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This article was published on May 9, 2010

What Happened Online This Week


What Happened Online This Week

Welcome to our weekly recap. This week’s biggest stories were; the launch of the Internets first non-Latin domain names,  Facebook’s announcement that it had partnered with McDonald’s to launch its long awaited geolocation features, rumors that social gaming company Zynga is planning on leaving Facebook and Google’s bold interface changes.

Before we crack on, do make sure you subscribe to TNW Podcast (iTunes | XML). On this week’s episode we offer a worldly perspective on this week’s tech news. This week many things were available to argue about including non-latin domains and Google’s entry into eBooks.

First Non-Latin Domain Names Go Live

This week was “historic” for internationalized domain names as the first three non-Latin script top level domain names go live.

All three are country code top level domains under the IDN ccTLD fast track program.  ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) first reported confirmation of the change in October 2009. Since then more than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains but today, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first to be released.

Facebook Set to Launch Geolocation

AdAge broke the story on Thursday that Facebook was partnering with McDonald’s to launch their Geolocation feature. The details of how the location feature will work and how it will integrate with status updates is still uncertain. At this point, all we can do is speculate on how the feature will work. Facebook’s implementation of location and how it will affect startups Foursquare and Gowalla remains to be seen. Although both are hot companies in the space, Foursquare has 1M users while Gowalla has about 250,000. Compare that to Facebook which boasts over 400M plus users with 100M of them accessing the service on a daily basis using a mobile device.

Zynga to Leave Facebook?

Rumors heated up this week that Zynga, the addictive social gaming company built on Facebook, would be leaving (or at least attempting to eliminate it’s dependency) on Facebook. In an email sent to TechCrunch by an anonymous source, CEO Mark Pincus held a company meeting to discuss Zynga Live – a social gaming network that would reside outside of Facebook’s walls.

Google’s New Look

Google has been gradually changing its UI over recent months and this week implemented some bolder changes. Changes were also implemented on it’s mobile platform. If you don’t fancy the new interface, you can always use the old one which is still available. Interface aside, if you missed Conan O’Brien’s talk at Google I would stop what you’re doing and watch it – it’s a must see.

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