NEWS IN BRIEF: Google denies slur

Google has reacted angrily to claims that its new browser, Chrome, is handmade in China by children less than six months old. The internet giant denies the existence of so-called ‘Google farms’ in which rows of infants assemble the colourful plastic shapes that combine to form the revolutionary new surfing experience, with the instant bookmark homepage said to cause most injuries. The resulting software is then allegedly shipped through the company’s sophisticated ‘world wide web’ postal delivery system.

Will social networking ever make significant profits?

Assuming several more years of loss-making, is social networking a bubble that will burst, or will it become the equivalent of a public service on the internet – or, perhaps more likely, serve as a loss leader to pull users into the arms of a multinational’s assorted goods and services? For now, the race to monetise continues. Backed by the Murdoch empire, it should be no surprise that MySpace appears to be leading the way with an aggressive advertising strategy, and while Facebook sprawls ever outward, moves toward targeted advertising provoke user ire.

Twitter makes no profit, and it’s thought that Google’s YouTube will lose half a billion dollars in 2009. There’s a reason for this – who wants to advertise next to a user-generated video of a man eating an entire tub of ice cream? The storage space for photos puts considerable strain on Facebook’s finances, so the price for all that video must be pretty steep for Google (but with profits at $1.42 billion for the first quarter of 2009, it can bear it better).

All this leaves social networking firms with the same problem as newspapers – how to monetise content. And how not to sell your customers down the river in the process, so undermining trust in what is an increasingly personalised service. After all, it’s this direct contact that people so value in social networks – who wants the adverts to get in the way?

For the stars on Twitter, it’s the direct contact they value with fans, without the ‘filter’ of the media. This has its own entirely unfinancial problems. Speaking on Larry King Live after Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter ‘victory’ over CNN, Sean Combs praised this lack of filtering, then confessed to doing some of his own by blocking all the ‘negative’ people who commented on his tweets. There’s also how easy it is to ‘pose’ as celebrities on Twitter, something that seems hard to solve without a third party who knows them personally, or some kind of invasive personal identity verification at source.

In this quest for profits, there are two ends of a scale to slide between – advertising and subscription – at least for now. It will be interesting to see if these digital pioneers come up with something different, as considering the amount of money that’s being thrown around in tough times, there must be a lot of very confident people out there, somewhere. Should we just remember that most start-ups take a while to earn? Speculate to accumulate, etc.

Those in the know, now: Swings and roundabouts in Iran and Russia

It must be wonderful to be one of the very few Iranians who actually knows what the hell is going on in their country’s nuclear programme. Imagine the fun they have pointing fingers and sniggering at the endless western speculation over whether their nation is enriching uranium ‘for military purposes’ rather than the innocent civilian use which they claim. Up until recently, we all believed they were guilty as hell. Then the American National Intelligence Estimate proclaimed that the programme everyone was worried about (not the research, note) actually stopped in 2003. The Israelis immediately said it was nonsense, and a firestorm of comment erupted on both sides of the American bipartite system, fanned by the realisation that one of the people currently campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire will soon be in a position to press the button and nuke the whole place.

The tricky point about intelligence is that it is rarely solid fact, and should not be taken as such. It is an indicator, a best guess.

But in an age of endless information, it is incredible to think that something is happening somewhere that it’s not possible to get information about instantly. Perhaps a Google search for +iran +”nuclear weapons” +yes/no would do the trick? No? How shocking. The problem with so much information is that very little of it means very much at all, and in the places where you need it most, it is often entirely absent.

Still, this could be regarded as a matter of context; rather like freedom of speech in Russia. These days, it’s the nationalists, the extreme right-wingers who get the airtime. Back in the unsteady days of Boris Yeltsin’s booze-soaked administration, those famous days of glasnost and vodka, it was the liberals who dictated the terms. Garry Kasparov probably had quite a lucrative domestic media career back then. Now, it’s the nationalists – although one wonders how many of them died when the liberals were in charge.