TechnoCloud

Facebook is expanding its Facebook Credits payments system across the site in a move to boost revenues from games and virtual goods.

Facebook first introduced a limted trial of its Credits system in in May 2009 as a way for users to buy e-goods from the Facebook gift store and a small number of third-party apps, but is now rolling this out to more app developers.

Facebook takes a 30% commission in line with Apple’s App Store commission.

With the rise in social gaming the virtual gifts economy this is a major revenue opportunity for Facebook. As Apple have shown in their App Store, making payments easy and people are much more likely to spend on digital content.

In the background is the battle to be the web’s micropayment engine. Many products are competing to unlock this potential goldmine, from early attempts at online currencies like Beenz (now closed), to retailers like Amazon, to eBay-owned Paypal and social networks, but surely the web is just too big?

As social networks, and Facebook in particular, increase their share of web usage their chance of having the kind of reach to become an ‘easier’ solution grows, but they will still be one among many.

Future are launching FirstPlay, a video magazine covering gaming, on the PlayStation network.

FirstPlay offers HD reviews, previews and downloadable content and costs £0.99 an episode or £8.99 for a three-month subscription. FirstPlay will also include advertising with six ‘premium’ slots available per episode.

Future already launched a video games mag, Qore, on the US PlayStation Network in 2008.

Google News is taking on Twitter by trialling a real-time news trends service. In the trial, a list of trending key words appears beneath the ‘Top Stories’ tab, in addition to a personalised news box, that allows users to add topics of interests. It’s still at the trial stage, so only certain users will see it until Google decides whether to add it to the default feature set.

Earlier this month Google began adding a personalised news tracking service, which allows users to star a story so they can keep track of updates to the story.

You might be surprised to hear that the second biggest app store after Apple’s App Store is in fact, Getjar, a cross-platform aggregator of apps. It has over 50k apps on offer across 97% of phones and has had close to 1bn downloads of free and paid apps. It benefits from confusion over app availability and discovery and makes its money through referral fees from the app publisher.

Over 70% of its downloads are Java apps, with Nokia’s Symbian second with 12%.

Facebook is fast catching Yahoo and Google as US web users’ home on the web, having already overtaken MySpace and Microsoft in the past year. It has doubled in the past 6 months to nearly 30 billion total minutes usage, against Yahoo’s 40bn and Google’s just over 35bn.

And why? Mobile access is certainly a factor, but isn’t it just human psychology in that news is interesting, news about your friends even more so. Indeed perhaps it’s news about ’strangers’ that is a big factor in MySpace’s fall from 17.5bn to 8bn in a year.

Nielsen claims that the time spent on social media sites rose 82% in 2009 across the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, with consumers spending more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009. Facebook accounted for an impressive 67% of social media users.

And with mobile access making it easier than ever to stay connected this trend is going to continue, in turn making social gaming an increasingly interesting opportunity with the right model. Balance against this Facebook reducing the visibility of most apps on their platform to combat abuse of the notification system.

RockYou suffered one of the worst data leaks of the year last year with some 32m accounts hacked through its lax security policies. A study of the passwords showed many users were just as lax – the top 5, in order, were: ‘123456’; ‘12345’; ‘123456789’; ‘Password’; and finally the rather heart-warming ‘iloveyou’.

If you recognise one of those, it’s time to update your password…

According to Gartner’s latest set of predictions, by 2013 more people will be able to access the web from mobile phones than from PCs. The company reckons that there will be 1.78 billion PCs in use that year, outstripped by the 1.82 billion install base of Smartphones and browser-equipped feature phones.

With the user experience challenges of a small screen and with other phones yet to catch the iPhone in terms of web usage, it could still be a while until the majority of the web is consumed on mobile devices, but it’s nonetheless an eye-catching statistic.

The future of the web is looking mobile.

As Apple passed another milestone in mobile with 3 billion app downloads, Google stepped up its competition in the Smartphone market with the launch of its Nexus One phone. Obviously, this uses Google’s Android operating system, also in use on an increasing number of handsets, including the much hyped Droid phone from Motorola.

The phone is initially sold directly from a Google website, with consumers able to choose their preferred operator for the $529 device (a $179 2 year T-Mobile USA deal is also available, more coming soon including Vodafone in Europe).

But is it an ‘iPhone killer’? It’s certainly close in size and shape to the iPhone and boasts finer screen resolution and a removable battery, plus a number of innovations including free GPS navigation. However, with a still limited Android app store and no bundled ‘iTunes’ equivalent, the iPhone may well still have more of its nine lives to use up…

A couple of weeks ago, a terrible thing happened to my favourite gadget. Yes, I dropped my iPhone in a sink full of water.

Initially all looked fine and it worked as normal. However, the next morning the water that had penetrated the phone started to corrode its components and the Home button stopped working.

The rest of the iPhone worked as normal, quite an achievement after a full immersion in water.

An iPhone app developer suggested putting the phone in a bowl of brown rice to draw out the moisture. Worth a try if you can do it straight away, but unfortunately the Home button was too far gone in my case.

The beauty of the iPhone is the simplicity of its user interface, with the touchscreen requiring only two addition buttons. Of course the drawback is when one of these buttons stops working you are in trouble.

My iPhone had passed its one year warranty date, so Apple were unable to replace it for free. My phone contract only had a few weeks to run, so it seemed too expensive to buy a replacement for a few weeks only when a lower priced subsidised device was on its way, particularly as I was looking to upgrade to a 3GS.

Over time, I’ve learned how to use an iPhone without the Home button:

- Move from app to app, as most apps allow you to open at least the browser (especially ‘terms and conditions’ usually contain hyperlinks). Email contains hyperlinks which open the browser. Contacts and Calendar allow you to put in a URL which opens the browser. Open a ‘purchase app’ link within the browser and then download a free app and you are back to the starting point (or incorrectly enter your password to avoid downloading lots of unwanted apps).

- Of course, some apps are dead ends. In this case, you have to restart your phone.

- If the phone gets stuck on the Apple loading screen (about 1 in 5 times for me), then you have a problem. As you need the Home button to force a restart you have to wait for the power to run down. Fortunately, the loading screen uses up lots of power, so it normally powers down within a day. The trick is not to fully charge the phone, so you don’t wait all day if this happens.

- And most importantly of all… Don’t drop your iPhone in water!