Alltop and Retweets

This week on net@night, Leo and Amber spoke with Guy Kawasaki about a barrage of issues dealing with tech. One issue to start off was the announcement from twitter to incorporate a “retweet” feature. This would allow for twitter`ers to simply click a button to retweet something from another person. This would eliminate the various formats that had been developed by the users of twitter. The retweet function was not something that was not designed by the twitter creators. Rather, the online community developed the lingo and the concept of retweets and twitter is following through by adding it into their program. Guy Kawasaki is an amazing techie that is the creator of Alltop.com, a website that compiles all the great tech news throughout the internet. Kawasaki has a great business model using twitter to post interesting tweets that direct them to his website, Holy Kaw! Kawasaki has ads to other related items and links to the topics that he is discussing. This generates revenue by selling personalized ad-spaces as well as links to websites which I’m sure he is drawing some revenue off of. This concept is very interesting and appears to be working, thou he does admit that he is not making Leo Laporte money.

Homepage Advertising

What happens when you see companies doing something that is not expected by the users? A user who always uses google as his homepage was very suprised to see google putting a advertise of a Verizon Driod phone in their homepage. Google typically are innocuous about advertising their product. However, putting out an advertise in the homepage seems very sleazy from the company like google.

We know all companies have advertisements in thier home pages. It is normal but this is one of the rare moments that google has been found to be doing. It is probably a new marketing strategy from google. As time passes by, google might continue to this and it may not strike as sleazy anymore.

emails and privacy

The conversation was about how secure are the emails as a means of communication. A federal judge said that emails do not get the fourth amendment protection of privacy rights. Most people perceive emails as a secure means of communication as mails or telephones. In reality, the ISP people could look at the emails if they want to while they are flowing in the channel. ISP also has to let the law enforcement people look at the emails if they have a valid warrant without letting the email senders know about it. The reason the emails have no privacy protection is they say because they are not at the people’s house or domicile. They are online or at the ISP’s servers.
The idea behind this topic is that people should not use emails as their private and secure means of communication or there should be a change in the law. There are few people who use IMs, facebook, or twitter as their means of communication but there are lots of people who genuinely think that emails are one of the most personal and secure tool for communication. As such, we could see people not using emails too much for their private talks and a possible law change about this issue.