PopSockets CEO calls out Amazon’s ‘bullying with a smile’ tactics:
“… executives from Sonos, Basecamp, and Tile, who all took turns airing a list of grievances against major tech players such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. They all recounted, in manners specific to their respective companies, how the major tech players have used their market dominance to squeeze smaller competitors in allegedly anticompetitive ways. “
*Are some of today’s big tech firms abusing their suppliers?
Social networking site not covered by HIPAA
During his research, Trotter found that he could use Grouply.io or a manual process to download the personal details of members of other closed Facebook groups – including other sensitive circles, such as those meant for people recovering from drug addiction, men living with HIV or individuals identifying as gay in countries where same-sex partnerships are criminalized. That functionality has since been disabled.
— Read on www.cnbc.com/2018/07/11/facebook-private-groups-breast-cancer-privacy-loophole.html
Just noticed that CrunchBase added something of an info graphic to the site on what topics are getting a lot of activity. This is a nice addition to the site. It helps the user know more about what other users are exploring.
The four consumer technology and Internet firms to watch over the next five years and possibly beyond are, in no particular order.
These firms are starting to have overlapping products and services.
Notes:
These firms have been competing in similar spaces for a while now. Apple has been selling music in the iTunes Music Store since April 2003 and Amazon has been selling MP3’s since September 2007. Google recently introduce Music Beta by Google.
Will Facebook get into streaming movies? They recently added Spotify integration to make their music offering more robust.
Amazon has a streaming movie service, Amazon Instant Video, and Google has YouTube. What will happen to Hulu? Will one of these four players make a move to buy it or create a strategic partnership?
Facebook “Alternative” uses Facebook Like button.
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picassa, Last fm, Foursquare, Instagram, Tripit, YouTube, MySpace, Vimeo, and RSS feed are ways to aggregate your data into Memolane. Looks like Gowalla is not yet supported. Went in to my Gowalla account to see if there was a way to export data via and RSS URL. Didn’t find one. Did send a tweet to @Gowalla to about this. If I receive a reply, I’ll add it to the bottom of the post or int eh comments.
Clicking leads to this URL.
Full URL is below.
*This was seen in the Foursquare notification email filter page of Gmail.
Questions for thought
How many people in the US over the age of 13 do not yet have a Facebook account?
Is this still a market big enough for Facebook to place ads against?
Is Facebook finding people who join via Gmail ads to be profitable?
Are they using a lifetime customer value as part of their customer acquisition strategy?
“Google should add a priority box to URL’s in search results. Let me curate the sites that matter.” I was about to tweet that when the idea moved me to write a longer post first.
Currently Google allows users to block domains from search results. Earlier today I was wondering if there was an easy way to get RSS posts out of Google Reader and into my Twitter feed. You can see the two results that looked relevant and interesting to me in the screenshot nearby. Here is a request to Google, create a 
way to add the sites that are relevant to users, for example mashable.com and louisgray.com, to a priority list. This list would search these sites as well as all others, but would put their relevant posts higher up in results, possibly even to the top.
Facebook may be creating a similar system from their “Like” feature. As people Like more and more pages the content in their news feed will become harder to find. Facebook may add an element that enables users to search amongst all the pages that users have previously expressed and interest in. Google already makes much of the web available to us. If there was a way to add priority to the sites that truly interest us, that would be very useful.
Google Bookmarks was a good step, but Google Priority Search would be like putting a man on the moon as compared to what happened near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Please make Priority Search a reality. Thank you.
D.L. Damore 