Around the web this week

May 5th, 2008 | by Laurent FP |

It has been a busy last two weeks with the web 2.0 expo in San Francisco and a 7 day trip to Montreal. I was not able to keep up with my commitment to post regularly here during this time but I hope the next few post will make up for it. In the mean time, here is the echo from around the web this week, and maybe a bit more.

All your favorite videos are hosted by the all powerful Google, and one morning you realized that they are not accessible. That’s what happened to some of the 80 million monthly YouTube users this Saturday when they were seeing a black screen instead. YouTube was down due to a DNS hack, or some internal technical error. Here is the story on Mashable, GogiaOM and CenterNetworks (who originally reported the issue). It shouldn’t be too important for fun clips, but what about people relying on youtube for providing content to their users? Outch!

On the Internet Photography front. Did you know the iPhone is the most popular phone camera on Flickr? The N95 gave away its first place to the iPhone that has 2,065,938 items and almost 1000 daily users. So in case you are bored and your creative side has failed lately, here is a A to Z list of subjects (@ScottBourne, This Week In Photography).

Promoting a Social Network App becomes costly. MySpace starts charging for being listed on their “featured apps” section of their gallery. Word has it that it cost between $50,000 and $100,000 per week to be listed. Who has the pockets for that? Silde with its half a billion dollar valuation monopolizes the 4 first spot on the list.

You probably heard following Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh’s presentation at Web 2.0 that Yahoo is going all in. All in for Open Social and they intend to open as much as they can. It can be a big step and SearchMonkey is their first milestone. They announced more to come by the end of the year.

After months of negotiation, rumors and anticipation, Rogers, Canada’s largest mobile phone operator, has finally sealed the deal with Apple to release iPhone for Canada. Unfortunately, the story stops here as very little detail is yet available. They say it will be available sometimes in 2008 but as it happens, Rogers is also the only GSM/3G network in Canada. Are they waiting for the official release of the iPhone v2 to announce availability as early as July?

I’m always amazed when some lawyers try to demonstrate the actual usefulness of lawsuits. As reported before here, their is a couple startups addressing that “market”. But one that breaks away from the crowd is AllRise “a website that allows users to file complaints against anyone or anything, argue their case, have the community choose sides, and ultimately vote on who should prevail“. If it works and both parties accept the value of the system, It would be a perfect stepping stone for Justice 2.0.

On a more technical front:

  • Facebook was hacked again. It has been reported by the BBC that Facebook has a new flaw and can be hacked for stealing a user’s personal information and the information from all their friends without their knowledge.

A few numbers for the week:

  • Yahoo has 256 million email users,
    while Microsoft has 255
    gmail 92 million
    and AOL 49 million
  • During the last 7 days people have executed:
    1.21 billion Google searches,
    441 million Yahoo searches,
    197 million MSN/Windows Live searches.

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