The beginning of this month saw Yahoo’s 15th birthday. While for many businesses 15 is not an advanced age, on the Internet it makes you one of the elders.

Back when Yahoo started, search engines were not a common concept, and, indeed, only a small percentage of the population was going online at all. It’s inspiring to think that this global, million-dollar company was started by two young graduates who happened to see a need. It’s a pattern that we’ve seen over and over again, as the Internet starts enabling Joe Normal to make it big, with nothing more than a rock-solid idea.

Yes, many companies fall by the wayside, but as we begin to understand this manmade phenomenon, the Internet, we also learn more about how to use it to succeed. Let’s take a moment to salute Yahoo, and to hope that our own small businesses might one day match this behemoth of the online world.

Rumour has it that the upcoming Digital Economy Bill will seek to outlaw the provision of an open wireless Internet connection. It’s probably a wise move for private households, but it could have unforeseen effects on small businesses.

An open connection is one which requires no password when joining. Many pubs and cafes, unwilling to provide wifi to passers-by unless they spend a little money, require users to request a password – but of course, unless they have the patience to change the password regularly, word can soon get around.

Under the proposed bill, this situation need not change, but it would no longer be permitted to have a completely free network available. Would this cut down on the number of paying customers, or increase them? The obvious conclusion might be that if you have to ask for a password, you are far more likely to purchase – but one might also argue that humans tend to take the easiest path, and would happily buy from a cafe where they knew they could access the wifi without the need for instruction.

ZDNet also makes the point that businesses will be required to capture and keep details of those who log on, adding unwelcome amounts of administration to what was previously a simple service.

It’s possible, too, that a crackdown could see a reduction in the number of on-the-go searches, as those users without a paid connection (eg, those on iPod Touches) would no longer be able to look up local businesses simply by piggy-backing onto an unsecured connection for a short while, as they stand outside the providing establishment. Whether this would have a large impact is difficult to know – and my feeling is that more and more of us are opting into paid data packages on Smartphones, making the lack of free connections less of an inconvenience, but more of a cost.

Did you hear the one about the technology blog that people started mistaking for Facebook?

It’s a funny story, really, but it teaches us a lot. In a nutshell, ReadWriteWeb wrote a workaday blog post one day, about a new log-in function of Facebook. Now, ReadWriteWeb is a high-ranking well-respected blog, and before long, that post had gained a high Google position for the term “Facebook log-in”.

So far, so good, until the post starts attracting a disproportionate number of irrelevant comments, all saying things like “What’s going on? I just want to get to my Facebook page!”. Yes, you guessed it, these were people who habitually get to Facebook by going to Google, typing in ‘Facebook log in’ and selecting one of the top results.

Having reached that page, though, they don’t think, hmm, this doesn’t look like Facebook. No, they quickly look for a log-in box, enter their details, find they’re still on the same page, and leave a bewildered or angry comment.

At some point during this process, more savvy web-users pick up on what is going on, and start to comment too. The resulting effect is a string of these discontent comments, interspersed with comments saying – with varying degrees of politeness – ‘This is not Facebook! Try typing Facebook.com into your address bar!’.

Amusing or sad as this whole event might be, it does underline a couple of pertinent points. Number one, there are a lot of users out there for whom the internet feels like an irrational arena, prone to springing unwelcome surprises upon them. Longterm users have, without knowing, picked up an understanding of interfaces and vocabulary that not everyone shares.

Number two, everyone skims. There is so much irrelevant stuff on every webpage these days – ads, invitations to register, alerts, and so on – that skimming is a vital skill if you want to actually get anywhere. Can we blame these people for skimming what, at first sight, may just look like an announcement for a new piece of functionality? Goodness knows the ‘real’ Facebook does enough of that.

There’s a take-away learning from this incident. You cannot underestimate your audience. Make your website as simple as possible, and when you’ve done that, make it twice as simple again. Remove unnecessary clutter. Don’t expect people to read your lovingly-crafted six paragraphs of text. Signpost the way. Your users will follow.

So, last week tweets from space – this week, tweets from dogs. Is the world going completely crazy?

