers falsifying reports for unsolved crimes and said he was promised a promotion to jail an innocent person.

Take a look for yourself at one of his videos here:

While Dymovsky has been arrested, we can only wonder if his YouTube popularity might save him from disappearing into a gulag on the outskirts of Siberia.

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While we recently reported that Google’s Nexus One had a slow start coming out of the gate, the Android operating system, which is spread across a number of devices, is not having the same issues. A report by Myxer, a mobile entertainment company with over 30 million members, says that visits to its mobile site by Android users grew 350% in 2009, strongly outpacing the iPhone, which grew 170% during the same period.

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While iPhone is shown to have grown from 3% to 4%, Android has jumped from 5% to 12%. In the fourth quarter of 2009, Myxer delivered seven times as much content to Android phones than iPhones.

When the report looks a little deeper into its numbers, it not only finds that the number of Android phones visiting the site have grown, but the number of phones running Android have too. During the fourth quarter alone, the number of Android devices doubled.

We think we can see this as more solid evidence that Android is going to offer some solid competition in the field of mobile OS.

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When we first looked at Spredfast, the social campaign management tool launched today by Austin, Texas-based Social Agency, we thought it looked like a less-flashy version of TweetDeck. Our first question to co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill was actually how the two programs differed and they took it in stride, given how far off the question really was. With big names like IBM, AOL, Cisco, Intel and Porter Novelli using the service, you better bet it does more than manage a handful of social networking accounts and microblogging services.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

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The entirely Web-based application is a full set of tools to not only manage and measure the message a company sends out among various social media, but also track the people who send the message. With fully customizable user roles and permissions, Spredfast looks like a great way to target multiple audiences on the Web from multiple directions. We think the key word here is multiple. This is a tool that can make a single person appear, to the average Web user, to be an entire community of people talking about your product.

Like single-user tools of this variety, such as TweetDeck or Ping.fm, Spredfast is set up to work with any of the standard social networks. In addition to that, however, it will work with a number of content management systems, from Drupal and WordPress to Movable Type. And with its user-role management, you can not only say who can post to what, but whether or not it can go live or needs to be reviewed by another user before being published. On-site scheduling and voice management allows a single tweet to be sent out and then be retweeted, in slightly altered forms, by any number of other accounts over time, creating the illusion of a discussion. We may never trust what we see people talking about on the web again.

In addition to multiple users, roles, networks and blogging platforms, Spredfast is also set to handle multiple campaigns. So, if ReadWriteWeb were to suddenly start using the system, for example, we could track activity for ReadWriteStart and ReadWriteEnterprise separately.

That brings us to the last point – tracking and metrics. As of now, the system has already incorporated Google Analytics and is looking to work with Armature and WebTrends in the near future. But even now, it offers full reports on the effectiveness of your message.

Campaigns are judged with three primary measurements – engagement, reach and activity. Put simply, these look at your interaction with your audience, the size of your audience, and how much you are pushing your message out onto the Web. Beyond these basic ranks, however, the system will give you detailed reports showing you how many “likes” you’ve gotten on a specific message on Facebook, or how many times a tweet has been retweeted. But that’s even just the tip of the metrics iceberg, as it keeps stats on each individual tweet, blog post, status update, what have you offering a full variety of data on click-throughs, impressions and whatever you would expect from a traffic analytics service.

Starting today, the system is available on a monthly basis starting at $50 per month, per campaign, for a single user. The “Enterprise” plan, at $100 per month, per campaign, allows for multiple users. Social Agency plans to announce another plan in February that will allow for unlimited users and campaigns, but the details for that are not yet available. For a program with this many features at launch, we only see it getting better.

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Mozilla announced today that the final version of Firefox 3.6 is now available for download, and we’re told the new Firefox is 20% faster than the last version with several new features to boot.

We’ve taken a look at all of the release candidates and now that the final version is here, we’re hoping it does everything Mozilla says it can.

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One of the biggest features Mozilla has been talking about, aside from all of the developer stuff we discussed when we looked at Release Candidate 2, is the Personas system. Personas is a theming system made easy as point and click. Personas lets you change the look of your browser from over 35,000 different themes, although we found many of them may be targeted to the teenage girl.

While you won’t see an automatic update for version 3.6 for a few weeks, the newest version is available for download.

And for the reading impaired, here’s a quick overview of the features from Mozilla:

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The big Hollywood pictures always make breaking into computers look like a fabulously hip and complicated process. It involves excitement and ingenuity and often times, because it’s just so difficult and exciting, a bit of sweat on the brow. But in reality, it’s as easy as “123456”. And if that doesn’t work, we’d suggest trying “12345”, next.

A report released today looks at a list of 32 million passwords and what it finds doesn’t saying good things about most of us and our password practices.

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The report, released by data security firm Imperva, works with real-world data to arrive at its finding. The 32 million passwords it uses as its data set were published on the Internet last month after being stolen from Rockyou.com.

