Google Toilet Paper : Optimize Your Wipe | Search Engine Journal – Here’s a fun Friday post about what could be easily mistaken for a new Google product launch to accompany the Nexus One and other new Google products : Google Toilet Paper (which gives a new meaning to “just Google it”).
MediaPost – news and directories for media, marketing and online advertising professionals – If you were on vacation, similar to me, during the end of December you might have missed Twitter's big announcement. The company acquired Mixer Labs, the creator of GeoAPI, which provides developers with the ability to query data. That data can come from about 16 million businesses and thousands of points of interest. The technology also offers developers a layer on which to handle complex geographical queries and location-based services.
National Weather Service: Twitter Storm Reports – GeoTagging is the act of associating geographical information with something, and Twitter has recently added the capability GeoTagging individual Tweets. This allows the NWS to correlate each Tweet to your location when it was sent. This capability will help to enhance and increase timely & accurate online weather reporting and communications between the public and their local weather forecast offices.
Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted – If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.
Top CMOs on Twitter – These are the top 63 Chief Marketing Officers around the world who 1) provide useful content and consistently engage with their followers on Twitter, 2) truly "get it" when it comes to the best ways to use Twitter and other forms of social media, and 3) were active on Twitter as of January 7, 2010. Please let me know if I have missed any CMOs who have 500 or more followers. After the review and confirmation process, he/she may be added to this list, which is updated regularly.
The Dawn of Facebook’s People-organized Web – GigaOM – In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.
A few years ago, when Apple originally set out with the idea of giving the iPhone to one carrier exclusively in the U.S., they first went to Verizon. But the network balked at some of Apple’s demands, which at the time of complete and utter carrier dominance in this country, must have seemed like a joke. So instead, Apple with with AT&T, and the rest is history.
Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal – In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.
These are my links for December 30th through December 31st:
Digg Takes a Dip In Traffic, Half The Size Of Twitter – But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
In 2009, Social Media Overtook Web 2.0 [GRAPHS] – While its definition is not yet etched in stone, most believe it describes a new type of media and communication that creates a world conversation and dialogue. Instead of being fed news (a one-to-many dissemination approach), everyone is welcomed to be a content creator and to generate a debate around that content. While its focus is the web, it goes beyond it as well.
FCC Chairman’s Facebook Account Compromised – The New York Times’ Bits blog is reporting that FCC head honcho Julius Genachowsi — the man in the middle of the net neutrality initiatives and the Google-Apple disputes — has fallen victim to the fraudulent activity of scammers on Facebook.
Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 – Facebook has been around for more than five years, but it hit critical mass and exploded in 2009. As the new decade begins, the fallout is blowing over the entire web. Facebook Connect is everywhere, in case you hadn’t heard. We’re talking 60 million users on 80,000 web sites
Facebook App’s Password Data Breach Turns into Lawsuit – Facebook and MySpace app maker and advertising network RockYou isn’t having a great December. Earlier this month, 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker going by the alias of “igigi.” That’s more than half of RockYou’s monthly active users.
The Androidification of Everything – GigaOM – A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)
Social media & startups: It’s a different ballgame | Socialmedia.biz – I get asked a lot: “How do I make money off social media?” Uhmm, well, you use the magic wand of online web awesomeness, obviously. Or maybe not. We have all read a million articles pointing us toward tools we should be using, things we should be considering, and the best practices we shouldn’t ignore. We get it: Social media is valuable. I think by now we all understand the importance of social media as a visibility engine and viral message maker. It can be used to enable conversations, announce information, put out fires, and so on.
It can do a lot. But it has limits. Ohhh buzz kill.
DDoS Attack Takes Down Amazon, Wal-Mart – If you’ve been doing some last-minute Amazon holiday shopping on Wednesday evening, you’ve probably noticed that Amazon’s website was sluggish and, at times, completely down. The same fate greeted Wal-Mart, Expedia and a number of smaller sites. The reason? A severe DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the servers of Neustar, the company that offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.
The Pirate Bay Goes Retro for Christmas – Remember how one of the most popular torrent sharing sites, The Pirate Bay, looked back in 2003? Today, you have a chance to refresh your memory, because the pirates have gone retro, changing the layout of the site to the way it looked back then, when the Internet was innocent and there was no pile of lawsuits on The Pirate Bay’s desk.
Disney Wants Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg On Its Board – GigaOM – Disney’s board today nominated Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to be its thirteenth member. It’ll be put to shareholder vote at the next Disney annual meeting, scheduled to be held March 10, 2010.
Add Clickable Links In YouTube Videos Without Using Annotations – While it is possible to add hyperlinks on YouTube videos via the built-in annotations feature, the only problem is that you cannot link to external websites from YouTube videos – that links should either point to a video hosted on YouTube or to a video search page that’s again on YouTube.
2010: Year of digital distraction? – CNN.com – The "real-time Web" is booming. From Twitter to Facebook to new search engines that discover information posted just seconds ago, it seems the 2010 Web will be fueled by our desire for instant gratification.
Mall of America Tweets Holiday Parking Updates – It may not be rocket science, but it is pretty cool: The Mall of America is using Twitter to tweet parking info for last-minute holiday shoppers hoping to avoid the ever-annoying quest for a space.
Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 – It’s the end of the year, traditionally a time for self-reflection. While many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions and looking back on what we accomplished, a lot of social media companies are sifting through their data and sharing what was hot in 2009.
FTC Inquiry Hinders Google’s Acquisition of AdMob – When Google formally announced their plans to acquire mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million, they didn’t expect any regulatory interference to impede upon the processing of the deal. Unfortunately they were wrong.
