Google lobbying, kids and the internet, Facebook Friendship

We all know politicians are under pressure to cut spending, but the internet’s importance to the UK economy is such that the government should continue to protect money for things like improving broadband services.

That’s the blunt message from the Google-commissioned Connected Kingdom report, which has worked out that the UK has the world’s largest per capita e-commerce market, contributing £100 billion (7.2% of GDP) to the country’s economy.

Hammering their point home somewhat, Google and report authors Boston Consulting Group say they hope to provide “context” for the government to make “better and more informed” policy decisions.

Mac App Store, global internet users, Amazon’s barcode scanner

Mac users will soon have another reason to feel superior to their PC-owning friends when the soon-to-be-launched Mac App Store makes it possible to play Angry Birds on a 27” iMac – surely the very definition of ‘living the dream’.

Bringing the App Store to the Mac may help remind people Apple makes more than just fancy phones and tablet computers, but it has caused concern among some Mac developers, who fear the move will ultimately prove restrictive.

The announcement came just two days after Apple’s fourth quarter results, somewhat overshadowing the news that Mac sales were up 27% on the previous quarter, iPhones up 91% – overtaking the number of phones sold by Blackberry manufacturer RIM for the first time, but iPods were down 11%.

Today’s conversations: niche upon niche

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The social media panorama, as visualised by the Conversation Prism, received its third annual update last week adding three new categories - social curation, niche working and social commerce.

Spotify, Grooveshark, subsidised downloads

Photo by Rsms (flickr.com/photos/rsms/) some rights reserved

Spotify is in a celebratory mode after announcing it has become Europe’s biggest music subscription service less than two years after unveiling its offering.

The UK-headquartered company bullishly says that it’s now closing in on “the world title”, though broadcasting this in a tweet conveniently left too few characters to provide any actual detail to its claim – like how many subscribers have stumped up for the paid-for premium option.

Meanwhile, the ‘iTunes-in-the-cloud’ service this week added John Lennon to its catalogue, meaning it just needs George Harrison for a full set of solo Beatles (assuming you don’t count curiousities like the ’70s Hits Singalong’ version of My Sweet Lord that it currently offers).

New Twitter: nice design, but no Hootsuite-killer

The redesigned version of Twitter unveiled on 14 September is – as of yesterday – now fully available to all users.

You’ve got a few weeks grace to flick between old and new, but after that it’s the updated Twitter or nothing.

The good news is that it’s certainly an improvement over the old version, whose limitations pushed heavy users of the service to third-party applications like Hootsuite and TweetDeck in order to manage the ‘firehose’ of conversation they encountered.

IE’s declining dominance, Orkut leads in Brazil, UK broadband competition

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Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may still be the dominant browser on the market, but there are signs its crown is slipping ever so slightly as younger, quicker rivals eye the throne.

In September IE’s global market share fell below 50% for the first time, while Firefox and Chrome saw slight uplifts in their shares of 31.5% and 11.5%, according to StatCounter.

But it would be wrong to write off IE just yet – the browser may have fallen by more than 8% over the last 12 months, but it still commands 49.9% of the market.