Profy

Can you imagine going to YouTube following a link on Twitter to watch some video recommended by a friend as a funny one (though NSFW) and since you are not at work, you feel perfectly safe clicking the link to watch it as this is exactly the activity you want to be involved in right now. And all of a sudden, instead of seeing the familiar player interface loading the video itself, you are served an error message reading something like "Sorry, this content is not available at your location at the moment. You will be able to watch this video in 2 hours."

Sounds like a crazy joke to you? It definitely sounds as one to me but unfortunately in some countries this may really turn into reality - and it is really not good to know that this is exactly what might happen in Russia where I myself live...

Due to some urgent work I had to finish over the week, I have left my email inbox unattended for a few days - which normally results in a huge overload and a few hours to sort everything out as a result. This time is no different other than it is Christmas day today on the web (I mean the English-speaking portion of the world wide web here, of course) so there are some difference that I have noticed that I could not ignore and decided to share here.

First of all, my spam folder is full of holiday wishes - both from the real companies I know for some reason and from spammers...

The situation with Apple iPhone in Russia is a very peculiar one but Russian mobile carriers still seem to believe in the geeky gadget - believe in it enough to arrange for the new model, iPhone 3GS sales in Russia even despite of the disaster with the previous model, iPhone 3G.

The very first iPhone model was never officially sold in Russia but Russian users still managed to buy their gadgets from various online stores that brought the devices in illegally here. iPhones were brought here in suitcases full of the gadgets - and easily found the buyers on the gray market...

I don't think that fascination with making money blogging is such a popular trend that it used to be a few years ago when we only started Profy here - at the time everyone seemed to be determined it was dead-simple to start a blog and begin making money off the blog by sharing some thoughts accompanied by Adsense blocks. Launching two or three blogs simultaneously definitely sounded like a surefire way to maximize revenue so we saw tons of blogs no one ever read advertised heavily by their authors everywhere in hopes they could get yet another reader...

Earlier this month a leading Russian email provider and portal Mail.ru made huge international news due to rumors about the company abandoning Yandex search engine for Google. As of now, web search on the portal is powered by Yandex, the local Russian leader in online search. But rumors everywhere had it that the company would replace Yandex by Google in 2010 - which definitely posed an appealing opportunity for Google with its not very solid position in the web search in Russia.

But today the rumors have been confirmed officially by the companies in the press release about the new partnership. What Mail...

I've been working in the startup and entrepreneurial online community long enough to notice one trend: almost every startup wants one of two things - either be acquired by Google or become the next Google themselves. Of course there are some realistic guys who know that any of these two things happens so rarely that chances are neither of them will happen to this particular startup. But even the most reasonable startups at least secretly dream about becoming the next Google one day - even if they keep silence about this secret desire...

When I sift through dozens of spam emails that land in my inbox daily or moderate numerous spam comments here on Profy, I can't help but repeat the same questions again and again because some things in the behavior of spammers are totally beyond my understanding. So I thought that I'd publish the questions here - and who knows, probably some people who are actually engaged in these activities will arrive here and answer some of them so that spam will at least lead to irritation without any further curiosity in the future...

Only last week registration of the domains in the first fully Cyrillic top-level domain zone began here in Russia - the zone is .рф and the attention it receives from international companies definitely deserves a post.

To prevent cybersquatting, initially only the trademark holders and various government institutions are allowed to apply for their new domains. Registration will only be opened to the general public in April and the prices will be much higher than those in the .ru zone that is currently associated with Russia...

I have to admit it: I've been living a life of lies for the last 3 years with my two identities rarely even meeting each other. My first identity is the online one - or basically me when my computer is turned on and I write, blog, comment or discuss something. In this life I have thousands of friends across all the social networks I am aware of - even though the vast majority of such people I have never met or even talked to on the phone.

But there is also another identity - the offline me - and that one has almost nothing to do with web 2...