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Earlier this month, Google revealed it was filing suit against Pacific WebWorks (and other yet-to-be-named parties) for infringing on its trademark. Pacific WebWorks was among the companies running a “Google Work from Home” scam, advertising a way to make money off Google, to be learned through an inexpensive kit (and hidden, exorbitant recurring fee—which always enhances my learning experience). Pacific WebWorks was also using Google’s logo and representing its kit and other services as endorsed by the search giant. Pacific WebWorks issued a statement yesterday saying that they had reached an “agreement in principle” to settle and would be complying with Google’s request for expedited discovery. So either they think they’re innocent or they’re ready to sweep this all under the rug as fast as possible. So, if they’re agreed and moving toward a settlement, why do we need discovery? Discovery is the phase of the trial where each of the parties share pertinent documents—so perhaps Google is demanding this to find the other companies it believes are running the scams. Google said earlier this month that, “upon information and belief,” the other scammers were materially connected with Pacific WebWorks. Does this mean that the Google work from home scams will stop? Maybe in this iteration—but the whole thing is just a play on an old theme. Read any classifieds section and you’ll see more of the same. Hopefully scammers will think twice about using Google’s name and pretending to have its endorsement, but this scam will probably never go away completely. What do you think? Will the case really be over that quickly? via

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Google Work at Home Scammer Settling Suit

Earlier this month, StumbleUpon started showcasing their new homepage design, when they touted their “Google + Twitter” social search . Now they’ve gone through the rest of the site to make it more consistent (less customizable), easy to understand and streamlined. Read Write Web reports: The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam. The most significant UX changes have occur[r]ed in the way friendships and subscriptions work on the site. Now, your friends are you “Mutual Subscribers,” which makes the relationship a little clearer. They’re the people users can share pages with directly from the toolbar. However, the redesign is largely changes like those—clarifying various site functions, streamlining the design, making things easier for users. The homepage, same as the beta featured earlier this month, highlights recent activity from Mutual Subscribers—but doesn’t place a big emphasis on the social search aspect they were talking about earlier this month. So is StumbleUpon shying away from that? Or are they worried that their core user base was confused? I know I was a little worried when I first hear the social search news—even though I’m now an infrequent Stumbler, I didn’t want to lose that original “discovery engine,” even if it would be for a working social search model. However, the actual stumbling part of the service would remain—and maybe this is just to remind and reassure their users of that. But it still seems like they haven’t really played up the social search aspect enough. While I remain highly skeptical of social search, it’s one of those brass rings for mainstream search engines—like Google, which announced Social Search in Labs , using sites that your Google contacts have viewed, as well as sites you’ve seen before in your Web History, Google Reader and associated Google services. However, with StumbleUpon’s more targeted “Mutual Subscribers” option, you have the ability to control what friends you’re getting information from, instead of results from everyone you’ve ever emailed. What do you think? Does StumbleUpon have a better chance of getting social search right? Is it shying away from that—and should it, now that Google’s officially thrown its hat into the ring?

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StumbleUpon Updates Design Again (Abandoning Social Search?)