Like children who won’t eat their vegetables, we obviously aren’t doing what we’re told when it comes to the basics of password security. While 30% of users chose passwords under the recommended minimum of six characters, 50% use common names, slang, and easy-to-guess things like consecutive series of numbers. Take a look at the top 20 passwords from the list below.

The report goes on to give a list of recommendations that, as it points out from the beginning, you probably won’t follow. Two previous studies of password-use, one in 1990 and another 10 years later showed that “password selection is strikingly similar.”

According to the data, a brute force attack would likely be able to access 1000 accounts in a mere 17 minutes.

Photo credit: danielleblue.

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Just in case you were thinking Mafia Wars or Farmville weren’t a big enough part of your daily life, Facebook has followed up on its promise and will now offer email notifications from applications. As we foretold in October, Facebook’s roadmap for developers contained several key points that would restructure the ways in which applications would be allowed to contact users.

But before you go diving off the deep end worrying about an inbox full of even more Facebook notifications, take a deep breath and remember that 1980s anti-drug campaign slogan and let it become your mantra – “Just Say No.”

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In its blog post announcing the feature, Facebook is careful to note that its users will retain control over who can contact them by email.

According to Inside Facebook, our favorite social network will offer users the ability to use a proxy email address so they don’t have to divulge their email address to external entities but can still receive the notifications by email.

Thanks to Facebook moving in the direction of sharing things by default, this move is surely going to prompt accusations that Facebook is invading people’s privacy. However, we think that as long as no information is shared by default, emailing application notifications should be okay.

What we really hope, though, is that some of our friends don’t permanently disappear into the Farmville abyss as they are constantly reminded that the cows are coming home.

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If you’ve spent any time trying to talk to a teenager lately, then the latest numbers on how much time they spend with their nose buried in a glowing screen of some sort will come as no surprise. Whether it’s text messaging, Tweeting, watching YouTube videos on their iPhone, lurking on a social networking site like Myspace or Facebook or doing something as old-fashioned as watching TV, teens are spending more time than ever before consuming some sort of media.

According to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation, those between the ages of eight and 18 devote just under eight hours a day to media consumption and, depending on how you look at it, that may be the least surprising of the numbers.

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The study consists of a survey of 2,002 3rd to 12th graders, ages eight to 18, with 700 of those respondents filling out a “media-use diary” for seven days. From these diaries, it found that respondents used media for an average of seven hours and 38 minutes during the survey period. However, due to multi-tasking – for instance texting while watching TV – teens actually crammed 10 hours and 45 minutes of media consumption into those approximately seven and a half hours.

What’s even more notable about these numbers is that the average teen has increased their media consumption by nearly two-and-a-quarter hours since the last survey, which was conducted in 2004.

Increased mobile media use and lax rules are two driving factors behind this growth in media consumption, the report says.

In a dramatic increase from 2004, cell phone ownership among the respondents jumped from 39% to 66%, while ownership of iPods and MP3 players jumped from 18% to 76%. Only about three in 10 had any rules regarding their use of these devices. And with cell phones becoming increasingly Internet-connected, their owners reported using them for media purposes more than their original purpose – actually talking to other people.

With teens spending more time with media in a week than the average person does at a full-time day job, we can only wonder what this next generation will look like as they enter the work force. Oh wait, are they called “bloggers”?

And to think, time spent texting was actually not included in the times for media consumption.

Photo of children on computer by Flickr user Erik Hersman.

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The New York Times confirmed today that beginning in early 2011 the company will adopt a paid model for its Web site, NYTimes.com. The move comes at a time when much of the newspaper industry is searching for a way to stop the bleeding brought on by the Internet and the accompanying smaller revenue streams that online advertising produces.

Many fear that putting content behind a paywall will just drive readers to other sources, but perhaps the Times’ approach will help to combat that issue.

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The company will adopt a different approach from the most famous example of a paywall, the Wall Street Journal, which offers just a paragraph or two for free while hiding the rest of the content for subscribers only. The Times will use what it is calling a “metered model”, which will allow users to gain free access to a yet undetermined number of articles per month before a subscription is required.

The announcement is light on details of the actual plan, such as the number of free articles, how much the subscription will cost or precisely how it will work, but one thing is for sure – New York Times readers are going to have to pay to play. The company’s press release does tell us, however, that subscribers to the print edition will continue have access to the online edition.

Notably, the Times’ model intends to “provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web,” according to the release. Acknowledging the nature of the Web, while trying to retain a profit, and hopefully keep paying hard-working journalists, sounds like a good method to us.

The move is something we’ve all seen coming, as more and more newspapers have shut down in recent years. By mid-2009, more than 100 newspapers had been shuttered with a number stopping the presses and going online-only in an attempt to remain in production.

As with most things of this nature, only time will tell if this new model will work. What do you think?

