People are a lot more comfortable making a purchase when they can get their friends to tell them what they think of it – even if they are only virtual friends, and not real ones. Facebook recognizes this social tendency and has released tools that will help, like Facebook Connect. When Facebook Connect is integrated into a retailer’s website, Facebook members who visit any product page will be able to see reviews written by their trusted Facebook friends. MySpace and Twitter have similar products out too. The trouble is though that these APIs are not simple to implement, and retailers find they need to invest a lot in integrating a social networking feature into their website. There are satellite businesses, like TurnTo Networks of New York, that help retailers implement Facebook Connect, charging a commission for their services.

The tool Fluid Social does this for a $1000 fee. Retailers report that visitors to their websites who use Facebook Connect while doing their browsing, have a conversion rate – from window shopper to actual paying customer – that is about 25% higher than for regular visitors. Some retailers report a 50% jump in overall traffic at their site, and attribute it to increased confidence in visitors that they can find dependable information and make a well-advised purchase.

There are lots of ways for a retailer to test the social networking waters without spending a bundle. Some try by simply using a Facebook link on their retail website. Others simply make open source coding available that would allow loyal customers to do the coding themselves and add a social networking feature to their website for free. Yet again, Facebook and Twitter may not be really that profitable themselves, but they provide an indispensable service that helps others be profitable.

What gives us the confidence that this cannot be done today is the law; in the US for example, the FCC rules that to any Internet user, every website must be available with no discrimination involved. It is free access to this powerful method of communication that has turned the Internet into a powerhouse of innovation. But there is a little caveat there: ISPs may arrange special deals to put YouTube or anyone through quicker, if they will offer that deal to other companies too on the same terms. Suddenly the right to freedom of expression doesn’t seem that free anymore.

The US government is beginning to debate whether allowing special deals is unfair. They believe that the major players, if they were not allowed special terms would have no reason to continue to use their platform for better innovation. Why would they continue to invest, make their service bigger and better, when just about any small clone could get the same terms as them, they reason. This doesn’t make real sense; true innovation usually comes from the small players, as the big ones are usually too busy defending their turf. Google Voice, for instance, started out as a service to allow you to cheaply call anyone everywhere; but when it emerged that calls to rural areas in the US were to be more expensive to Google, it quickly decided to drop rural coverage. Google abandoned the innovation of wide and uniformly priced coverage to financial priorities. Wouldn’t it slow innovation down if small players in this market were given unequal terms?

To begin with, paying for online content is pretty much established in Japan. People access premium content through their cell phones regularly, and pay through their monthly mobile bills. Why, Internet on cell phones is even more popular in Japan than Internet on PC. Japan is also a considerably more celebrity-crazed culture than elsewhere, and people will happily pay to keep up with the latest on their favorites. They don’t have to be international superstars or anything; a Twitter recipe feed by a celebrity chef for example, attracts fanatical following. And value for money is somewhat easier to provide in the Japanese script; the Japanese script allows more information to be packed into 140 characters than does English.

Keeping up is much easier when there is a proper and official Twitter client to use on the cell phone, as there is in Japan. Twitter’s 2 million users in Japan can certainly give the paid model enough momentum. All eyes rest on this preliminary foray into turning social networking into a paying business model. Time will tell how successful it is.

This then, is how Internet bandwidth is used; just try this if you will: search for “Facebook’s 25 Random Things” on a search engine; your trouble will reward you with tens of thousands of such lists, all cleverly brought together by Facebook – they’re the ones who embrace this the most enthusiastically. Facebook’s reasoning is that such an exercise helps you contemplate the meaning of your existence. The Random Things meme is certainly sweeping the Internet up ; there were 5 million notes created last week for Random Things compilations. Facebook admits that this is a kind of record in note making. The whole “Random Things” concept has been around ever since the dawn of email: the 100 questions fad. Some things just never die.

Businesses at least had the consolation back then that the consumer had not much else to turn to for product information other than company-controlled advertising. But they do now: forums, Facebook, and Twitter. People have a hundred Facebook friends, and whatever they feel about a product, they vent their feelings and generate powerful word-of-mouth. When friends receive product information from a “friend”, the advertisers suddenly arte made irrelevant and have nothing left to say. Word of mouth has always found a great friend in the Internet of course; but Facebook and Twitter make word-of mouth particularly powerful.

