One held for posting obscene Orkut message on Sonia

One held for posting obscene Orkut message on Sonia
18 May 2008, 0325 hrs IST,TNN

PUNE: Orkut, the popular social networking site, is in the news again. The cyber cell of the city police crime branch has arrested Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid (22), an IT professional of Gurgaon, Haryana, for allegedly uploading obscene and derogatory text about Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi on Orkut. Congress activist Amol Bhokare (28) of Pune, who saw the message, lodged a complaint at the Deccan Gymkhana police in December, 2007. Vaid was found guilty under section 67 of the IT Act. According to assistant commissioner of police (cell) Netaji Shinde, Vaid, who was working with PC solutions, an IT company in Gurgaon, had added the derogatory text in a community named'I hate Soniya Gandhi' on Orkut, last year. He uploaded the text while working at office. Shinde said that the police had first asked Google to provide the IP address of the person who posted the message. They learnt that the accused was connected to the net through Bharati Airtel and Sify Internet in Chennai. It was also learnt that the message was circulated through the email address'rahulvaidindia@gmail.com'. The police then sought information about the user of this email address from the internet service provider and learnt that it was the address of Rahul Vaid, a resident of Chakarpur in Gurgaon. The police nabbed Vaid at his residence on Friday. He admitted to having posted the message. The accused was produced before the Shivajinagar court on Saturday and remanded to custody till May 21. Interestingly, the person who formed the community'I hate Soniya Gandhi' is not guilty as per the law. ACP N. Shinde said hating Sonia Gandhi is the personal opinion of the person who formed the community. Having a personal opinion about someone is not an offence as per the law. Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Pune/One_held_for_posting_obscene_Orkut_message_on_Sonia/articleshow/3049971.cms

Google Networking

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google has set out to enable all websites, free of charge, to be imbued with common social networking features as the Internet evolves toward becoming a giant community along the lines of MySpace or Facebook.

Google Friend Connect was previewed at a Campfire One gathering of software developers at the company's "Googleplex" campus in Mountain View, California on Monday.

The unveiling of the plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down walls of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.

"Social is going mainstream," Google director of engineering David Glazer told reporters. "What used to be hard and proprietary is becoming easy and open. It's the evolution of social networking."

Glazer described the MySpace and Facebook announcements as "big steps forward in giving users control over their data" and said Friend Connect is intended to advance the movement.
"We see the web moving toward an end state where people can use any application on any website with any of their friends," Glazer said.

"Social activity on the web has been bottled up in a handful of sites. As things mature on the web they become more open and more interoperable."

Friend Connect lets website owner's add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called "widgets" by simply adding snippets of free computer code.

People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.
To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don't have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles.

All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.
Concerns about protecting people's profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer.
Website owners are invited to put their names on a "white list" online at www/google.com/friendconnect.

Google wants to be at the heart of the Internet trend of people building online identities that play, share, and conduct business in virtual environments, according to Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle.

"Much like Google kind of controls the overall online advertising experience I think this is Google trying to figure out how to own the virtual representation of a person on the web," Enderle told AFP.

"Monetizing the virtual person on the web is where the money is and they are trying to figure out how to do that. If you want to have the door into my wallet you want to be as close to my information as you can get." Google plans to phase in more websites and social networks in the months to come, with the Open Social software platform as a basis for interoperability. Google launched Open Social last year to promote common protocols so developers can make applications that work on any social networking website involved in the effort.

Facebook cuts off Google’s Friend Connect

MySpace, then Facebook and then Google all recently launched services for third parties to access their users’ data through other sites.
Google, though, uses Facebook’s developer platform to distribute Facebook user data through its own service, Google Friend Connect. Now, Facebook has cut off that access.

When Google announced Friend Connect on Monday, I asked the company for clarification on its relationship with Facebook — strangely, Google didn’t offer MySpace data even though those two companies are partners on Open Social. A main point of the announcement, after all, was that Open Social applications could run on other sites, with better access to social networks’ data.

Instead, Google announced that third party developers would be able to access data from Orkut, smaller Open Social member network hi5 and Linked — and Facebook. Google, it seems, wanted to see just how open Facebook’ social network rival was.

For Google’s response to my question, check out this audio clip. As the company tells me in the clip, it has no business relationship with Facebook.

