Facebook connect finally lands on the iPhone. Its a web development tool which has been designed to help sites add social networking. The application is currently directly in competition with Google Friend Connect. The Facebook Development team have now released a version for the iPhone application developer. This will allow developers to incorporate social networking into there applications. The features include:

- Making Api Phone Calls allowing your app to access user profiles and share information
- Publish directly to Facebook
- Ask other users to extend permissions for offline access and interaction with data

It will be interesting to see how the next wave of iPhone Applications will utilise this technology.

Interestingly Google Webmasters help currently diplays a thread which asks what the limit is for the number of submitted sitemaps in the Google webmasters interface. Click Here to follow the thread. There is currently no documentation detailing the 500 Sitemap limit, so this is the first time we beleive this has been mentioned.

Google’e JOhnMU mentioned that this limit will be increased in the future.

PRS, The Performing Rights Society for Music has long been in the eye of controversy in the UK. There squeaky clean image has been tarnished with allegations of perusing licensing fees from small businesses who’s 2-3 staff are listening to the radio in non public areas. It’s understandable that with the down turn in CD sales and the issues music piracy, PRS need to enforce the collection of licensing fees to reimburse to the performers and support new music. Youtube is the latest casualty with PRS proposing an increase in the cost of fees after the expiry of YouTube’s current contract. The costs are so high that YouTube would be paying more than the revenue achieved on the site through advertising. Youtube wanted to justify the costs and track exactly which videos were played using their video ID system. It has also been noted that PRS would not identify which artists and songs are covered by the licence which has obstructed this proposal.
“We value the creativity of musicians and song writers and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright,” said parent company Google.
“But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”
Google is still negotiating with PRS but until an agreement is made videos from artists on EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony BMG will disappear from the UK version of YouTube.
Patrick Walker, director of video partnerships on YouTube said that music videos are some of the most popular and important content on YouTube.
“This is about long-term viability,” he said. “If the next Arctic Monkeys is going to surface we need to get this to work. It’s in the interest of the music industry – we’re not just doing this for us. The record industry needs a new business models so it’s kind of a shame that this has happened. But sometimes you have to step back to step forwards.”
PRS have claimed that YouTubes announcement came without warning and with no consultation.
“We were shocked and disappointed to receive a call late this afternoon informing us of Google’s drastic action,” said PRS chief executive Steve Porter. “… which we believe only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”
In an attempt to combat the fury and anger of YouTube users PRS emphasised that it did not ask YouTube to remove the videos and “urges them to reconsider their decision as a matter of urgency”.

Over the past few weeks the search marketing industry has been buzzing by the news that Google now prefers brands, giving big brand sites an extra boost in ranking. The changes took effect in the recent “Vince’s” Google Algorithm update.

Matt Cutts, head of Googles Webspam team, recorded the following Youtube video for Googles webmasters Central channel explaining exactly how the changes will effect search results.

Matt Cutts stated that the “simple change” is not so much about brands, but about elements that go into a brand, including “trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality.”

“I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands. We really don’t think about ‘brands’ in Search Quality that much,” says Matt “It’s not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users.”

“The net upshot of this change is pretty simple. We try to return high-quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank. And so, what you should be doing doesn’t change: try to make a great site. Try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche,” Cutts said. “And it doesn’t have to be a big niche. It doesn’t have to be a huge, well known keyword. It can be a smaller niche, and if you’re still the expert, that’s the sort of thing that people are going to want to link to, that they’ll talk about, the sort of thing people really enjoy. Those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.”