Several alerts were sent to journalists covering Myanmar over the past week, prompting questions of whether the reform-minded government is continuing in some form the habit of the previous military regime of spying on reporters.

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Google over the past year has boosted the Google+ operation by integrating it with the company’s top-tier properties, including its Web search engine, Gmail, YouTube, business listings and the Android mobile-operating system.

People using Google to search for photos or customer reviews of a restaurant, for example, automatically are steered to the restaurant’s Google+ page. In the fall, Google began requiring people who want to post their reviews of restaurants or other businesses to use their Google+ profiles to do so. The same rule applies for reviews of physical goods or mobile apps obtained through Google.

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Dubbed Backupify Winter Release 2012, the revision brings a bunch of new administrative features that large companies running Google Apps might need. Its the first update to the Enterprise Edition of Backupify since it was first launched in August.

The headline features the ability to give administrative control to more than one person across multiple lines of business in an organization. Heads of IT in different departments can, say, rescue a Gmail message deleted by mistake, for those employees with fat fingers.

There’s also a new audit log feature, that lets admins track everything that happens within the Backupify account. So if someone deletes something they shouldn’t have, there a record that includes who did it, the IP address of the machine they were using and a timestamp saying precisely when it happened.

The new version also adds support for accounts within Google Apps subdomains.

Backupify has come a long way since it started up primarily as way for people to back up their Twitter and Facebook feeds, which it still does. The company has 5,000 paying customers and is now backing up more than 1 million individual accounts. It recently boosted its total storage capacity to 400 Terabytes. It now backs up 700 million individual items, and 2.7 billion GMail messages.

In August it announce it had raised $9 million in a Series C round of venture capital funding from Symantec. That followed a Series B last September in a round led by Avalon Ventures with General Catalyst Partners and Lowercase Capital also participating.
 

As AllThingsD previously reported it would, Yahoo has released a new version of its Yahoo Mail offering, updating its Web offering and also adding native mobile apps for Apple iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows 8. It also updated its Google Android app.

The new Web mail has a decidedly cleaner design and improved search, part of an effort to better compete with Google’s Gmail, which has taken major share from Yahoo in the arena in recent years.

In fact, one source told me that the aim was to be “more Gmail-like.” And, indeed, it looks like it is. Yahoo is also working on a radical rehaul of its homepage, which is set to debut in the coming weeks, although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been rolling it out in testing for months now.

Redoing Yahoo’s flagship properties — especially to focus on mobile — is a key priority at the company under new CEO Marissa Mayer. She said in a blog post that the new Yahoo Mail will be rolled out to most users soon.

It’s an important step, as I noted in my post about the impending changes to Yahoo Mail, which got its last refresh a year ago:

At the time, the first change in five years got good reviews, with a cleaner design, Twitter and Facebook integration, improved spam filters and speedier delivery.

Unfortunately, since then, Google’s Gmail has become the most popular email service in the world, passing Microsoft’s Hotmail (which is now called Outlook.com after a recent rejiggering), according to recent stats from comScore. That has added up to Gmail’s 287.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, 286.2 million for Microsoft’s email product and 281.7 million for Yahoo Mail.

Still, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo is holding onto its longtime — though dwindling — lead, with 76.7 million using Google’s email product and 35.5 million using Microsoft’s.

It’s an important spot to maintain for Yahoo, since many of the users of its products now come to the site to access email and it has been a key driver to its content properties.

But to keep mindshare, Yahoo faces increasingly strong competition. Google’s Gmail released a series of solid improvements last fall. In addition, along with the positively reviewed Microsoft Outlook.com redo, AOL has just announced a new email product called Alto. While it is in beta to a small audience, it is aiming to help users with multiple email accounts organize them better.

In others words, the mail business — especially using it via smartphones and tablets — is another place Yahoo has to make sure it remains innovative.

But Mine, a new start-up focused on exactly this sort of thing, operates on a different premise: Embarrassing or no, we are what we buy.