To read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of newspapers’ struggle in the 21st century, check out our Newspapers and Journalism archive.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.

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The whirlwind of news and rumors surrounding Google and its dealings in China seems to grow faster, more disjointed and more chaotic by the day. Today, Reuters reports that, in addition to looking at the Chinese government, Google is looking at the possibility that help came from within its own ranks in the recent hacking successes.

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According to Reuters, some employees in Google’s China offices have either been denied access to parts of the company’s internal network, transferred to other locations or put on leave. Google, however, remains tight-lipped, saying that it will not comment on “rumor and speculation”. The company also denies reports that the company shut down its offices in China last week.

It seems lately that much of the news about Google’s security situation in China consists of little more than rumor and speculation. Immediately after Google’s threat to include previously censored results in China, reports started coming in that the search engine had begun showing results that the Chinese government would consider sensitive. Google, however, remained firm on the fact that search results on Google.cn remained censored.

According to one source in China that we contacted on Friday, search results for such hot-button terms as “Falungong”, “Taiwan Independence” and “Tibet” included a number of previously censored sites, when searching in English. Today, however, searches for “Falungong” and “Dalai Lama” in both Chinese and English carried a disclaimer saying that according to Chinese laws, some results were not being shown.

This news comes alongside reports from the New York Times that “at least two foreign journalists living in Beijing have had their Google e-mail accounts hacked”. The hacked accounts, in much the same manner as other accounts, were forwarded to other accounts, where outside parties presumably intercepted the emails.

As for the accusations that these security breaches could have come from within Google itself, there is one notable difference – the company is not denying the claim outright, as it has with other “rumors and speculations”.

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Google announced today that it will offer free calls to Haiti through Google Voice to help connect Haitians with their families in other locations. The company’s announcement follows on the heels of Skype’s announcement yesterday that it would be emailing vouchers for $2 of Skype credit to its users in Haiti.

However, a United Nations Foundation worker told us this afternoon that the communication systems in Haiti were essentially unusable. It appears that the two companies have just joined the category of “awfully nice, generous, but somewhat impractical” ideas.

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Now this isn’t to say that Google is completely amiss on the subject of helping Haiti. The company has also set up a page to respond to the crisis in a number of ways, and has pledged to donate $1 million to relief organizations. But let’s take a look at what’s going on.

Skype’s blog post on the subject starts off by pointing out that “many people in Haiti are without landline or cell phone coverage since the earthquake.” If this is true, the same must be said for the Internet in Haiti.

Mozilla’s “Blog of Metrics” shared some statistics yesterday about Firefox usage in the country and the numbers don’t say good things for the state of the communications infrastructure.

The data is based on a once-daily ping from Firefox users in Haiti and is broken down on an hour-by-hour basis. The pings stopped at the time of the earthquake.

While both moves seem well-intentioned, we can only wonder how effective they might be.There are some reports of people using Skype to connect with family there, but from what we’ve seen of the satellite imagery on Google, this must be the exception more than the rule.

Update: The Word from the Ground

We spoke with Ingrid Madden from the U.N. Foundation this afternoon and she told us that communication systems in Haiti were essentially unusable.

“The only ones on our staff who have been able to make phone calls have satellite phones,” she said. “Even electricity is really hard to come by.”

She also told us that they have teams on the ground trying to set up satellite communications systems.

A first-hand account from an aid worker with the U.N. World Food Program in Haiti describes the technical difficulties they are facing in the region:

Some minutes later, we learned that Port-au-Prince was badly hit by an earthquake. We tried to contact the WFP country office by FoodSat phone, mobile phone and landlines without any success. Finally we got in touch with the HF radio on 3.xxx Mhz.

The account goes on to say that landline communications in the Port-au-Prince area are also completely down. Luckily, the worker found a satellite leftover from Hurricane Ike in 2008 in the back of a cybercafe.

For more information on how to help, the U.N. Foundation has issued a call for donations or you can visit their page directly.

Photo by WFP/ICT.

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In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.

Widget provider Gigya sent us some numbers from their social network login tool and in a three company competition, Facebook came away with 65% of the traffic, Myspace with 18% and Twitter with 17%.

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Gigya provides a number of widgets, from tools to share Web pages on social networks, to logging in to third party sites with your social network identity. Their widgets can be seen on sites like the Disney Store, ABC, Turner and Audible, and reach more than 250 million people each month.

Gigya also shared with us the numbers when two major email and search providers, Yahoo and Google, are thrown into the login mix. Facebook still comes out with a majority, 53%, of the logins, while Twitter takes second place with 14%. Google and Yahoo! sneak in with 12% each and Myspace stumbles in with only 9% of the take.

In their note to us, they made sure to mention that when a site offers more options for logging in, more people do, providing a greater variety of data on its customer base.

We’d like to see if and how these numbers might change as more companies come out with competition to Facebook Connect and become more noticeable.

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