Everyone wants Oprah to endorse their product because her backing usually translates into healthy sales and dollars and cents added to the profit column.

We have seen it with books where she has turned unknown authors into literary stars because of her choice. When Amazon launched the Kindle, Oprah was the one that boosted it from a nice tech toy to a must have item.

Figures just out show that the Kindle 2 has already sold 300,000 since its release in late February. It is selling at roughly double the rate of the first generation device which sold around 400,000 units. Analysts reckon the Kindle 2 will hit the one million sales mark this year.

Well now Oprah is turning her attention to another piece of technology that has long been the darling of Silicon Valley and that is the microblogging service Twitter.

On her Facebook page and her programme website, Orpah has said she will be talking to the “King of Twitter - Ashton Kutcher…and sending her very first tweet!”

The actor is presently locked in a Twitter battle with CNN Breaking News to pull in one million followers. He has offered all kinds prizes to the person who actually becomes the one millionth follower and also said he will “ding-dong-ditch Ted Turner’s house while I am in Atlanta.”

Mr Turner who founded CNN no longer runs the network. The challenge has ‘fired up’ CNN Anchor Larry King who has responded with a video on YouTube basically saying bring it on pretty boy.

“Are you putting me on? Are you kidding? Do you know how big a network we are? Do you know what CNN is? Kutcher, you’re playing out of your field. CNN will bury you,” said Mr King, with a wry smile on his face.

Okay so a fun sidebar to the latest chapter in the Twitter story. But there is no doubt that for Ashton Kutcher, who presently ranks at number 3 behind CNN on Twitter, being crowned the “King of Twitter” by Oprah will boost his following.

For Twitter, it will take the service to a whole new level. Figures show the popularity of being able to tell people what you are doing in 140 carachters is catching on, big style.

According to Compete, a Web analytics firm, Twitter had 14 million unique visitors in March, up from 8 million in February.

When founder Ev Williams’ tweeted yesterday that “Tomorrow just became a very big day,” journalists and bloggers in the Valley went into overdrive speculating that a deal was about to be announced with Google.

Some might say having Oprah in your corner is an even bigger deal. No doubt the Twitter management will be working like crazy for the moment when Oprah sends her first tweet live on national tv. Could you imagine if she got the famous Fail Whale that shows the service is overloaded?

One person, writing on Oprah’s Facebook page, has a $100 bet on Twitter going down in its hour of glory.

So has Nokia, which still has 37% of the global mobile market, lost the plot? Well its share price leaped ahead after the results came out, despite a fall of 19% in the number of phones sold this year compared to last. The market was happy because the news wasn’t worse.

Nokia reaffirmed an earlier forecast that the overall market would shrink by 10% this year, pretty shocking for an industry which was used to 20% growth every year, but investors latched on to the idea that the gloom wasn’t getting any deeper.

But there are still questions over how well Nokia is competing in the one area of the market that is still growing - “converged mobile devices”, as Nokia calls them, or smartphones to the rest of us.

The company only managed to sell 13.7 million smartphones in the first three months of 2009, compared to 14.6 million in the same period last year. But the company’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo still managed to extract some good news here, claiming that its share of the market had actually ticked up a little since Christmas.

He trumpeted the success of the 5800 Xpress Music phone which was Nokia’s number one seller in the first quarter of the year. But this device, touted an iPhone rival, was the company’s first mass-market touchscreen phone - and arrived many months after just about everyone else had brought out similar devices.

Nokia seems to have been caught napping by the way smartphones have moved from early-adopter business devices into the mainstream. I remember visiting their Helsinki headquarters in 1999 and finding everyone there tapping away on the first version of the Communicator - and telling me that it made business meetings a bit tricky because colleagues were messaging each other across the table.

That device seemed extraordinarily advanced at the time - and Nokia has continued to develop the kind of phones that appeal to well-heeled early adopter executives. Now, though, everyone wants a device that is both smart and simple, and Nokia has struggled to deliver that combination.

A lot is now being staked on the N97 which arrives in June, and looks an attractive combination of touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told the investment analysts that he hoped it would sell a million a month, if the price charged by the operators was right.

But one analyst reminded me that June might be a difficult month to launch a smartphone because that’s when a new version of the iPhone may be unveiled. Nokia probably sells forty times as many phones as Apple but the N97 could still find itself overshadowed by the glare of publicity surrounding a new iPhone. Perhaps the Finnish company needs smarter marketing, along with its smarter phones.

Last year I received a warning that a video I had uploaded of my family playing in the park featured copyrighted material in the form of a Cat Stevens song, used as a backing track.

