I ain’t no soccer fan and I’ve never watched the World Cup, but this time, I felt an urge to watch it live on television, the result being no fights for the remote! For the first time, I feel the spirit of the football world cup, not because of an instant awakening, but because it’s all around – newspapers, television, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube everywhere!  Even in the online world, it’s almost impossible to stay away from the spirit of the FIFA World Cup 2010! Here are some examples of how a few websites are spreading the joy of the FIFA World Cup 2010 and how they have benefitted from it too.

1.   Oleole.com
Oleole.com has managed to bring the football community closer on the web. It was created in 2006 and has stayed active to witness and hold discussions on all major football Cups. The World Cup section offers live scores, travel info, and interesting facts about the game and matches. More than anything else, you have an ultimate community for football lovers to hold discussions which is full of football-driven content. You can join fan clubs for Football Leagues, podcasts, wallpapers, blogs and videos about football.

2.   Southafrica.info
We have seen South Africa tourism steer towards the World Cup as their new tourism mantra. World Cup 2010 is expected to be a turning point for South Africa in terms of tourism and development. Southafrica.info, a site which gives information for investors, tourists, citizens and South Africans abroad, has an exclusive page for the World Cup – www.southafrica.info/2010/. It includes an SA 2010 Fan kit which gives information about African culture and football, informative articles, match schedule and news about the World Cup.

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Apple hates Google. Who would have thunk it! The one-time bosom-buddies, who even joked about merging the companies and naming it AppleGoo, have now turned not merely rivals, but enemies engaged in a fierce battle for supremacy. If you are about to compare this to the battle of wills and copyrights that Apple and Microsoft engaged in for years, you’d better stop, because you’d be way off the mark. Apple, it seems, is waging a very personal war on Google.

Apple (read, Steve Jobs) believe that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who served on their board of directors for a number of years, has not merely betrayed their trust by venturing into the mobile technology business arena, but that he may even have drawn ‘inspiration’ for their future products from the many iPhone discussions he was part of. (Surely, Steve couldn’t be accusing the Google CEO of corporate espionage? Or could he?)

The growing rift between Apple and Google was first suspected in August of 2009, when they mutually decided that Eric Schmidt would give up his position in Apple’s board of directors, because his continued presence on the board would undoubtedly lead to conflicts of interest as Google was encroaching on more of Apple’s core business areas with Android technology and Chrome OS. (Not to put thoughts in anyone’s head, but does Google’s advancements in these core areas coincide with Schmidt’s stay at Apple?)

Things went steadily downhill after that.

The rift (only) grew wider when in November 2009 Google acquired AdMob, a leading mobile advertising platform that Apple had its eye on. Google apparently paid a premium of 25% just to keep Apple from going after it. Jeeze, Google, competitive, much?
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The other shoe has dropped. Google has officially made a foray into the realm of social networks. (No, now is not a good time to bring up Wave, which Sergey insists is a success – yeah, whatever you say, Sergey.) On 9 February 2010, they unveiled Google Buzz – “a Google approach to sharing”. And apparently, the only solution for the problem of ‘oversharing’ of social expressions on the web. It is but the natural course of events, considering Google’s we-need-to-have-a-finger-in-every-pie attitude. And web domination is not (quite) web domination without a social networking tool.

Coming back to the topic at hand, what exactly is Buzz? From what I can see, it is a robust, not to mention ambitious, email application masquerading as a social networking platform, which also doubles as an aggregator – of status updates, images, videos and links – all in the name of social curation.

Now, how does it work? In a clever move that almost makes up for the mess that is Wave, Google has released Buzz directly into Gmail. So, the next time you log in to your account (this is when I interrupt myself  to say that only Gmail users get to use Buzz), you may just find yourself with a spanking new Google Buzz account. No need to sign up anew, no installation of any kind required. Just click on the Buzz tab beneath the Inbox tab and you can get Buzzing. As Google reports on their official Buzz page, they are still in the process of rolling out this service, and it may take a couple of more days before it is active in all Gmail accounts.

When Buzz is active in your account, you’ll be taken to such a page when you log in.

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Over the past few months, some important changes have been underway at Facebook. Some are already noticeable when one visits the site, but there are others yet to become apparent. If you have no idea what I am talking about, come a little closer, I’ll tell you, “Facebook’s ditching its regional networks!” (I know, it’s no scoop, but did you really see that coming? If you subscribe to the Facebook blog, you probably did.)

My reaction to this revelation, though, is largely that of indifference, it doesn’t affect me one way or another. Probably because my activities on Facebook have never been network based, I have always taken care to set my privacy settings at ‘Only Friends’, which ensures that only the people on my friend list have access to my profile and the contents. And to be honest, except for the fact that it could possibly indicate the geographical location of a user, I’ve found the concept of regional network rather useless. In my defense, even Facebook admits (sort of) that these networks turned out to be pretty useless, apparently only 50 percent of the users ever joined regional networks.

Facebook first mentioned of a change in status quo in their 03 June post on their blog:

“…To make the site easier to understand, we’re taking the first step towards removing these regional networks…since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share…made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global…”

In addition to frequently publishing posts regarding the matter on their blog, over the months, they have also maintained an active discussion thread for users to comment, air views and give suggestions.

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