From the Facebook company blog, today:
In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

Facebook?s Friends Data Has Already Left the Barn

SchonfeldTechCrunch.com Sunday, May 18, 2008; 1:09 AM

How much are your friends worth? That is the question behind the big debate going on around social networks and data portability. In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data (including friends lists) from other sites, except that what they are really trying to do is erect new walled gardens by positioning themselves as the primary repository of that personal and social data. This is valuable data and none of the big players want to cede any more of it than is necessary, which is why Facebook banned Google from tapping into its members' social data.

But here's a little secret. All of this data is already leaking out in ways that Facebook and other social networks can hardly control. Startups are finding ways around their official APIs to get the data consumers want into their own systems. For instance, Zude, a personalized Webpage service, recently launched a feature called SocialMix that lets people import friends lists, photos, profile information, status updates, comments, and other data from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and hi5. (See the screen shot below, which shows my Facebook friends on Zude). "What we are doing is taking the information and normalizing it and making it available in any manner you want," claims Zude CTO Steve Repetti. He was tired of waiting around for true data portability to arrive, so he figured out a hack to offer it on his own (and it doesn't involve screen scraping).

Taking a different approach, Minggl has found a way to access your social data through a browser plug-in. And Media6° is placing cookies through the ads themselves on Facebook to collect social data for advertisers. If you click on an ad with one of its cookies, then the same ad will be shown to all of your friends, who supposedly are two to ten times more likely to click on the ad than other people. Media6° also should be able to target Facebook members as they wander across the Web (as long as a cookie has been placed in their browsers and they come across an ad with the Media6° Javascript code embedded in it).

I've come across other startups who claim to be able to pull profile and friend data from Facebook. Facebook can go after them and shut them down, but it is rightly more concerned about Google gaining free and unfettered access to that data. Google is the bigger competitor and the bigger threat. But in the meantime, all of these little startups are finding ways to get at the same social data being so ferociously guarded by Facebook. In fact, they already have it, and Facebook is going to have a hell of a time trying to put it back in the barn.
(Photo by Larry Wilder).

Ask an outside consultant

Q What are some of the less known but effective marketing strategies available for cash-strapped companies?
KOFI BOSQUE-HAMILTON
WWW.ADSURFARI.COM
A Whether a marketing strategy succeeds or not depends on how precisely the marketer has identified the target segment and whether the product or service being marketed offers a compelling benefit to those potential customers. Since I do not know the nature of your business, I will highlight some variants of the "word-of-mouth" techniques that are inexpensive.
You may think about creating advertising material for your products and putting it on a website such as YouTube. Some leading brands have successfully launched innovative online advertising campaigns and achieved increased awareness and greater buzz for their brands.

You may also try some of the popular social networking sites such as MySpace or Orkut and put up your product or service demos and messages for people to see. These avenues are free and they offer a potential for increased word of mouth. If your marketing message is creative, it's likely that the person seeing it may feel motivated to forward it to friends, thereby generating greater awareness for your brand.

In addition, you may make use of the professional networking site Linkedin. This site has been used effectively by professional consultants to advertise their services; it offers the opportunity to provide a link to your company on your personal page. The name of the game is to tap into a network of professionals who may be interested in your products or services.
Any of these approaches may be successful, but only if the right audience happens to get exposed to them.
AVINASH MALSHE,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MARKETING,
UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS
OPUS COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
Source: http://www.startribune.com/business/18997749.html?location_refer=Business

Hit Pause On The Evil Button: Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man

Michael ArringtonTechCrunch.com Sunday, May 18, 2008; 7:09 AM
These stories are becoming more common as Internet companies operate under the laws of many counties.

In February A Moroccan man was arrested for pretending to be the Moroccan king?s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. Facebook complied with Morrocca information requests about the man, leading to his arrest. The man was granted a royal pardon after his sentencing, and was out of jail by mid March.

Today we're hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named ?I hate Sonia Gandhi.? Sonia Gandhi is a prominent politician in India.

Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information TVechnology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community.

During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address ? Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.

He was thn charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he's convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere, but the hot spots right now are areas where extreme laws make what would be legitimate actions in the US or Europe into fairly serious crimes in their jurisdictions. Our companies have to decide if they'll defy the law and take the consequences. On the upside, users will flock to them knowing their data is secure.