After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Sponsor

Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

The number of people quitting Facebook is still small, but they are a vocal minority. Alicia Eler explores why they are leaving, shares the farewell stories of a few and explains why they felt a need to band together. Read Now is the Time to Quit Facebook to learn more about the “not on Facebook” movement.

Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox

Some may be expecting the fabled Google Drive to compare closely to Apple’s iCloud or Dropbox, but Jon Mitchell explains why he expects the long rumored product to be a very different beast. Check out
Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox to learn more.

The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers

Path has gotten a great deal of attention because it has a great user experience, but this week it got some bad press over a privacy issue. You might not expect the app to upload your entire address book to it’s servers, but that’s exactly what one smart hacker discovered. Path has since apologized but there is a great deal of damage done. Is the price of a free app worth the loss of privacy? Learn more about Path’s privacy issue in The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers.

From the comments:

Alan Langford – “The open source community has long distinguished between free as in no cost, and free as in freedom. One can expect that anything in the commercial sphere that comes at no monetary cost will do so by restricting one or more freedoms.”

Tiago Sartor – “There’s saying that goes like this: if something is free, then you are the product.”

More Top Posts:

First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon

As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the “Metro” style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer. More

Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year

The growth of the mobile Web is on a steady rise. While pundits throw around words like “explosive” and “outrageous” the more precise word is probably “consistent.” According to analytics firm StatCounter, users accessing the Web through mobile devices has almost doubled every year since 2009. In its latest report, StatCounter says that global Internet usage through mobile devices rose to 8.5%, nearly doubling the 2011 figure of 4.3%. More

New iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for January 2012

2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below. More

Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next

Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. More

Iran Blocks HTTPS, Cutting Off Gmail, Yahoo and Other Major Sites

The Iranian government isn’t exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it’s never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.

Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. More

Microsoft Looks For Ways To Use Kinect In Business Applications [UPDATED]

The company launched Kinect for Windows this month, which is the first Kinect sensor licensed for commercial use. Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s unit that develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications, is currently exploring business scenarios that could benefit from the use of Kinect technology. More

Facebook Bans Breast-Feeding Photos

Breasts. They’re complicated.

Facebook states that breast-feeding pictures are okie dokie, just as long as there’s no “exposed breast” that doesn’t feature the child actively nursing. In other words, if there’s no suckling, there’s no posting. Today breast-feeding activists are using Facebook to coordinate “nurse-ins” outside of of the company’s headquarters worldwide, including its homebase Menlo Park headquarters. More

ReadWriteWeb Channels

Enterprise

• The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl
• First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon
• Study: PDF May Be Creating More Paperwork Than It Saves

Mobile

• [Poll] Are the iPad 3 Rumors Underwhelming?
• [Interview] How Zynga Is Transforming Games With HTML5
• Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad

Cloud

Follow ReadWriteCloud on Twitter and join the ReadWriteCloud LinkedIn Group.

• Amazon Bucks Storage Trend: Drops S3 Pricing
• How to Become a Cloud Service Provider in About a Day: VMware
• The Disintegration of PaaS

ReadWriteWeb Community

You can find ReadWriteWeb in many places on the web, a few of which are below.

• ReadWriteWeb on Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb on Twitter
• Google+
• ReadWriteWeb on LinkedIn

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

Want to have this wrap up delivered to you automagically? You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email.

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Sponsor

Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox

Google’s long rumored cloud file storage, Drive, doesn’t have to be a direct competitor to Dropbox or iCloud. Jon Mitchell discusses how Google Docs is already a file sharing service for some, how Google Search Plus Your World affects the ecosystem and how Drive can set itself apart from iCloud and Dropbox to become it’s own different beast.

From the community:

Mitchell Bundy – “Great post. What about the possibility of Google working with their other services? Google Music recently had an update, and you can now download the music you uploaded. Since there is already an application installed on the user’s computer, what stops them from expanding to a Dropbox style sync? It’s not that far off.”