In that case it was allowed to remain on the site, although advertising appeared alongside my video, as a result of an agreement between Google and the record labels on “monetising” music videos.

But now a video I uploaded at the weekend has been deleted - and I’ve received a stiff warning that my whole account could be closed down if I fail to behave myself.

This time the copyright issue involved not music, but football. I’d visited one of the big matches of the weekend - Brentford v Exeter City - and uploaded exactly 37 seconds of action.

It wasn’t exactly “Match of The Day” - one shot of the teams walking out, two attempts on goal by Brentford and a penalty miss. But I wasn’t trying to record match highlights - my aims was to try out a new mini high-definition camera.

I wanted to see what kind of pictures I could get out of the camera - and how they would look when uploaded as a large file to YouTube, which now offers an HD option.

I’d somehow forgotten that the Football League are policing YouTube closely - and also assumed that they were looking out for material grabbed from the television, not a few frames of video shot from the crowd.

It looks as though my camera doesn’t belong to me once I go through the turnstiles at a football ground. Maybe they should have the same signs that you get at cinemas, warning against the use of a video camera.

But here’s a funny thing. I uploaded another video to YouTube last week , featuring a live performance by Billy Bragg at a press conference. He was part of an event staged to demand better terms for musicians - from YouTube’s parent company, Google.

I’ve not received any warning notice about this video, and when I searched, I found plenty more material featuring Billy Bragg, much of it shot by fans. In one clip you can actually hear the songwriter asking people to sing nicely because they may well end up on YouTube.

So it seems there’s a simple message - it’s worth taking your video camera or mobile phone to a gig because the artists and their labels won’t really mind too much, whatever their views of YouTube. But if you’re going to a League Two football match, take my advice - leave your camera at home.

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Wall Street was certainly happy with the initial news and shares went up a notch or two in after hours trading to finish around the $15 mark.

Next week eBay has an earnings report out, so shareholders might be more lenient on the board if the numbers don’t delight because they know the future means offloading a company that left many scratching their heads when eBay paid $2.6bn for it in 2005.

eBay boss John Donahue himself admitted that the Skype purchase was not a wise buy when he said: “It’s clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal…and that separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth engines - e-commerce and online payments - and deliver long-term value to our stockholders.”

So why not just put the company on the block and sell it now rather than go down the IPO (initial public offering) route sometime next year?

It’s a cute move in a down economy surely to lure out possible buyers and placate shareholders?

For some analysts the IPO route just doesn’t make sense now or next year. Gregory Lundberg from Commresearch told Reuters News: “The first thing that I have to say is market conditions currently would not support an IPO of Skype in our opinion. 2010 will be equally questionable unless the business changes course with the launch of the BlackBerry and iPhone applications.”

In its first 36 hours, the iPhone app was downloaded one million times.

The IPO market is pretty miserable at the moment. So far this quarter there has been just one IPO pulling in over $800m compared to 20 last year at the same time raising $24bn.

So if this is a bait and switch move, who would want to buy the company.

First out of the gate are the original founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who have reportedly approached a number of private-equity firms about buying their baby back.

eBay however might not be willing to do a deal here, notes the blog TechCrunch, given that it is “embroiled in a legal dispute over Skype’s licence to certain peer-to-peer technologies which Skype founders still control…and which form the technological foundation of Skype.”

There are of course other possible buyers.

Microsoft was in the running last time and could well be interested again. Yahoo was also there but it’s doubtful they would be able to play ball at the moment given their own financial woes.

Google is steadily moving into the world of mobile with voice search, Grand Central and of course its Android platform. The search giant has declared time and again that mobile is the future and with Skype’s 405m user base, it would give them one fantastic kick start.

But analyst Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates notes that they “don’t have an end point, their own phone. They have a platform but are light years behind where Apple is.”

In fact Mr Arnold believes that Skype is the perfect fit for Apple.

“If there is a cool move to be made here, it is Apple and Skype getting together,” said Mr Arnold.

“Skype has this amazing user community and Apple has the cool products but it doesn’t have a community like the Skype community. The two together would become a global carrier in the true sense of the word because most carriers are geographically based and these two are so rooted in the world of the internet that it is native to them.”

Mr Arnold said he has even devised a name for the Skype/Apple product and it’s Skapple!

What caused the outrage was the way that “adult” appeared to mean books or DVDs with gay or lesbian themes. That meant that they would no longer turn up in searches, or, when found, would no longer include their Amazon “sales rankings”, the one number that every modern author really cares about, and checks, ooh, at least a couple of times a day.