In other words, it’s another stab at mapping our online identities. But instead of relying on our ever-expanding web of social connections — such as Facebook — or the myriad topics of interest that catch our fancies on a moment-by-moment basis — like Twitter — Mine goes after our e-paper trail, piecing together a picture of a user from a history of their e-commerce activities.

“Over the next few years, purchase history is going to become perhaps the biggest component of your online identity,” co-founder Pierre Legrain said in an interview. “Right now, it’s spread out all over the place. Mine should be the repository that you control — it’s the master copy of your purchases.”

The idea is fairly simple. Log into Mine with Twitter or Facebook and grant the app access to your Gmail or Yahoo email account. From there, Mine combs through your purchase history of receipts from Amazon, Etsy, iTunes and Zappos, retrieving a master list of your purchases. After that, you’re able to choose which purchases you want showing up in your Mine identity (thank god), and publish them to your account.

From here, it’s much like other social platforms — you’re headed into the stream. Based on a follow/follower model like Twitter (a company Legrain once worked for), you’re able to scroll through the stream to see your friends’ recent purchases, complete with annotated comments sections and the ability to “heart” things. There are links tacked on to each purchase entry, so if you like something one of your friends bought, you can click through and get one yourself.

So, a question: Is this little more than a collection of items you’d otherwise be “liking” on your Facebook page? Or, say, a Pinterest board of items you own or want to own? It seems like the territory is already rife with potential competition.

Legrain refutes this (obviously). He believes the verbs themselves — “like” for Facebook, “pin” or want for Pinterest, and “own” for Mine — are on separate trajectories. “Liking and wanting things creates tons of volume, but in terms of ownership, it is a completely different bucket in people’s minds,” Legrain said.

In other words, there’s room for his start-up not to get big-footed upon by a giant competitor (hopefully).

That may be true, but the more difficult part is making room for another social networking app in consumers’ minds. Keeping people engaged and in the feed is an uphill battle. And with existing competition from players like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (to say little of Path and Pinterest), Mine has its work cut out for it, no matter how active our spending habits.

Mine is available in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as on the Web.

Good taste not included.

According to sources close to the company, Yahoo is prepping to launch a major overhaul of Yahoo Mail — which sources said has a cleaner, “more Gmail-like” look.

I am not clear exactly what that means in terms of features and design. But sources said the goal of the redo — which has been initiated by new CEO Marissa Mayer, who is also pushing ahead with a new homepage design — is to better compete with the fast-growing mail offering from Google.

“Marissa thinks Yahoo Mail has been a big missed opportunity for the company and she wants to fix that,” said one person with knowledge of the effort, which had also been mulled by previous CEO Scott Thompson.

Sources said the latest iteration of Yahoo Mail will be released in early December, just after the new homepage is rolled out widely.

That’s a lot of change at a critical money-making time for Yahoo, but Mayer — a former top Google product exec — has publicly committed the company to releasing innovative and mobile-focused products as a key differentiator.

It’s a good idea when it comes to Yahoo Mail, even though it got a major refresh just about a year ago. At the time, the first change in five years got good reviews, with a cleaner design, Twitter and Facebook integration, improved spam filters and speedier delivery.

Unfortunately, since then, Google’s Gmail has become the most popular email service in the world, passing Microsoft’s Hotmail (which is now called Outlook.com after a recent rejiggering), according to recent stats from comScore. That has added up to Gmail’s 287.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, 286.2 million for Microsoft’s email product and 281.7 million for Yahoo Mail.

Still, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo is holding onto its longtime — though dwindling — lead, with 76.7 million using Google’s email product and 35.5 million using Microsoft’s.

It’s an important spot to maintain for Yahoo, since many of the users of its products now come to the site to access email and it has been a key driver to its content properties.

But to keep mindshare, Yahoo faces increasingly strong competition. Google’s Gmail released a series of solid improvements last fall. In addition, along with the positively reviewed Microsoft Outlook.com redo, AOL has just announced a new email product called Alto. While it is in beta to a small audience, it is aiming to help users with multiple email accounts organize them better.

In others words, the mail business — especially using it via smartphones and tablets — is another place Yahoo has to make sure it remains innovative.