Leena – “There’s free Google drive app, Syncdocs, that syncs music to Google Docs. I use it because Google Music is for the US only. Syncdocs lets me stream music from Google from anywhere in the world, except maybe China.”

More Must Read Stories:

A Look at Steve Jobs’ FBI File

Yes, it’s true. The FBI had a file on Steve Jobs. It’s not what you might think, though. The FBI performed a “level III” background investigation on Jobs as a potential presidential appointee in 1991. He was described by most witnesses as an “individual of good character and integrity” that would be suitable for a “position of trust and confidence with the Government.” Jobs also had a brush with the FBI when Apple received a bomb threat in 1985. (more)

[Infographic] Mapping the Tools in the Mobile Development Ecosystem

The mobile development ecosystem is a large, complicated space. There are innovative startups making tools for native and mobile Web apps along with large enterprise-grade companies that offer solutions from cloud support to frameworks and developer environments. For a mobile developer, it can be confusing to know where to turn and what to use to make the best app possible. (more)

Saudi Twitter User Faces Death Penalty for Tweets

A 23-year-old Saudi Twitter user, Hamza Kashgari, fled the country Sunday to avoid being arrested for his religious tweets, only to find himself in the hands of the Malaysian police today. He was heading to New Zealand to request political asylum. (more)

Harry Reid Wants a Bigger, Badder Version of SOPA/PIPA

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., still licking wounds from last week’s defeat of the Protect IP Act and its House counterpart the Stop Online Piracy Act, is reportedly working on an even more sinister, Internet-regulating bill. (more)

Oracle Claims Taleo’s Cloud-based Talent Management Jackpot

In the 20th century, corporations recruited talented professionals but then nurtured them and integrated them into their organizations. Talent was part of their business foundations. In the more intricate economy of the 21st, talent is something perceived to be possessed by individuals. Corporations recruit these people, and then undertake what’s called compensation management in an effort to retain them as long as possible, and to let go of talent that doesn’t perform up to scale. (more)

Hangout With the Scientists Looking for the God Particle

Want to hang out with the people who run the CMS? No, not the content management system. The Compact Muon Solenoid. It’s one of the two big detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world. (more)

[STUDY] 61% of Social Media Users Feel So Close To You

A new study from Pew finds that for the most part, adults are kind to each other on social media sites. In fact, 85% of adults say that most of the people they come across on social media are rather kind; only 5% say that people are “mostly unkind,” which would imply rude or mean. (more)

Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Implement Mobile Cloud Services in Titanium

Mobile development company Appcelerator announced today that it is buying “backend-as-a-service” startup Cocoafish to implement cloud services and functionality in its Titanium Platform. Acquiring Cocoafish is an astute move by Appcelerator, which focuses on tools for developers to create native and mobile Web apps. (more)

Microsoft Will Launch Kinect For Workplace Next Month

Microsoft wants its popular Kinect to be a game changer for more than just video games.

The company plans to introduce the first version of Kinect authorized for use in the workplace next month. The product will be marketed through its Microsoft Dynamics division, which develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications. (more)

Keep up with ReadWriteWeb by subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter. You can also follow ReadWriteWeb across the web on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they’ve always conformed to the understanding of “The Cloud” that has prevailed at the time. If it’s not like Apple’s iCloud, which is integrated into Apple’s devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don’t. There’s room for a third, stand-out option here.

Sponsor

Google Docs

Google already has a browser-based file system, Google Docs. It originated as a sort of word processor in the cloud, but it can actually handle and store many kinds of files, such as PDFs, JPEG images, MPEG audio and video, and it’ll handle pretty much anything containing text. That does make it a pretty compelling stand-in for Dropbox when it comes to simply storing files.

It even has a nice disk drive icon now, after last year’s Google makeovers. Google Drive, indeed:

Are people already using Google Docs as a cloud drive? Spanning, a company that provides backup for Google apps users (not just Google Apps users; free customers, too), took a look into how thousands of people are using it, and it studied their use to better optimize its services. Consequently, it has some insights into Google apps users to share.