The result - at least according to lots of American bloggers - was that all sorts of works, from “Maurice” by EM Forster [pictured, right] to Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” virtually disappeared from view. As far as I could see, the “deranking” didn’t affect books on the amazon.co.uk site, though some British authors say that their US editions were affected. Attempts to contact Amazon by authors who’d seen their works lose their rankings yielded little in the way of hard information.

Then an author called Mark Probst, who is also a publisher and therefore has what he calls a “special way” of contacting the retailer, got this reply when he asked why his novel had been sent into the wilderness:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Within hours, an internet firestorm was spreading, with Facebook groups formed to decry the apparent censorship, online petitions gathering thousands of signatures and “#amazonfail” becoming a trending topic on Twitter.

Of course, you might think that it’s perfectly sensible for Amazon to decide to filter its content, making “adult” content less accessible, and so protecting younger users from seeing unsuitable material. I put that point to Zoe Margolis, whose own book “Diary of a Sex Fiend”, had its ranking removed. “Amazon’s argument doesn’t stand up,” she told me, “you have to be over 18 to purchase from the site.” And, she wanted to know, who defines adult? “As we’ve seen lesbian and gay fiction - featuring NO erotic content whatsoever - has been deemed ‘adult’. One has to wonder if someone at Amazon is pandering to a right-wing contingent, who want to restrict access to non-conservative authors/topics.”

But then the plot thickened. Amazon appeared to change tack, insisting that the apparent censorship was instead “a glitch in our system which is being fixed.”

That of course did not quieten things down. New conspiracy theories started to circulate - that Amazon really was intent on quietly making its service more “family friendly”, that Christian fundamentalists were behind the whole thing, or that someone had somehow managed to manipulate the system by which Amazon responds to complaints from users about books. And then a a blogger came forward and claimed that this indeed was the explanation for the whole affair - he wrote that had “gamed” the system, extracting a list of every gay and lesbian book on the site, and sending thousands of complaints by an automated process.

Finally, on Tuesday morning at around 0630, I got a more complete statement from Amazon, which described the incident as “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.”

The statement went on:

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

So was it a glitch, a bizarre cyber-conspiracy, or a ham-fisted cataloguing error? I’m not really any clearer - but I think that there are some lessons to be learned.

First of all, that it’s a bit of a nightmare being an online retailer. If WH Smith or Waterstone’s decided to put gay literature on more obscure shelves (remember - the books weren’t banned, just made harder to find) would anyone have made a fuss - or even noticed?

Secondly, that in the days of “real-time” social networking, a PR storm can break over your head within hours, even over a holiday weekend, and you need to be ready to respond rather more quickly and coherently than Amazon managed.

But thirdly, that the culture wars that have been fought bitterly on dozens of blogs, with small but passionate audiences, are now spreading to mainstream sites like Amazon. You may think you just popped in to the online store to buy a book - but prepare to duck as lobby groups, libertarians, religious groups and mischievous hackers lob brickbats at each other.

The idea is deceptively simple - plug a hard drive into your network (that is, into your router) and then you can share the storage across all your computers, and share music, photos and video all from one place.

Quite a few companies - including Buffalo, Netgear and Iomega - have offered consumer versions of more high-end network storage for some time.

The reality is somewhat different, as anyone without an engineering degree who has ever tried to “mount”, or connect to, networked hard drives or grapple with RAID system will attest.

There are so many different configurations of hard drive back-ups - from simple mirroring of one drive to another to ensure at least one disk remains healthy, to multiple mirrors in a collective configuration - that for the ordinary mortal, myself included, networked (or even non-networked) storage has sometimes proved offputting.

Coupled with the sometimes byzantine process of connecting to drives - depending on whether you use a Mac, Windows or Linux - and whether the drive itself is formatted correctly for the operating system you are using, it is easy to see why most people have simply stuck with a plug-in external drive.

We’ve seen a number of attempts recently to simplify this process.

Apple launched the Time Machine and Time Capsule combination, which automatically backs up data wirelessly from your Mac. It’s a simple idea, and unfortunately for many people, this simplicity brings with it a lack of flexibility.

Time Machine is a no-nonsense dump of all your data and any changes you make, but with few options around doing anything else, such as streaming to consoles or media players around the home.

Another attempt to simplify NAS has come via a set of standards, called the Digital Living Network Alliance.

This umbrella organisation allows different devices on the network to talk to each other and share media. So a DLNA-compliant TV can stream video from a DLNA media server, for example.

