Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

It was bound to happen at some point, but MySpace has been caught by Facebook in the number of worldwide unique monthly visitors.

While Facebook’s push for a wider foreign audience is having some success (I even see them advertising at English Premier League matches), they are still lagging behind in the United States by a significant margin and aren’t doing much at this point to chip away at it. MySpace’s unique visitors double Facebook’s in the US, and that number hasn’t changed much over the last year.
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I woke up this morning, and instead of grabbing the morning paper, I signed into to Digg to see what wonderful thing Barack Obama was doing (for those not familiar with Digg, Obama is a demi-god on there).

One story that was Dugg up came from ITBusinessEdge, via Vnunet. A poll done by IT services provider Telindus showed that 39% of 18 to 24-year-olds would consider leaving their jobs if their employers decided to block access to Facebook. The number was far lower for older employees. Additionally, 21% more of the youngsters said they’d feel “annoyed” by the ban.

What does this point out? First of all, that young people have high expectations of the freedom they should have in the workplace. There are trade-offs to this. Obviously, if you have a friendly work environment like Google, you’ll have to make up for your perks by working longer hours.
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Back in the 70’s, the Miller v. California case established that in the case of obscenity, community standards would determine whether or not something was deemed pornographic. In other words, small towns could reserve the right to shut down adult book stores if they pleased, while cities in the fast lane didn’t have to be held to some Draconian standard that a one-size-fits-all approach would create.

How does this work in the Internet age? Paul F. Little, aka “Max Hardcore,” has been charged with 20 counts of obscenity in a Tampa, FL court because some of the servers his website uses are located in Tampa. With each charge resulting in a maximum sentence of 5 years, Little could face 100 years in prison if things go downhill.
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Twitter going down pretty much the norm, but big ol’ Amazon.com featured an hour and half of downtime today, probably costing them something close to $3 million of revenue.

There is some speculation that the new 60GB Playstation 3 bundle, which sold out on Costco.com BEFORE the time Costco stated it would begin selling the much-desired PS3, was the cause of the failure on Amazon, but that’s just speculation. It does make sense, though considering the short supply of the bundle and the frantic refreshing undoubtedly being done by Playstation-crazy gamers.

Amazon likely made up most of their revenue after the site came back up. But it reveals how tenuous and precious server functionality is, and if anybody should know how to keep their site up, it’s Amazon..
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Alright, let’s suppose we did a Google search for the keyword “ringtones,” and we clicked on one of the AdWords ad on the right side of the page. We go to some ringtones site and download a ringtone or six. Lets also suppose we are think we’re getting the ringtones for free, but we get a charge on our account next month. What do we do?

Sue Google, that’s what we do! They never should have let us click on a site that was misleading us, and they should pay us all $5 million.

Jenna Goddard, a New Jersey resident, had just such the above scenario happen to her, and now she’s suing Google. Her lawyer is also trying to turn this into a class action lawsuit.
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