What you need to know - Monday 9/6/10

Buzz suit settled, Android on the rise, Ping hits a million and Google goes back to court

Happy Labor Day! Lets begin the week, or end the holiday weekend, depending on how you choose to look at it, with everything you have missed over the weekend.

Google faces anti-trust litigation. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot launched a probe into how Google ranks the sites that it indexes. In a blog post about the issue Google's  Deputy General Counsel, Don Harrison said "Occasionally, we’re asked about the “fairness” of our search engine -- why do some websites get higher rankings than others? The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking." several of the site listed as possible cases in this issue include: Foundem, Source Tool and myTriggers. It is interesting to note that two of these companies are largely founded by Microsoft.

Android based phones gain 25% of the market. A recently published Quantcast study showed a significant growth in the sales of Android based phones. Apples iPhone OS still holds the top spot with 56% of the market. These results were for the month of August 2010.

Ping crosses 100,000,000 users in 48 hours. Ping, Apples new opt in social media platform built into iTunes 10 gained 100,000,000 followers in its first 48 hours in operation. These number were, of course, announced late on September 3rd, and once the holiday weekend is over the results may have grown.

Google settles Buzz lawsuit for $8.5 million. After a hotly contested launch to the Buzz social network, were users gmail contacts were automatically imported, the giant has settled its legal disputes  $8.5 million. The proceeds from the suit, minus the legal fees of course, will be donated to a yet to be named charity that supports the privacy rights of people online. They are also being required to provide public education about Buzz's privacy features.

Google to re-write privacy policies. Google will be changing its policy, which it called in a recent blog posting, "Long, complicated and lawyerly". The changes, which will take effect in October are supposedly all changes designed to increase clarity, "we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable.", wrote Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel.

Regulars to Craiglist’s Adult Services section have likely noticed a new change to the Web site this weekend.  Where the “Adult” ads once were, there is now only a black box with glaring white letters spelling out “CENSORED.”  Clicking on it does no good. After months of debate and controversy, the company has decided to remove its Adult Services offerings, but they will clearly not go quietly into the night.  The bold black “censored” box bespeaks their true feelings about the matter: they’re not happy.  In fact, one might even say they’re virtually pouting.  

(image source: blogcdn.com)