Facebook has been in the news a lot recently. The Occupy London group followed the lead of Occupy Wall Street to set up encampments to protest about the failings of capitalist Britain. After the group lost an appeal against an injunction barring them from continuing their protest, bailiffs representing the City of London Police moved in to remove the tents on 28 February.
Meanwhile an allied movement, UK Uncut, is particularly incensed at instances of corporate tax avoidance. A favourite tax dodge is the “double Irish” arrangement (setting up two Irish companies and funnelling profits through one to the other) used by several US-based IT and web companies to avoid paying tax on most of the profits they’ve generated worldwide. Google and Microsoft are two of the companies known to be doing a “double Irish”. So is Facebook.
The thing is, Facebook is precisely what the protestors have been using to organise and publicise themselves. So you have the delicious irony of one of these big tax avoiders providing the means for their opponents to highlight their greed. (Don’t you just love the Web?)
The company has also been attracting attention over the Facebook Credits system, which developers of games for Facebook are required to use if they wish to incorporate a virtual currency into their game. This ban on other virtual currency providers is alleged to be against America’s anti-trust laws.
According to Hitwise, Facebook now accounts for one in six of all Internet page views in the UK, and one in five of all page views in the US market. The behemoth announced its IPO in early February, and is expected to be worth in the region of US$ 100bn. In the run-up to its IPO, all this negative attention is probably the last thing Facebook wants.
Google continue to change their algorithm more often than most people update their blogs. (Ahem.) Indeed, they changed it more than 40 times in a 29-day month. There are too many changes to list here but you can find more details from Google’s official search blog.
ClickBank has started a new weekly podcast service which they’re rather grandly calling ClickBank Insider Radio. It’s focused on making money online with ClickBank rather than general affiliate marketing. The podcast series is new but the first episode consists of more than half an hour of material most of us have heard before. Is it a wasted opportunity or will you become an avid listener of ClickBank Insider Radio?
You can listen to the first episode here
Tags: ClickBank, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MMO, SEO, social media, web development