Apples’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference has traditionally served as a platform to showcase the latest innovations the company has developed, and this year was no different. Steve Jobs, Apple’s Chief Executive, provided the main attraction via his keynote speech, which featured the new iPhone 4 that will be going on sale later this month. As one of Apple’s marquee products, the media, software developers and consumers have anxiously been awaiting an opportunity to see the latest edition of the iPhone in action.

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It took all of two days for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to make good on his promise of simplifying Facebook’s privacy settings. Unlike many companies who have come under public scrutiny as of late—BP, Goldman Sachs and Toyota, just to name a few—Facebook moved quickly and decisively to address the concerns of their constituency. The new settings were unveiled at a presentation held today at the company’s headquarters and will provide users with what the company had originally intended: a straightforward, user-friendly means for Facebook members to control the dissemination of their personal information. The changes will take a couple of weeks to be implemented, but here is a brief overview of what you can expect:

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No matter her age, size or preferred taste in clothing, every woman is familiar with the struggle to find the perfect-fitting jeans. While some consider this notion a fairytale and others believe it’s about attainable as a four-leaf clover, nearly all women – even those who have stumbled upon occasional luck – share the frustration of chasing this dream.

“I had never heard of Not Your Daughter’s Jeans and then, one day, a friend who lives in Australia called me up to see if I could find her a pair and ship them overseas,” said Lee Ann Singleton.

It was the summer of 2008 and, although Singleton discovered she wasn’t able to grant this wish due to international distribution laws (specific to the brand), the request did spark a curiosity that led her to purchase a pair of her own to find out what, exactly, made them worth all the trouble to track down.

“Before I was introduced to NYDJ, I had to try on every pair of jeans prior to purchasing them because my size seemed to vary from store to store. But after slipping into my first pair of NYDJ, I was enlightened by the exhilarating reality that: Jeans can fit!” Singleton said.

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If imitation is the highest form of flattery, tech companies have inundated Apple with praise over the last decade. The iPod has inspired a litany of similar MP3 players, while the iPhone has forced competitors to rethink the concept of the cell phone entirely. One aspect of Apple’s business structure that has remained exclusive is their App Store for the iPhone and the iPad, until now that is.

Earlier today, Google unveiled  a new online marketplace where consumers can purchase games, magazines and online applications via the Google Chrome web browser. The Chrome Web Store, which is slated for debut later this year, will feature both free and paid applications. According to news sources, the store will operate in a similar fashion as the Apple and Android App Stores, except the applications will be for your personal computer.

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The 30,000 staff members at the University of California Davis are no longer using Gmail as their e-mail provider. The university had been testing Google’s e-mail service since August 2009, in hopes to eventually roll it out to the entire campus population. However, university officials say that the e-mail service isn’t secure or private enough to meet their standards.

Quite a few staff members had privacy concerns, many of which stemmed from Google Buzz, the social network embedded within Gmail. In a letter from the university to Google, school officials wrote that the staff members “expressed concerns that our campus’ commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future.” (more…)

If you’re thinking of using duplicate content for your blog posts, you might want to rethink this strategy if your goal is to create the most effective blog possible. Duplicate content is created when people visit different places on the Internet, such as Wikipedia or Ezinearticles.com, copy an article and paste it on their blog, pretending they wrote the text.

The problem develops when the search engine spiders try to index this duplicated post you have published. The spiders will recognize that the information reads verbatim to that of another source or multiple sources, depending on how many other webmasters have already copied this information. (more…)

Leaders of data protection from 10 nations – Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom – have written a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressing their concern about some of the privacy issues connected with a few of Google’s services, specifically Google Buzz and Google Street View.

“We were disturbed by your recent rollout of the Google Buzz social networking application, which betrayed a disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws,” the letter stated. “In essence, you took Google Mail (Gmail), a private, one-to-one web-based e-mail service and converted it into a social networking service, raising concern among users that their personal information was being disclosed.” (more…)

It’s been awhile since we first heard Rupert Murdoch that he would block News Corp. websites off the search engines, particularly Google.  And since nothing has happened within the past 5 months, Murdoch warned the world again over the weekend that his sites will no longer be available to the search engines.   .

“We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it,” Murdoch said according to Paul Harris who attended the National Press Club. (more…)

You may recall back in November, we shared with you in a news brief that Google was talking about making page speed part of it’s ranking system.  Now that has become the reality.  Googled confirmed in a blog post late last week, that site speed with now factor in where you show up in Google’s ranking. 

“Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users,” said Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, both from Google.  “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.  But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.” (more…)

In a bit of a extremely quiet week in the social media and search worlds, finally a bit of news.  Small and new developments coming from the China-Google saga.

For the past week, Google has reported on their “Mainland China service availability” page that mobile searches were partially blocked, however as of late last night, Google is entirely available on mobile devices. 

Doug Cavely of WebProNews said, “Assuming the yellow wrench doesn’t reappear tomorrow, this development may represent a significant breakthrough.  Even a sort of victory for Google, if the Chinese government has decided not to follow through on some rather harsh statements about lawbreakers being ‘unfriendly, irresponsible,’ and having ‘to pay the consequences.’” (more…)