Microsoft ahead of Google & Yahoo in Total Time Spent Online

Despite all the benefits reaped by other companies, this will surely come as a surprise to some. Industry tracker comScore, Inc., last week released a study showing that, in terms of time spent on sites, the Redmond-based Microsoft sites ranked as the most engaging global property in September, followed by Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

According to the study, Microsoft websites seized nearly 15 percent of time spent online worldwide in September, and almost 70 percent of the time spent on its sites was through Windows Live Messenger.

In September, Internet users spent on the Microsoft website in total 3.9 billion hours, or 14.5% of the time surfing. Such are the calculations of market analysts comScore. In second place were the statistics page of Google against Yahoo! and Facebook. According to comScore, Internet users spent 1.4 billion hours a community party, which gives about 193% higher than in September 2008.

Own research as a basis for the results of the comScore panel studies 2 million users in 170 countries, which shall then be converted into 1.2 billion Internet users aged 15 years or more who use it at home or at work. According to analysts in September, Internet users were on the net total of 27 billion hours. Of the time spent on Microsoft’s website, almost 70% to the Windows Live Messenger. Google Pages users have viewed some 2.5 billion hours, or 9.3% of total time, slightly less than half that time falls on video website YouTube.

Twitter flying high: Lufthansa offers on board facilities

Lufthansa offers plane location info for Twitter, Facebook. Lufthansa has designed an online tool to allow air travelers to share updates during their journeys via Twitter and Facebook.

Dubbed MySkyStatus, the application takes users’ flight information, including departure and arrival data, and matches it to Lufthansa’s feed of airline traffic. The result: automated tweets or Facebook status messages when flights take-off and land, as well as updates en route.

As quoted in media, “Lufthansa digital agency Profero in New York devised the tool, available for any flight, as a simple way to prove the brand’s differentiation, which is its “passion for precision,” says Profero North America CEO Wayne Arnold.

Lufthansa plans to support MySkyStatus with a marketing campaign, and it is considering integrating that effort with the booking engine on Lufthansa.com.

Google Services: Many of Them Depends Upon Your Country

By here, there are so many features which Google is currently offering is totally depends upon the region or the part of the world in which you are leaving. Described below are the Google’s services that will only work in one country, or a limited set of countries….

* At YouTube, sometimes videos will read “This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.” Maybe you can click on the frontpage thumbnail, but then the video won’t show.
* At Google Books, even for stuff which is in the public domain in a country where you access the book, sometimes you’ll hit a block. For instance, when I want to read “The Comedies of William Shakespeare”, I’m seeing the text “No preview available” here from Germany. (Checking through a US proxy, I can see there’s a preview coming up.)
* Google China has a music service where you can listen to songs. It’s linked straight from the google.cn homepage. But what if you click on it from outside China? You’ll get the message “Music streaming/download services are not available in your region”.
* Google logo doodles are often country-specific. (This week’s comic doodle reportedly only shows in the US, for instance, unless you call up a special URL.)
* Google Video sometimes brings up country-blocks for specific videos. At one time, I saw the message “We’re sorry, but this video is not available in your country.” (While Google Video still had upload functionality linked from its homepage, you could also select target countries from a dropdown box for your content.)
* Users of Google China are in the position of having quite a bit of features and content blocked for them. For instance, Google recently removed the “sign in” link from their homepage, they stopped offering auto-completion on the search box, you can’t disable safe-search, and they censor certain web results, images, or news sources. (Search for e.g. human rights, and you’ll find a censorship notice by Google at the bottom of the page. On a side-note, an ad says you can “Find human rights on eBay”, though.)
* When you enter www.gmail.com in your browser and you happen to be in Germany, you’ll see the note “We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.” You can access Gmail here by typing mail.google.com instead. You can’t get a @gmail.com account in all countries, but need to settle with @googlemail.com in some places.
* New Google features and functionality are often initially offered in US English language versions of the interface only (like most Gmail updates) or on the .com domain (such as the new iGoogle layout). Although that’s not country-specific, it hides new things from non-English speakers.
* The Google SMS service isn’t available in all countries. The UK homepage reads, “Google SMS is currently not available in the UK. The service is still in beta, and we’re working hard to make it better.”
* Google Apps only supports the purchasing of the following top level domains: .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info – all others need to be purchased elsewhere.
* Free giveaways often officially only apply to the US… although others say they received them anyway.
* Google says, “The Google Latitude web app currently supports iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0 or above. For now, it’s available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and we hope to bring it to more countries soon.”
* Phone service Google Voice is only available for the US.

Source :Blogoscoped

Yahoo ! GeoCities: Now Closing after 15 Years of Web presence

Geocities was created in 1994 as an easy way for people to create a Web presence. Fifteen years later, Yahoo has decided to close the doors on the iconic webpage service. Ars reminisces upon the good times of Geocities.

U.S. Internet search giant Yahoo! Inc., said it would close out GeoCities, a personal Web page service it purchased for $2.9 billion in 1999. The GeoCities Web page now sports a prominent note that says, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.”

Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the Internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.

Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?

Here’s how Yahoo put it: “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

The purchase 10 years ago anticipated the popularity of personal Web pages, but GeoCities did not match up to the interactive capabilities of social networking services, like Facebook, Cnet said. Unsurprisingly, Geocities has declined in popularity in recent years thanks to the plethora of similar and easier-to-use services—not to mention the rise of social networks like MySpace that allow the same demographic to make equally horrific pages and try to pick each other up at the same time. Add to that the explosive popularity of various blog platforms and the suffering of the online advertising market, and it’s really not a shock to see Geocities going the way of the dodo.

Google shuts down many Products

Just recently, Google’s 3D world Lively was shut down. Now Google announced they’re canceling a couple of other products or product features. These are:

• Mobile service Dodgeball. “We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available,” Google says. The original founders of this Google-acquired company already left a while ago in frustration due to Google allegedly not evolving their product.

• The Mashup editor, which is still only available in a limited test version. This product, originally released in 2007, was letting you create programs accessing and mixing APIs like the Google Maps API. Google suggests the App Engine would now be the way to go, as far as Google products go. “Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months,” Google notes.

• Video uploading at Google Video. For quite a while now Google had made acquired YouTube their official video upload site, at least judging by things like where Google uploaded their own content for official blog posts (and judging by how much easier it was to get videos onto YouTube in terms of speed and lack of bugs). Google Video is a meta video search engine these days. Now that change in direction has become more completed and official: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video,” Google writes, adding that existing uploaded content won’t be removed, though.

• Google Catalog. This was a bit of a precursor to Google Print, now known as Google Book Search. The scanned and OCR’d catalogs of this collection are painfully out of date by now, tough. “[W]e’re bidding it a fond farewell” Google says, stating they want to focus efforts “to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”

• Last not least, Google Notebook – while not being directly canceled – won’t be worked on anymore. “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users.” Google say they will continue offer the service for existing users. The Notebook extension won’t be supported anymore, though, Google adds. Google suggests users look into Google Docs, as well as the SearchWiki feature.