Hi All,

Thought of the day - So call me a Facebook and Twitter addict! I spend a fair amount of time on both and I do find it slightly irritating that I need to login to respond/chat to friends rather than using my favourite IM client. I’d love to see some sort of federation so I could use Live Messenger to update status’s on Twitter, chat to Facebook friends etc. Obviously there’s lots of reasons why this probably wont happen, least of all being technically possible, never the less it bugs me!

Nick.

Hi All

Have you ever wanted to know the name of admin@gmail.com? Now you can. Through a bug in Google calendars the names of all registered Gmail accounts are now readily available. All you need to find out the names of any gmail address is a Google calendar account yourself. Depending on your view this ranges from a harmless "feature" to a rather serious privacy violation. According to some reports, spammers are already exploiting this "feature"/bug to send personalized spam messages.

Nick.

Google's Docs and Spreadsheets disappeared today for close to an hour, proving that the world's largest search engine is a long way from perfecting the art of online business applications.

Many businesses paid good money to look at this screen, which appeared - at least to people in Silicon Valley - from about 9am to 10am

Go here for the full article.

Hi All,

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.

Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the opinion and order, which is here (PDF).

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Go here for more information.

Nick.