Everyday I post three links on Twitter with the hashtag #threefromme. Each is a link to a technology story that I think is interesting. Once a week I pick the three best stories and post them to my blog this weeks top three are:

• Skype 2.0 launched– The big thing with this story is the fact that between now and August you will be able to place calls from an iPhone with the Skype app installed to Skype users for free using 3G. From August there will be a subscription charge and the level of that charge is yet to be released. Some people think that this is unfair as you are already paying for your data plans through your phone tariff and that this is a way to double charge customers. Personally I think that a small subscription charge would be acceptable. After all if there is nothing to limit these calls then everybody will download the Skype app and use it to make free calls to each other. The telecom companies will soon catch on and push the price of all our tariffs up at the same time that the level of connectivity reduces due to increased bandwidth usage. Don’t think this would happen? Why have AT & T decided that they are no longer providing unlimited data plans for the iPhone and iPad in USA? Normal Skype to Skype calls using a wifi connection will continue to be free.
• Google maps your home wi-fi network– This is taken from an article in The Daily Telegraph, The now infamous Google Street View cars did a little more than just capturing pictures of your house and people on street corners. It now transpires that they were also recording details of every wi-fi router in the land. Google say that this was to help improve their geolocation software so that they could pinpoint you when you are out of 3G range. To me this seems almost Orwellian in nature. Why would I want everybody in the world to know where I am to within 20 metres? I have nothing to hide, but I might not want people to know that I am out of the house at a particular time. Geo location is rapidly becoming the next big thing in technology. Just because the technology is available does not necessarily mean that there is a demand for it. If I want people to know when my house is empty I will register with a site like Please Rob Me. However, there is still more to this story. Not only did Google map your wi-fi network they also downloaded data from your network as they went by and have stored that too. According to a UK based Google Exec who I heard on the BBC World Service this data was recorded due to a miscommunication between two development teams. The Exec also noted that as the vehicles are moving at speed the amount of data that was recorded was very small for each network. It does raise the question, how safe is the data in your home network?  Cnet.com posted an article on ways to keep your network safe.
• Quit Facebook Day Stats– May 31st was “Quit Facebook Day”. The quitfacebookday.com website was set up by a group of (now former) Facebook users in response to the perceived way that Facebook used its users personal data. At the time of writing this there were 36073 people that had signed up to say they would quit Facebook. This is nearly a 50% increase on the number who were signed up on 27th of May, the last time that I wrote about the site. This number pales into insignificance against the approximate 400 million active Facebook users. So the question is did people decide not to sign up to the campaign because they were pacified by the changes Facebook made to its privacy policy? I do not think so, I believe that people have a general apathy about the personal data that they share online. I often here people say to me things like “The trouble with Facebook is that everybody knows your business”. Actually, that’s not Facebooks fault that’s your fault for oversharing your life with people that you barely know. One interesting anecdotal fact is that I receive stats on all the links I post and I can tell you now that among the least popular articles are ones about Facebook’s Privacy Policy. That being the case I think I will stop typing now!

I am always interested in your views on these or any other technology stories, so why not leave me a comment?

You can get links to interesting technology articles every day by simply following me on Twitter or go to twitter and search for threefromme.