For instance, when you have your own social networking facility on a company intra-net or a trade group the familiarity and identity felt with other members of your group is particularly strong. Advertised opinions will pale in comparison. Facebook’s social map Loomla, or Connect, for example, bring along you your personal cloud of trusted friends wherever you visit on the Internet. Any place you visit on the Internet, Loomla or Connect will tell you how many of your Facebook friends have visited before, read it, and said something about it. It’s like travelling with your own crowd of friends no matter where you go. And if any advertiser is going to want to get to you, he’s going to come through your friends. Perhaps Facebook is going to overtake Google and its AdSense after all in online advertising.

Let’s say in happier times a couple had a crazy party; one of them is just very proud of the partying he is capable of, and impulsively posts pictures of his wild hijinks on Facebook. In a child custody battle, how would party photos of him in drag strike the judge? If you personally manage to be discreet with your own profile, what do you do about descriptions of your life that your friends have on their page? They may not be too discreet themselves; they could open your life to one and all.

After a particularly sad event like a death in the family, what does one do with the online presences used by the deceased? One could plan for such an event, by placing all of one’s passwords on a service like Legacy Locker; they allow you to record all your important passwords, to be turned over to family, when they prove that an unfortunate event has occurred. Facebook will help you keep the account of the dearly departed, but will help you make it less live, by removing status updates and such. Some e-mail companies like Hotmail, will help you out by sending you a CD’s worth of the entire e-mail account held by the departed.

Internet services like social networking are so new and so full of life now that no one really wants to think of how reality can spoil the party. But as people like to repeat a lot these days, these are parts of your digital life; you wouldn’t want it to just get lost in space, or get into the wrong hands, now would you?

Do the people who connect with social maps realize that those websites they go to with their social maps can actually completely look into their profiles and those of their friends too? When they find out where you go, what you do, who your friends are and what you look like, who knows what they will do with it? Digg for example will use your Facebook profile picture to publish next to recommendations. Other websites will try to share the information they harvest on your viewing habits among fellow businesses. Your Facebook information properly analyzed, can lucratively help them target advertisements to you wherever you may be in the world signing in through that Facebook account.

Only two years ago, the Facebook Beacon app brought all kinds of privacy concerns up; when a user went around the Internet while signed in into Facebook, Beacon was able to record all the places visited and phone home to Facebook. The biggest problem there was, that Beacon was turned on by default; Facebook’s Connect on the other hand, has to be turned on manually.

Facebook Connect also allows you to use your Facebook username and password to log in into participating websites; and then you can choose to have Facebook publish all your Internet meanderings on your profile. They are all doing it these days: MySpace with MySpaceID, and Google with Friend Connect. Of course, there are larger concerns here than having some private company look at Facebook’s information to send you advertising. The courts could subpoena your personal information from Facebook any day if they have reason to believe there is incriminating information there.

Google has for long now had software, that tries to filter out this kind of advertisement for useless, overpriced products and services. But just as spam is hard to completely filter out, so are spammy advertisements; the spammers just keep changing their tricks to get past Google’s filters. If Google gets wise to a website, or an advertisement, it bans them; and then the low-class advertisers just turn around and create a new website and a new ad. There was just no end to it; until now.

Here is how the spammy ads work. A maker of an over-priced and useless product hires a bunch of commission agents or affiliates. Those affiliates put up little box advertisements all over the Internet. When you click any ad, you will be taken to the affiliate’s own website, where you need to click on a “Buy” button again to be taken to the main vendor. Clicking “Buy” on the affiliate’s website gives him the commission. What Google does is, it doesn’t bother with all those affiliate websites that mushroom up to represent a product, a thousand for each; it goes after the main vendor of the product who will be taking a customer’s credit card number. When there is no money going into the system, all those affiliate websites and little ads asking you to buy a product will just evaporate. An impressive and common sense approach to the problem, indeed. Some worry that Google could get too strict with its filters; one would hardly expect that to happen, as advertisements bring Google all its revenue.

The DNS system has always only been capable of accepting ASCII or all Latin characters. When you type in a regular Internet address into a browser, the DNS system translates the user-friendly name into a string of numbers that identify the network address the name appeals to. The new IDN system does not replace the DNS system; it merely works with it, by using algorithms like ToASCII and ToUnicode to translate non-ASCII text to ASCII standards. All browsers today have been updated to accept IDNs.

Starting November 16, 2009, countries and language communities can begin to apply for language-specific top-level domain names or country code extensions like.uk or .us. This move while it has been in the making for nearly ten years now, coincides with the way the US government has started to ease its control over the Internet body Icann, paving the way for true autonomy.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.