I recently bought a NAS for my home; a one terabyte Iomega Home Media Network Drive. The box said it was DLNA-compliant, compatible with the Mac, and reviews I had read said it was easy to set up and use.

Well, this was partly true.

Physical set-up was easy - simply switch on and plug the NAS into a wireless router via ethernet cable.

It comes with software which promises to autodetect the drive and then “mount” on to my machines in the form of shared folders. The idea is that you install the software on all the Macs or PCs sharing your internet connection and they will all be able to read and write to the drive.

Sadly, this was not the case. The supplied software would not see the drive at all. As far as it was concerned, I did not have a drive attached to the network.

A quick search of the Iomega forums and it was clear this was a problem suffered by anyone using the latest version of the Apple operating system, Leopard.

No problem, though: the Apple OS can mount network drives if you know the internet protocol (IP) address of the drive, or you know its name on the network.

A bit of digging through the settings of the drive and, hey presto, I now had access to the folders on the drive on my machines. The only issue is that I have to manually connect to the drive each time I switch on the Macs.

There is another work-around, but even if that works, every time you put your machine to sleep for a long period and then wake it up, the drive and its folders will no longer be available.

This is a common problem. There is a work-around for this also here, but it is clearly beyond what most users will be prepared to do and makes a bit of a mockery of the supposed consumer-friendliness of the device.

And this isn’t a problem confined to Iomega - this is an issue with all network drives and putting machines to sleep.

Thankfully, when the NAS is working, it works like a treat. Not only can my family now share documents more easily across the network, we can also use our PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 to stream any video, music or photos from the network drive.

Sadly, this doesn’t include Apple’s iPhoto. iPhoto was never designed to be a multi-user program and while it is possible to move an iPhoto library to the network drive, it remains fiddly and prone to problems.

The same is somewhat true of iTunes. It can be moved to the network drive, but I wouldn’t advise it, unless you were completely comfortable messing around with folder structures.

Luckily, the Iomega drive is one of a number that come with an iTunes server built in to the hardware, so you can use that to play and store all your music. However, there are limitations: you can’t build playlists on the server, so if you want to do more with your music collection, you are out of luck.

I should also stress that these issues related to iPhoto and iTunes are software problems and not related to the drive itself. Neither application was designed with the networked household in mind.

They do have simple sharing/viewing options built in - so you can view the photos of another iPhoto user or listen to the tracks of another iTunes user on the same network - but this is not the same thing as building a truly networked iTunes library or iPhoto collection.

So where does this leave network-attached storage and the consumer?

To my mind, there’s a number of hurdles to overcome before NAS is truly ready for the mainstream home - starting with the hardware itself, the software used to connect to the drives, the operating systems, and the programs we use to store and share our music, videos and photos.

It’s clearly a watershed moment for the company which is just over five years old. I have no idea if the two-hundred-millionth active user was given a bottle of champagne or free lunch with founder Mark Zuckerberg, but I feel they should get something, even if it is a free t-shirt!

One thing Mr Zuckerberg did to mark this momentous happening was write a blog post. He also announced a new space on Facebook where people can write and share their stories about how Facebook has helped them to give back to their communities, to effect change or to connect with a distant relative. In other words, Facebook community, this is your opportunity to write about how wonderful Facebook is.

They have put a cool timeline on the blog page that shows how fast the community has grown - but really, it underlines how much of the world still has to be conquered by the service. World domination is still some way away, it seems.

But before anyone goes totally negative on the whole online friends routine, a study by IBM and MIT [460Kb PDF] has discovered that there is money to be made from those buddies.

The IBM collaboration with MIT’s Sloan School of Management tracked the electronic communications of over 7,000 volunteers for three years. The aim of the work was to put a dollar amount on the effect of those electronic and virtual relationships.

Researchers found that having strong connections to managers (yes, sucking up to the boss) can boost the bottom line. On average, it adds up to $548 (£365) in extra revenue a month.

This conclusion is based on data and mathematical formulas that analysed e-mail traffic, address books and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year.

No word on how those involved in the failed Sun takeover talks rated!

French and German musicians are also in dispute with YouTube - with music videos now blocked from the German site, and the threat of similar action in France. And later today the Performing Rights Society holds a meeting in London where musicians will press their case for what they’re calling “fair play for content creators“.

What this all signals is a growing revolt by creators against the idea that “free” is the only model that works on the internet - or that getting into bed with Google is the only way to secure their online future. The musicians say they’re getting peanuts - and a number have been giving chapter and verse on what exactly they earn from YouTube.