Spanning has found that over half of the files in their customers’ Docs accounts were not Google Apps-created. They were PDFs, audio, video, photos and Microsoft Office files. By file size, non-Google files comprised over 85% of the stuff people stored in their Docs accounts.

So, at least for the use case of storing files, lots of people are already using Google Docs instead of Dropbox. What Docs does that Dropbox doesn’t is allow users to create and edit certain kinds of files. If you use Google Docs as your cloud document service, you’re probably using it to make and work on documents, too. That’s more than Dropbox can offer, standing on its own. (We’ll get to apps built on top of Dropbox in a minute.)

Search, plus Your World

There’s a new Google product that didn’t exist last time the Google Drive rumors surfaced. It’s Google. Or rather, it’s Google+. On January 10, Google revealed Search, plus Your World, which threw everybody for a loop. If you don’t understand that Google+ is the user-centric backbone of Google itself now, it doesn’t make sense that this one side of Google search has stuff from this weird social network in it.

While this early stage of Search+ is definitely about putting Google+ in users’ faces, that’s not what the message is. “Your World” does not consist solely of YouTube videos shared on social networks. Google’s personalized search also tries to figure out what a search means to you, so it can return something more meaningful. It’s two modes of search: Global mode searches the indexed Web, and personal mode tailors it to you.

How much more useful would this be if Google’s personalized search had your files in it? If your Google Drive contained your documents and music and other local files, they could show up in your personalized search results. If you couldn’t remember whether you read something online or in a document you downloaded, Search+ could find both. Now we’re giving meaning to the “Your World” part.

Dropbox has search, but it only contains part of what you’re looking for when you search “your world.” It’s more useful as one of many services in a third-party cloud search app like Greplin, which also logs into Google apps and searches across. Google’s new social signals run through all its services now, so if it’s in your Google cloud, Google search will find it, period.

Dropbox Is A Platform. It’ll Be Fine.

Between Docs and Search+, whatever Drive Google eventually ships (whether it’s in a few weeks or another X years) will have lots of unique capabilities that make it a different beast from Dropbox.

That’s exactly the way Dropbox wants it.

Dropbox turned down insane amounts of money from Apple, because it didn’t want to get rolled in as a feature of one integrated system. That’s why iCloud doesn’t work like Dropbox. Apple wanted cloud syncing that was just there, so users don’t have to know where their files are. Developers in the Apple ecosystem can just hook into iCloud. Their applications become Apple-specific. In exchange, they get free marketing in the App Store, and if Apple is feeling generous it features their apps as the App Of The Week or something.

Dropbox said “no” to all that. It wants to be the next Apple or Google, and its valuation seems optimistic about that possibility. Apple’s cloud is totally integrated with its devices, using hardware as the platform. Google’s cloud is integrated with its services, using the Web as a platform. Dropbox is a platform.

Dropbox lets different clients on different systems read and write to it. Dropbox doesn’t have a Google Docs because anyone can build a word processor on top of it. We can build a thousand word processors on top of it, and if they can all read the same file format, they can all work together. Dropbox’s platform ubiquity is what it’s all about, and that’s why Google (and Apple) can’t copy it.

Lead photo: AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

View full post on Search Engine Journal

ReelSEO Online Video News

SHAZAM! Interactive Super Bowl Ads Drive Engagement
ReelSEO Online Video News
The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" …
What Time Does The Super Bowl Start? What Channel Is It On?Midwest Sports Fans

all 1,567 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

Brafton

Two-thirds of marketers believe SEO will drive success in 2012
Brafton
Sixty-seven percent report that they will center their efforts around SEO, ensuring that their website content is developed with keywords and the behavior of their target audience. According to Valpak and Cox, the amount of businesses using SEO as part …

and more »

View full post on SEO – Google News

View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing