Google has released a preview version of ‘Friend Connect’, a service which makes it easy to add social networking features to a website.

With Friend Connect, a Web publisher can add a small piece of code to their site, to immediately provide social networking features, without having to carry out any complicated programming.

With 99% of sites not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market.

It can be used to add features such as message posting, and user registration, allowing visitors to any site with Friend Connect, to interact with their contacts, and freeing them from the need to be on a specific social networking site to interact with other members.

A nationwide survey among 1,000 male and female teenagers aged 13-17 years found that young people are consistently trying to buy inappropriate material online.

In thousands of cases across the country they are successfully buying alcohol and adult DVDs as a result of poor levels of age verification.

Recent advances in online technology mean websites can now immediately verify anyone who tries to buy or access material which could be deemed inappropriate, by cross-referencing existing ID and age data - allowing online firms to keep sites user-friendly while putting security measures in place to protect young people.

The survey showed that online retailers are still failing to verify customer ages, apart from the UK online gambling industry which has embraced the latest age and ID verification processes.

Two thirds of 13-17 year olds have been asked for ID in shops when trying to buy inappropriate material over the past year, yet just 18% of young people have been asked to prove their ID when trying to buy similar items online over the same period.

According to the research conducted by GB Group, the UK’s leading identity management company, almost half of the teenage boys questioned have tried to buy adult DVDs or violent video games online in the past year.

More than three quarters of them were successful. A similar number of 15 year olds have been able to buy dangerous objects like knives online.

A quarter of teenage boys and over a third of teenage girls under 18 have managed to buy items online using someone else’s credit card.

The Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill receives a second reading in Parliament this week.

Introduced by Margaret Moran, Labour MP for Luton South, the proposals aim to ensure that anyone selling age-restricted goods and services over the internet has to take steps to verify if customers are old enough.

GB Group, who conducted the research, assisted the UK online gaming industry protect vulnerable and young people from accessing inappropriate online material.

Online gaming firms are obliged under official rules to undertake age checks.

Their research shows there is an urgent need for online retailers to take a more responsible approach to protecting youngsters from buying inappropriate goods online.

It is the highlight of the year for Radio 1, when they put on the One Big Weekend series of concerts, which covers a wide range of musical tastes and is branded as the first UK music festival of the year.

However showing the concert live on BBC3 is always going to be a risky affair, and this proved right with the performance by Madonna.

The BBC have reportedly received complaints not about the singers performance, but because she swore live on air, twice!

The concert which was held in Maidstone, Kent was deemed a success, and yet it cannot be helped to think that the whole thing is set to be blown all out of proportion because of the singer’s antics on the stage.

The concert was on live radio and BBC3 which means that there will complaints coming in from listeners and viewers, just how many complaints arrive at the BBC and Ofcom is yet to be determined.

The BBC had already been reprimanded after showing the Live Earth concert last year, where again it was Madonna and other performers who swore during the live event.

It looks as if BT is looking to off load their data centres, and they are already in talks with the US based computer maker Hewlett Packard.

The price that BT is looking for, for this part of their global organisation is around £1.5 billion.

The two companies are already partners in the international market for providing large organisations and companies with IT and Telecoms solutions, having signed an agreement over four years ago to pool their resources in this sector to offer a better product at competitive prices.

The deal, if it went ahead would make the current arrangement between the two businesses even stronger and would help BT in particular to improve their profitability in this sector.

How far the talks between the two companies have gone is unknown, but as the information is leaking out then a deal could be coming very soon.

Following a successful partnership agreement, Netgear are going to provide Virgin Media with their wireless G Routers, which will be named the Virgin Media Wireless Router.

This equipment will be offered to all new Virgin Media subscribers for a low price or in some cases will be free.

The routers are said to enhance the service being provided through the fibre optic broadband packages.

Both companies believe that the deal will enhance both services, but for Netgear it will give them extra coverage in the UK for their products.

New customers on Virgin Media’s L and XL package will be getting the new routers for free, while the customers who have chosen the M package will have to pay an extra one off payment of £40 to use the router.

Is there never going to be an end to the scandals that surround the premium rate phone calls which viewers make, when it comes to voting for the winners on certain TV programmes?

Or is it just that these phone polls have created such a mistrust of those who run them, that they are scrutinised more thoroughly than before?

Whatever the reason, the outcome is going to be the same, outrage! From viewers who spend time and money watching these programmes and voting for whoever they feel should be the winner.

In this latest case, it has been found that over a £100,000 that should have gone to various charitable organisations had for one reason or another been held back.

The thing that saves the BBC is the fact that they actually commissioned an audit of the premium phone lines that are operated by Audiocall in conjunction with over three hundred programmes.

It was found that around £106,000 did not get paid to the charities because these calls were made after the voting lines closed.

It is not known which programmes have been affected, but the BBC have now paid the money plus interest totally at £123,000 to the charitable organisations.

With a change of senior management in both camps, it would to be a great time for the two sides to start talking, in an attempt to try and sort out the dispute over the Sky’s channels once and for all.

There is no doubt that Virgin Media are suffering, whether or not this is as a direct result of the loss of channels, in particular Sky News and Sky One, which has all the latest US hit shows like, Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis.

Virgin has in fact added some five thousand new customers, which is a good sign as this time last year they were losing around fifty thousand.

However the company’s revenues were down slightly on the year before.

But if they could finally end this dispute with Sky and restore the lost channels, this would make a lot of difference to Virgin Media.

With the ink still wet on the billion pound cheque from Best Buy, there are plans already being made to spend it.

The founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone has confirmed that the company have put in an offer for the UK division of Tiscali.

However the offer for Tiscali UK only requires half of the money from Best Buy, the offer being £550 million, leaving a nice half of billion sitting there waiting for the next deal to come along.

It has been known for some time that there have been some additional bids for Tiscali but where this bid from the Carphone Warehouse stands will not be known until the day that the winning bid is announced.

Tiscali have around two million customers at the moment which will make a very nice addition to any one the top six UK broadband suppliers.

Having taken the sponsorship over from the Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media have once again decided to continue with their Mobile division sponsoring the Big Brother reality programme for series nine.

Carphone Warehouse pulled out of the deal with Big Brother when, in the celebrity show in early 2007, the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty suffered abuse at the hands of Jade Goody and some of the other contestants.

Sponsoring this type of TV show gets some serious coverage for a target audience of 18 to 34 year olds, as the shows normally have around eighty per cent in that age range.

So even though the last series, Big Brother – Celebrity Hijack, was not as successful in viewing figure terms, for a mobile phone and broadband operator like Virgin this is priceless.

The owner of Channel Five, RTL, have been experiencing some problems with their advertisers as the market would appear to have dropped slightly for the first quarter of 2008.

But RTL do have anything up to seventy channels across Europe and are reporting that the down turn in advertising revenues is not just restricted to the UK, it is a Europe wide problem.

This is good news for the UK channels such as Five, Fiver and Five US, which have recently been undergoing a serious overhaul which is designed to attract a younger audience.

The actual figure for advertising revenues for the first quarter of 2008, are a straight £1 billion, but despite this being a huge figure, it is actually down nearly three per cent on the same period last year.