Last night, Gmail went down and it had alot of users talking about it on Twitter and FriendFeed.

It was the number #1 topic on Twitter Search and was covered alot in my feeds on twitter and friendfeed, even TechCrunch blogged about the Systemwide Gmail Outage and this got me thinking - could this be done for pr purposes or was it really “raining” in the clouds.

Imagine if you took down a much valued service temporarily, you’re going to see alot of bloggers discussing it as well as, on the likes of Twitter, FriendFeed and much more. This means your getting press coverage for free and boosting your brand and as a result, you’re saving money on your advertising spend - and for any company that’s a good thing - no matter how big you are.

This also seems to ring true, when the GMail blog didn’t comment on the issue for a long period of time and the HTML Gmail Version was working through-out the mass outage - which could mean GMail could have been taken down for pr purposes.

A company as large as Google wouldn’t suspend a service to get FREE pr now, would it?

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Profit Baron will be changing in the near future, and this is why you’ve not seen content being posted on here recently. Currently, I feel that Profit Baron has had no sense of direction and I’ve been thinking of ways to fix this issue, as we want to be focused on one particular topic and not a “jack of all topics” so to speak.

Therefore, it is now going to be my “personal blog” and the name of my company, in which my other ventures will operate under it. As a result, some of the content will be removed from the site so we are fully in relation to the ”new” Profit Baron and I feel that this is a great way for both of us to benefit and by moving with the times, we can grow our community and expand our user base.

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Many of us know about how Senior Judge Louis L. Stanton, ordered Google to hand over its YouTube information to Viacom. However, the problem is that the data includes username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on YouTube. Which means that, Viacom can potentially launch a lawsuit against any user who has watched a copyrighted video.

A number of publications have said and quoted Viacom on that they weren’t going to collect all the data they were entitled to under the order. But, I’m not sure if we should believe Viacom on this because, if you remember in 2006 - The AOL search debacle which had users being identified based on a simple list of the search terms they had entered.

Viacom has come out again, and reiterated their statement on that they won’t use the information to go after individuals.

The problem is Google aren’t sure if Viacom will live up to the promise of not going after individuals. This is proven by them being unwilling to hand over employee data and this has led to Googles reputation being on the line. They’ve shown they’re prepared to protect their employees, now it’s time for them to show they will protect its users too.

Because, if they don’t protect their users everyone is going to remember that Google had gathered and stored information without consent, and then gave it away when they were up against some trouble. Which will certainly kill their reputation.

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Facebook as we all know have a huge user base but, modest revenue. There are a few things I can think of very quickly which Facebook can implement to allow them to increase their revenue rapidly and become a “cash cow”.

Advertising is a method which may eventually work, but so far social networks are proving ad-resistant.  However, a couple of well-placed sources have told us that Facebook Officials have been debating the introduction and merits of creating a PayPal-like system which allows users to buy virtual goods and other goods. Our sources and a couple of useful clues have also said that there could a possible launch at Facebook’s f8 developer conference.

Another factor which could show that they are implementing such system is that we’ve had several reports from our readers, who use Facebook and have told us that they’ve seen what appears to be a ”secure” version of the site - which is using SSL (Secure Sockets Layers) encryption. This encryption method is often used by sites which, collect payment information from users and it seem to make sense that Facebook are using SSL for this reason.

However, although Facebook are playing with SSL it doesn’t actually mean they will be implementing a paypal-like system any time soon.

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Deep Fork Ventures, have raised $500 million for a new fund. The $500 million five-year fund will be used to invest in consumer technology, the Internet, digital media and cleantech.

Its three partners: Aubrey McClendon, Andre de Baubigny and Timothy Komada provided all of the money and met through Vintrust, which dubs itself an “investment bank for wine”.

Vintrust provides storage facilities, wine management software and advice and was founded by Andre and Timothy with Aubrey being an investor.

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