Hoping to finally become profitable, online social-networking pioneer Friendster Inc. is joining the crowd of Web sites that rely on Internet search leader Google Inc. for a large piece of their advertising.
Google already has been feeding Friendster ads aimed at making a connection with the surrounding content displayed on a Web page. Under an expanded deal announced Wednesday, Friendster will soon display ads from Google based on Web search requests – a method that has proven to be one of the Internet’s biggest moneymakers.
Last year, Google pocketed a $3.1 billion profit while distributing another $3.3 billion in revenue to its thousands of online ad partners.
Friendster has been relying on Yahoo Inc. and Eurekster Inc. for ads generated from queries to Friendster’s internal Web search engine. The switch to Google is scheduled for the second quarter.
After it established social networking as a hot phenomenon in 2003, Friendster became an afterthought as young Web surfers flocked to MySpace.com and Facebook.com. In January, Friendster attracted 1.3 million U.S. visitors, compared with 61.5 million at MySpace and 19 million at Facebook, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Salvation on YouTube:
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia hopes to add salvation to the seemingly endless list of things Internet surfers can find on Google Inc.’s YouTube.
Just clicks away from videos of stupid pet tricks, the archdiocese has started posting weekly Lenten messages from Cardinal Justin Rigali on the popular video-sharing site. His first video has gotten nearly 16,000 views.
The archdiocese got the idea after having success streaming video on its Web site. Spokeswoman Donna Farrell acknowledged some early concerns about the other content that can be found on YouTube, but she said all the feedback has been positive so far.
More messages are planned for Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter.
Man bites back at spam:
Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back.
The Web marketing specialist from Edinburgh, Scotland, sued the sender, Transcom Internet Services Ltd., in small-claims court. The court ordered the company to pay $1,445 in damages and $1,190 in court costs.
“If someone was throwing stones through your window, would you just ignore it?” Dick said. “It’s anti-social behavior and they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Dick argued that Transcom had taken his e-mail address from an Internet forum without his consent, violating the European Union Data Protection Act.
Transcom director William Smith denied that the message was spam. He said Dick received the mailing last year after his address was accidentally taken from a group e-mail and added to a company database. Smith said the e-mail went to 41,000 people.
Transcom’s lawyers argued damages were unwarranted because the e-mail did not hurt Dick financially. But the court rejected the argument.
Rating the avatars:
A startup billing itself as the Better Business Bureau for virtual worlds wants to provide a rating system for avatars – players’ online representations – in “Second Life.”
RatePoint Inc. plans to release a beta version of the free downloadable program Monday. The launch comes after numerous disruptions in “Second Life,” which has struggled to get its 4.3 million users to embrace its own rating system.
In December, some “Second Life” users sabotaged a successful virtual-world landowner, sending lewd cartoons into a digital pavilion where a journalist was interviewing her. “Second Life” malcontents have bombed e-commerce stores, frozen other people’s avatars and crashed other users’ computers.
“Unfortunately there are people who do bad things on ‘Second Life,’” said Chris Bailey, CEO and co-founder of RatePoint.
RatePoint users will fill out a short online form to identify their avatars and begin rating others’. The software prevents one avatar from ranking another over and over. Rankings will appear prominently above avatars’ heads.
Couch potatoes are gonna love this:
AT&T Inc. is offering subscribers a new kind of TV control: their cell phones.
The company this week began offering its “Homezone” customers the ability to control their digital video recorders through Web-enabled phones. The interface lets cell phone users schedule or delete recordings on their set-top boxes from anywhere.
Homezone is a $10-per-month product for subscribers of the Dish Network satellite TV service. It includes a set-top box that brings content from the Internet to televisions, such as on-demand movies, plus caller ID information from the phone and photos from the home computer.
AT&T will not disclose how many subscribers Homezone has, but it has far broader reach than U-verse, the high-speed Internet service AT&T hopes will help it win back customers from cable TV rivals.
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