The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

Twitter, the fledgling social networking service founded in 2006 has grown in popularity. Now the regular online hang out of A-List celebs, multinational companies, journalists, politicians, and described as “the sms of the internet”. Users such as Ashton Kutcher have over 5.3 million followers at time of writing. In total, the service currently has around 190 million users, and has received large investments from private equity firms. The firm is currently valued at over $1 billion.

However, while it certainly has the audience, does it actually have the ability to generate revenue? The service carries no adverts, and charges users nothing for the service. Some third-party companies have tried to monetise the service; companies such as Izea who run sponsoredtweets.com. This company pays users to post tweets about other companies. But is a community of advertising posts what users want? Also, while this may earn Izea a profit, it doesn’t help Twitter.

It seems to me that perhaps Twitter will reach a ceiling, where it has too many users, and too higher overheads to keep running a worthwhile operation. And perhaps it’s financial backers will see this also. Either way, Twitter needs to start focusing on making themselves a viable, profitable company, and less of Freeinternet.com.

Follow me on Twitter, jmkuk.

JK

Ads: they seem to be everywhere! Ad banners, popups, interstitials. They are never ending; a huge part of the web’s great commerce. However, these ads may be taking more from you then you realize.

Google, eBay and many millions of other sites use ads that spy on us: they find out what we are looking at, where we live, and a whole lot more. Google scans emails sent and received in Gmail, eBay uses are account information.

But what gives them the right? We haven’t asked for those ads, and we haven’t agreed with them, that prying on us and invading our privacy is ok.

A new ad site that has sprung up is Phorm. It already has agreements with BT,Virgin and other UK ISPs, that allows it to look at your live browsing history, and serve appropriate ads. The service isn’t yet live, but will be shortly. In my opinion, this is a direct invasion of our privacy. What gives Phorm the right?

Internet Advertising is now a valuable commodity, with many sites providing free services in return for the ads. Examples are Facebook and Spotify. While it’s great that we can get these free services, it is not ok with me, that these ads are spying on me. I should complain; if only I knew who to…?  

JK

Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular browser, with a 68% market share has now been upgraded to version 8, with the Release Candidate now available. With the upcoming lunch of Windows 7 which will be bundled with IE8, the European Union is launching an antitrust case.

An article on the BBC news website says the following:

"Microsoft does have the advantage of its browser being shipped with its operating system so people that want to shift have to do a lot of work to shift," said Mr MacDonald, a vice-president of analyst firm Gartner.

The EU last week accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its IE browser with its Windows operating system.

I personally think this is ridiculous, and is fueling these antitrust claims. Switching to Firefox, Safari or Opera is easy! It’s just a matter of downloading the program, and taking a minute to install it. Plus, a lot of OEM Manufacturers bundle Firefox with their PCs anyway.

I don’t see the problem with using Internet Explorer anyway. IE8 RC1 is a fine browser, and for those who want to switch, they can. It’s not like the browsers make profit for Microsoft or Mozilla. The EU should spend their time doing something more worthwhile.

JK

So YouTube have widened their videos, with the introduction of HD. People have been complaining about it like nobody’s business. It’s change! Let’s deal with it.

JK

ChaCha are a fairly new company, in the Question and Answer market. Basically, US users text in any questions they like, free, and ChaCha texts back the answer.

How they do this, is using “Guides”; knowledgeable individuals, who get paid to reply to the questions through the ChaCha web portal. For every answer, they get paid $0.10; the top guides getting twice as much.

Out of curiosity, I tried to become a guide earlier today. Unfortunately, they rejected me at the first questioning stage; the ChaCha Fitness Stage. The topic? ChaCha.

Of course, I had no idea. To be honest, the founder of the company, the place that it was announced and the company’s ethos do not really interest me in the foggiest.

I can imagine how important to an American when their out-and-about to find out that “Cha” means dance in Chinese, and Scott Jones invented the concept. Wow.

I also fail to see how ChaCha actually makes any money. Users don’t have to pay anything to the company to text in, and the texts don’t have ads. Great business model.

JK 

Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Chrome, a new web browser, from the company whose business is the web.

The news spread across tech sites like the plague, with everyone waiting to try the browser. But is it really better than Internet Explorer?

I’ve been using the software for a few hours now, just going around doing my usual things, checking email, catching up with friends and watching video.

The first thing I noticed was the sleekness of the software’s interface. The way new tabs open up is all very mac-ish, and the way the window integrates with Vista’s glass interface is all very streamlined.

Video works, just as well as in IE or Firefox, and everything seems to work, even pluggins not designed for the new browser. I tested YouTube and BBC iPlayer, which worked perfectly. However, the Channel 4 Watch Online service failed to work due to Google Chrome not having a Windows Media Pluggin. 

Another great feature is the address bar itself, which gives very intuitive guesses at what it is you want, as soon as you begin to type.

The New Tab Page in Chrome is a great development. In IE, all you get is a useless About Tabs page, but in Chrome, you get a lot of info: snapshots of your history and past searches, and your bookmarks as well. 

But is the browser as good as IE? Not yet. Loading Pages seems to take that bit longer than in IE, and the software seems to become suddenly slow. Also, the way it generates pages sometimes goes amiss; my webmail page for instance looses it’s beauty in Chrome.

The overall design isn’t brilliant either. In IE, you have access to everything you need on every page, but without being intrusive. With Chrome though, to access your bookmarks, you have to open a new tab. Also, there’s no individual print button for example, or a history button. It just seems to take… longer.

That said, Chrome can only get better. Some of it’s features would make IE fantastic. One can only wonder if IE8 will incorporate some of it…

JK

One of the coolest features of iTunes is Cover Flow. It’s a really cool way of searching through your digital music library; as long as you have the album art.

So a new website uses a similar features to allow you to search through the web. It’s called Searchme.com, and by typing in a keyword and clicking search it shows you a cool preview of all the matches.

Actually, it works really well, even though it’s still in Beta. Better, it has an extensive index of sites; pretty much just as good as Google.

So a cool little site that is very useful. Google, watch out!

JK