The US Department of Justice has sent Google a request for additional information as part of their scrutiny of the search giant’s proposed purchase of Motorola Mobility.
As with any deal of this magnitude, the DOJ must conduct an investigation before it can be finalized. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission may have a say in the matter.
Google Senior Vice President David Drummond announced the DOJ request on the company’s Public Policy blog, writing, “Today we received what is called a “second request,” which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.”
He added that he doesn’t believe there is any reason to believe the Justice Department will not approve the sale.
However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be additional hurdles to clear before everything is said and done. At a US Senate antitrust hearing last week Google’s Erich Schmidt faced hostile legislators who accused Google of anticompetitive behavior.
Even though the hearing was focused on their search business, more than one Senator intimated Google uses the Android OS primarily to further their dominance.
With national elections for the US presidency and more than half of all legislators coming up next year, political pressure and grandstanding could easily lead to significant delays.
Result for: blog
Twitter users, especially those that had gained a large following over the years, were shocked earlier today when their number of followers was reset to 0.
While the numbers were back to normal soon, the reset had to be done to kill off a bug that was being exploited to force celebrities to “follow” anybody who was using the bug.
“We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to “force” other users to follow them. We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place,” said the company in a blog post.
Fortunately, adds the company, the glitch did not make private tweets public.
The extremely easy glitch involved tweeting the term “accept (whoever)” and then refreshing. Suddenly, Ashton Kutcher or whoever else you wanted was your fan.
Result for: blog
Twitter has boasted that its users now send out 50 million 140-character-or-less tweets per day, or about six hundred per second. The micro-blogging giant, which is usually mute about much of its statistics, revealed the milestone on Monday. The site had five thousand tweets every day back in 2007, which went up to 300,000 per day in 2008.
In 2009, tweets had grown to an impressive 2.5 million every day, according to Kevin Weil, a member of Twitter’s analytics team. “Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day,” Weil said. “Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”
The total number of Twitter users is unknown to the public, kept as an internal statistic at the company since it launched.
Considering that the 50,000,000 figure only represents the amount of tweets made by users, the actual number of tweets delivered by the service would be much higher, with tweets being shown for all followers of a user. Furthermore, Twitter omitted messages that were posted from accounts identified as spam from the total figures.
