It’s been a while since my last posting and a lot has happened in the marketing world. I figured that with the recent spate of interesting developments, the timing would be right to post my next blog update. Here are some of the newsworthy developments in the blogosphere and my personal views on them…

Google and China – Starting off with the news that’s been dominating all the RSS feeds and blog posts…Will they or won’t they? Will Google finally take a stand and walk out of a booming market or will they bow down to the higher powers. While Google in the past had agreed to censor search results in accordance with government policies in China, it is no longer willing to do so. Miffed at the reports about hacking of personal email accounts of human rights activist, Google threatened to take its business out of the China market. However, as I write, the analysts are still speculating on what will be the outcome of this tug-of-war. While on one end, Google is talking about the right to free information and privacy laws, on the other end China is questioning the double standards by Google. Several cyber-security experts claim that “e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google’s own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.” While I firmly believe in freedom of speech and information, I also wish that all the facts come out in the open before we make any judgments on this issue.. More details on this here. Also read Google’s official statement here

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According to statistics published by Facebook, the social networking site has 300 Million active users and an average user has 130 friends.

Last year Newsweek carried an article (by Steven Levy ) that the average number of friends in Myspace was 180 (May 2008).

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