Profy

Most of the time I am a big fan of everything Russian and a loyal supporter of the majority of the companies and products originating from my country - with a few rare exceptions. But sometimes Russian internet companies offer paradoxical ideas that I simply can't grasp even after thinking them over for a while. Today is one of such days as I got to know about one of the two largest Russian social networks, Odnoklassniki.ru, coming up with a very unusual approach to competing with their main rival - Vkontakte.ru.

The thing is that the communication tools available on the social network have certain restrictions for users preventing them from mentioning the URL of the competitor in such communications with other users.

Both websites are traditional social networks with Odnoklassniki...

Over the week I have been given an opportunity to play with a private beta of a new European startup called Shout'Em. The startup is intended for anyone to create and manage a microblogging community like Twitter or Pownce or any other Twitter clone you have already seen.

The team calls Shout'Em a "Ning for Twitters" and this is the best description probably: same as you create a full-functional social network on Ning, you can create a social network focused strictly on microblogging here on Shout'Em and I can certainly confirm it is a nice way to create a Twitter for yourself if you actually need one...

PayPal is one of the most important web services for freelancers - that's what I learned long ago when working as a freelance translator and persuading my international clients to go through all the hassle involved in sending money my way by wire transfer. Of course you'd expect PayPal to be a better option available for quick and cheap international payments to just about anyone in the world. Right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, PayPal's support of some countries is very limited - limited to the extent that makes this great service only half usable for international customers from a long list of countries...

Today Google is finally rolling out its long-promised and long-tested by a large group of randomly-selected users SearchWiki functionality - this time for everyone to see and use. The functionality allows any Google user to customize search results for any search query by moving results up or down according to their relevance (as viewed by this user), deleting certain links from results if deemed not relevant, adding sites that are not in the results pages and also adding notes for various sites - for example, to describe why you think this particular website is helpful for a user doing a search on this query...

We have recently reported on a Russian company Era Vodoleya that expressed its intentions to sue Google for a huge amount of $3 billion (which is 15% of Google's revenues) because of Google allegedly infringing a patent with its contextual advertising technology - the one that turned Google into a multi-billion company.

In the post I thought that the entire situation looked more like the company was trying to attract some publicity to itself instead of actually having the resources required to sue the internet giant - patent or no patent...

Louis Gray has just published a review of yet another Twitter tool named TweetValue intended to assign value to any Twitter account - this time the value expressed in real money. We have already seen applications calculating all types of ranks for us but TweetValue goes one step further and encourages us to know how much our Twitter accounts are really worth.

To find out the value, you simply let the application know your Twitter ID and it will calculate its dollar value based on some secret algorithm using publicly-available information about your Twitter account...

The latest buzz from Google is the newly-launched Gmail themes that allow every user to choose exactly how your Gmail application will look like in your browser. Also Gmail team has rolled out a slight change in the overall default application interface that features a little different colors. But when on a normal day new interface for Gmail could be a hot topic for the day, today people don't even mention it with the new Gmail Themes introduced being big news...

Even Google makes mistakes from time to time and its own virtual reality Lively seems to be one of such mistakes. Today Google's team working on Lively has admitted the mistake and announced the decision to shut Lively down explaining that the company needs to focus on its core lines of business - search, ads, and applications.

Lively definitely was a short-time experiment for Google: the internet giant launched its own tool for users to create 3D virtual worlds ("rooms") only in July so it will last only half a year by the time the experiment is finished in the end of December...

As some of you may remember, over the weekend I published some of my thoughts about very visible increase in spam volumes that arrives in comments to blogs. I was not the only person noticing that and my idea was that spammers were trying to compensate for loss of email channel for spam after McColo hosting company responsible for three quarters of the total worldwide spam volume was disconnected from the internet.

Now that we are starting to see the number of spam emails hitting our inboxes slowly resuming, I am also seeing the number of spam comments caught by Akismet getting back to normal again...