Mattel, the well-known toy company, have brought out Puppy Tweets. It’s basically a collar which is triggered by certain doggy events – barking, say, or chowing down – to send an automatic message to the dog’s Twitter account.

Which does rather beg the question, who (beyond its adoring owner, I suppose) is going to want to read those tweets? As some wag remarked as Twitter announced that 50 million tweets are sent per day, yes, and at least 1 million of them are actually read.

How much do you love Google? Enough to display your affection across your chest?

Google teamed up with some young fashion designers, asking them to create a piece that somehow reflected the Google ethos. This t-shirt, showing the iconic Google Maps marker, is the most straightforward; you can also show your Google affection more subtly, with a scarf, or a magnifying glass necklace to signify Search. All the pieces are available to buy online – at fairly steep prices, mind you.

It’s worth noting that, of all the search engines, Google probably is the one held in the most affection, and the one you would be most likely to advertise for free. Personally, I can’t see Bing sweatshirts or even Yahoo apparel catching on that quickly. While we’ve seen plenty of negative press around Google’s apparent world domination tactics in recent years, they seem to also have the magic ability to still appear cool and friendly in most people’s eyes. Now, if only we could all apply that magic to our own businesses.

Proof, if it were needed, that Twitter really has reached every part of the known universe, comes with the news that Japanese aeronautical engineer Soichi Noguchi is tweeting from the International Space Station as it orbits. Follow his Twitterstream here and you’ll gain regular views of aerial photos as he passes over the Earth. If nothing else, it provides a fascinating glimpse at a way of life most of us will never experience directly.

“In the 19th century we built the railways. In the 20th century we built the motorways. In the 21st century let’s build the superfast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain.”

Stirring words from the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne this week. Earlier this week we reported on the Tories’ use of Google Moderator; it certainly seems like the internet is high on their list of Conservative priorities for the UK’s future.

Indeed, Labour also have their plans, committing to rolling out broadband to 90% of all UK homes by 2012, albeit with a less ambitious speed.

One thing’s for sure – the spread of the internet is unstoppable. Important as it is now to business, it will only become more crucial. When the internet is accessible from every home, and many public spaces beside, shopping, information retrieval, and the purchase of services are likely to happen almost entirely online. Is your business ready for the future our politicians are already planning?

Regular users of Twitter will already be familiar with the “trending topics” function, which shows which words and phrases are being most tweeted about at any given time.

From today, Twitter have rolled out the option to view more ‘local’ trending topics, with the thinking that these will be more relevant and interesting for the user.

For those who rather like the global nature of Twitter, the choice still remains to see a worldwide picture – and, at the moment, ‘local’ only means ‘UK’.

It will be interesting to see whether this feature drills down to a city level in the near future (as it already does for key cities in the US), and, if so, what that will mean for local businesses. You may find that small campaigns and pieces of news really start to make waves in your own local community – and that has to be for the good.

Now, some of us have only just got used to the whole concept of internet via mobile phones – now we also have to get to grips with the increasing access through internet-enabled TVs and games consoles, such as the Wii, which can turn your TV screen into a monitor.

This week, Yahoo! announced a further rolling out of its TV widget, plus a developer kit to allow enterprising developers and publishers to work it into their own applications. Many TVs across the world will now come to the consumer with the internet as a feature, and with Yahoo!’s widget pre-installed.

Thus far, we haven’t seen many adapting their websites to appear better on a TV screen, as they do for the smaller mobile screen. Although resolution is lower, the large screen means that few changes are vital. At this point, the developing use of internet via the TV is simply proof, if it were still needed, that the web is becoming ever more pervasive. If you don’t have a website, or you have a substandard one, your business really is going to be left behind.

Remember our post about Knols back in May ‘09? You may be interested to hear that Google have introduced a suite of new tools to be used within the Knol publishing environment.

Now you can expand your Knol with calendars, maps, spreadsheets, high-quality images – whatever it takes to get your point across more elegantly. Our stance now is the same as it was in May – it’s not a marketing channel, but it can have some knock-on effects in terms of getting your name out there and your voice respected – and now, there are extra tools to help you do so.