Pete Waterman says he’s never made more than £11 for 100 million plays of Rick Astley’s Never gonna Give You Up. Brendan Graham, who wrote You Raise Me Up, a song which appears in many forms on YouTube, and has been viewed milions of times says he got a “a very impressive royalty statement from PRS… of about 30 pages of YouTube royalties… coming to about 30 pence.”

So do these figures stand up? Well neither Google - YouTube’s owners - nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed “a rubbish deal ” - at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that’s because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy - oooh two or three years back - and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.

Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic - and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.

Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for - and demanded a rate 50 times higher.

So there’s still a large gap between what the songwriters want and what Google is willing to pay. But there’s a wider issue here.The YouTube business model - acting as a free platform for content and then advertising around it - just isn’t working either for Google or for the content creators.

In a recent study, analysts at Credit Suisse calculated that running YouTube would cost $711m this year - that includes the huge sums needed to store videos as well as the cash paid out in licensing fees. But Credit Suisse says the revenue the site would earn from advertising would amount to no more than $240m, even assuming a 20% rise this year.

You don’t have to be very good at maths to see that the sums just don’t add up - and will look even less attractive if Google has to pay out more to the content creators. But the PRS says that’s not its problem - “Why should our members subsidise YouTube’s failed business model?” a spokesman asked me.

And they’re not the only creators asking whether handing over their content to Google is quite such a good idea. Newspapers are also beginning to grumble again about the return - or lack of it - they get from Google News.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, hit back yesterday accusing the newspaper industry of “dropping the ball” when it came to online distribution.

On one side you’ve got content creators, from songwriters to journalists, seeing “analogue dollars turning into online cents”, as they describe it. On the other, you’ve got the only business that’s really mastered the art of making large sums from online content - without producing any itself. Prepare for a long battle.

In its first AppStore penetration survey, comScore Inc reports that one out of every three apps downloaded by the 15 million strong user base is the one developed by Palo Alto company Tapulous. comScore says this is a big deal for a smaller developer.

“It’s impressive that a game like Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge can attract a higher penetration among Apple app users than apps for larger more established brands,” said comScore’s vice president Brian Jurutka.

“Tap Tap’s success demonstrates that there is ample opportunity in the app space for any publisher to obtain significant distribution with a product that engages users.”

For Tapulous this all equals dollars in the bank.

Bart Decrem who is the CEO says: “With such a large base having already installed the free version of the product, converting even a small portion into paid versions using premium content represents significant revenue upside.”

The company’s next premium product will involve the seven time Grammy award-winning band Coldplay.

Facebook came in as the fourth most popular app with MySpace at number seven.

The comScore survey also illustrates the importance of games to devices like the iPod Touch and iPhone. Twelve out of 25 of the most popular mobile apps were games including the old favs like Hangman and Pac-man.

…the Home Office is linking to a Chinese porn website.

Mike Riley had been wondering whether the new directive applied to his company. He needed to know if he was a “communications services provider”, and so under an obligation to retain his customers’ data.

Off he went to the Home Office website, and eventually burrowed his way down to this page. On the right, he noticed several links, including one to a body called the Technical Advisory Board (the link has since been removed). This, according to information elsewhere on the Home Office site, is a “non-departmental public body that advises the Home Secretary on whether the obligations imposed on communications service providers (CSPs) under the terms of RIPA are reasonable”. But when Mr Riley clicked on the link he was directed to what appeared to be a porn site.

After reading his email, I too clicked on the link - and ended up on the same site, though it appeared to be Japanese rather than Chinese. I contacted the Home Office press office, and provided them with the first news of this embarrassing glitch.

Within minutes, they had broken the link, then removed it altogether from the page. The press officer thanked me - and stressed that the site had not, as we’d both at first assumed, been hacked. Instead, she said someone had taken over what was a redundant site, which had once belonged to the Technical Advisory Board, and occupied it with something rather different.

So is this a serious matter - or just a moment of embarrassment for a government department which has had its fair share in recent days? Mr Riley says it does matter. He says he’s still not sure whether he’s covered by the new directive and has “little faith in getting an answer from the Home Office who seemingly are unable to monitor and securitize, their own site let alone the communications data of millions of email users in the country”.

On the other hand, this kind of stunt happens to a number of prominent websites - and causes red faces rather than real damage. A bigger threat appears to come from the Chinese group which has allegedly managed to hack its way into government departments around the world in a cyber-warfare operation. But I can imagine the Home Office will be hoping not to hear the word “porn” again for at least a few weeks.

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