The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

One of the problems is that every site has its own website that you need to visit and log in to before you can use it. That’s a tedious process, especially if you are like me and sign out after each session.

The brand new Google Chrome extension Gooce+ promises to optimize the daily social networking workflow by integrating the streams of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into the Google Plus interface.

Just install the extension in the Chrome browser, and you will notice that three new icons have been added to the top icon bar when you are on Google Plus. First the five standard Google icons from Home to Games, and then the three new icons for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While it is not possible to mix news streams, users can click on one of the icons to sign in to their accounts to access their news streams right on Google+.

It is possible to read the latest posts, post status updates, comments, use the like and share functionality or view photos or videos right on the Google Plus site. Some links, like Facebook friend links, open up in a new tab in the browser on the social networking site directly.

Gooce+ demands quite a few permissions during first sign in. Some users might be uncomfortable with that which is understandable.

The developer has created a short video demonstrating the Chrome extension’s functionality.

Gooce+ can be a handy extension for Chrome users who use at least one of the social networking sites next to Google Plus. The core benefit of Gooce+ is that it can reduce the number of open tabs in the browser by up to three. That’s the best case scenario if you use all four social networking sites on a day to day basis.

Chrome users can download Gooce+ directly from the Google Chrome web store.

I recently stumbled upon a story over at Connection Agent. The story basically revealed that LinkedIn had automatically opted-in all their users to a setting that allowed them to use their user’s names and photos for third party advertising.

Now, the core problem with these kind of things is that they are usually diametrical to what users want. This would not be a problem if the service would be opt-in only, so that users could make the decision whether they wanted their names and photos to potentially appear in third party advertising. Then again, no one would probably do it if that was the case.

Steve describes on his blog how users can opt-out of the third party advertising. They need to click on their name on the LinkedIn homepage and select Settings from the drop down menu that appears automatically.

On the Settings page they need to select Account. They then need to locate Manage Social Advertising in the column next to Account and de-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”.

Once done you are opted-out of third party advertising.

Now, the real problem here is LinkedIn’s sneaky way of enabling this for all their user accounts. The move sounds great from their perspective and will surely please their stock holders. The majority of users may never realize that the option is there, and those that do are probably only opting-out and not closing their accounts because of this. They may be a bit disgruntled but this settles over time.

LinkedIn basically does what Facebook has done before them; Enable a feature for all users automatically that the majority of users, if they knew about it, would not opt-in for.

If you are on LinkedIn and do not want your name or face to appear in an ad that you have no control over whatsoever, I suggest you opt-out of it immediately.

Update: LinkedIn has posted a response called Privacy, Advertising, and Putting Members First on their blog. While the company does not seem intent to change social advertising from automatic opt-in to manual opt-in, they have announced that they will make changes to the ad units.

In a clever marketing campaign they’re even telling people what member number they were, in my case number 234,289.  In the personal email from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn he said…

Dear Mike,I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number 234289 in fact!*). In any technology adoption life cycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.

We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site.

When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world’s professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more.

We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.

LinkedIn has become a very valuable and popular social networking site.  It’s aimed at business users, helping people to network and make contact with like-minded people to aid with sales, leads and recruitment.  In that role it does indeed work very well.

This week, as stated in the email, the site hit 100 million members which, for a business only website, stacks up extremely well against the likes of Facebook with half a billion.  I’ll still certainly be using LinkedIn (you can find me at mikehalseyuk if you’re on there too) but this seems all the more impressive given that it’s just about the only social network that still maintains a subscription service.

While you can join and use LinkedIn for free, if you are serious about using it as a business networking tool you’ll need to pay

Here at gHacks we wish the site well as it attempts to reach its next milestone.

Many people were expecting this to have been released with the new Office 2010 suite recently but news soon came that it might be some time before it was released.

The Connector provides a stream of information from SharePoint, Windows Live and Social networking sites.  The connector is built into Outlook 2010 but will be available to download as a plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007.

The forthcoming version of Windows Live Messenger will also feature social networking integration and this is a tool that can prove useful in the business space if utilised properly.

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) should be available for download later today.

UPDATE : You can now download the Outlook Social Connector HERE.

The major changes in this release are again memory optimizations claiming memory reduction by up to 75%. The default Digsby client is using a little bit more than 10 Megabytes of computer memory which is 5 Megabyte less than the last version according to Joshua’s screenshots of the last release.

Other notable changes include more than 3000 code revisions since the last release, performance increases, connectivity improvements, LinkedIn support and full newsfeeds.

• RAM Usage: We optimized from the ground up and fixed memory leaks to lower RAM usage by almost 75%. This has been the number one complaint since our launch and we are proud to introduce this massive improvement.
• Performance: User interface elements draw twice as fast for better performance. We have made changes to the architecture that will improve GUI responsiveness and CPU utilization across the board.
• Connectivity: Every IM protocol automatically tries multiple connection methods and ports to improve the odds of getting through restrictive firewalls and proxy servers.
• LinkedIn: Digsby now supports LinkedIn in addition to the other social networks. Functionality includes a full newsfeed, alerts when new messages arrive, and the ability to set status right from Digsby.
• Bug Fixes: We have fixed hundreds of bugs, making Digsby more stable than ever. There have been almost 3,000 revisions in our codebase since the last release so there are too many fixes to list in our changelog.