3 Powerful Social Good Trends in 2010 – 2009 saw a proliferation of online charity events, competitions, and “friendraisers” that spilled across Twitter and Facebook and filled email inboxes everywhere with more requests for money than any Nigerian prince could ever hope to make. And while it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing — anytime someone gives money to feed the hungry instead of buying another digital potato seed in Farmville, global karma rises, if even just by a little — this focus on using the web as an ever-more elaborate means of getting people to fork over cash misses the much bigger opportunities just over the horizon.
Is Hiring a Ghostblogger a Bad Thing? – At any given time, there is usually an ongoing debate in some blogging circle about whether ghostblogging is a good or bad thing. I say it depends on how you’re using the term, and how you are using your ghostblogger.
Google News Will Not Accept Single Author Blogs – I put in an application to submit our blog to Google news, but it seems Google news will not include sites that are written and maintained by one individual!
Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki – By 2001 web startup Third Voice, which let people annotate websites via a browser plugin, was done. Website owners just didn’t like the idea of people “defacing” their websites with comments they couldn’t control. But the idea has lingered (really), and now Google is taking a shot at their own version of the service. It’s called Sidewiki, and it just launched.
Microsoft’s Courier Tablet Is ‘Astonishing’ – Technology News Briefs | Newser – Microsoft’s foray into tablet computers looks to be “astonishing,” Gizmodo blogger The Paperboy raves after getting a look at leaked photo of the Courier, which has two screens and opens like a book. It has touch-screen and stylus capabilities, and is in the “late prototype” stage, sources say.
Courier: Microsoft Has an Apple Tablet Rival, And It Looks Impressive – microsoft courierAlthough the Apple Tablet remains one of the most hyped (and mysterious) upcoming devices, it’s now not expected to launch until February. In the meantime, a variety of other innovations are looking to steal some of its thunder.
STATS: 84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI – We talk a lot about the rapid adoption of social media in a wide array of industries. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.
Google Crowdsources Reader, Docs and Search Features – Google has just opened the floodgates. With millions of users, it's only natural that the company is prioritizing features and crowdsourcing new product ideas. In a recent blog post, the company has revamped Google Product Ideas as a series of separate feedback pages for iGoogle, Google Docs, Google SketchUp, Google Ad Planner, Google Custom Search and as of today, Google Reader.
Picasa 3.5: Ruining Your Good Name with Face Recognition Tagging – Say goodbye to your controlled web presence and say hello to Picasa 3.5. Google released Picasa 3.5 with a slew of new features including facial recognition and name-based batch tagging, faster geo-tagging and better web uploading functionality. The service is so good at finding your mug and tagging it that wild photos from yesteryear can resurface and wreak havoc on your reputation.
Yahoo! Search Gets a Massive Revamp | Search Engine Journal – There you go, Yahoo has just announced a major revamp of its search portal, particulary the search results format. According to the Yahoo Search blog the new Yahoo Search format aligns with the previous changes recently made on Yahoo’s other products such as the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messengers video calling feature.
What Women Want from Social Sites – eMarketer – Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site. Nearly three-quarters (73%) were members of LinkedIn and 55% were on Twitter, while just 41% belonged to MySpace. Almost one-half of respondents (48%) reported belonging to four or more social networks—the most common response.
Professional networking and staying up-to-date with friends were the most compelling reasons to visit social networks, according to the respondents. Substantial majorities also considered researching products and services (79%) and finding deals and discounts (64%) important.
Google News Now Recrawling & Reindexing Stories For Updates – A Google News Help thread has confirmed reports from Google's Inbal that Google News now reindexes and crawls news sources for the latest version if those updates are posted within a "short period of time." So if you make a mistake in your publication, you now have a short window of opportunity to update the article, in order to make sure Google News updates your mistake in their index.
Facebook Sued for Privacy Breach – US News Briefs | Newser – A group of Facebook users has sued the social networking company for violating consumer privacy laws by harvesting personal information for commercial purposes and failing to compensate clients, reports CNET.
10 valuable Twitter utilities for business users | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.
Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Will Win in Real-time Search? – For the last year, Twitter has had no major rival in real-time search. But last week, that all changed when Facebook launched its real-time search engine. Not only can it search status updates, but it also tracks photos, notes, videos, and more. Can Facebook, with its larger userbase and recent talent acquisition, make Twitter Search irrelevant? Or does Twitter’s open platform and first-mover advantage give it the edge?
HOW TO: See Twitter Like Someone Else – Ever wanted to see Twitter the way someone else does, with all the Tweets from the people they follow? Now you can.
New Privacy Lawsuit Throws The Kitchen Sink At Facebook – So what are the Plantiffs accusing Facebook of? The suit alleges that that Facebook is at its core a “data mining company.. [that] seeks to open and/or disseminate private information to third parties for commercial purposes and economic benefit” and that “Facebook has created a business model and apparatus designed to harvest as much personal and private information as possible in easiest, quickest, and most innocuous-looking manner possible.” Cue the ominous music. It gets better.
Facebook Search vs Twitter Search – Side by Side Comparison | Ignite Social Media – As most fellow geeks are aware of Facebook announced the purchase of real time microblogging platform Friendfeed yesterday. Without any delay they then announced later that night that users will now be able to search across peoples profiles and wall postings, something that has never been possible before. This opens up a whole new can of worms and it remains to be seen how well this search feature is adopted and what changes Facebook continues to make to the underlying platform that they have now integrated from Friendfeed.
How will your site rank with Google Caffeine? | Blog | Econsultancy – When Google updates, SEOs around the world hold their breath. For websites that rely heavily on their Google SERPs for traffic, an algorithm change can sometimes mean the difference between profitability and the poorhouse.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Help test some next-generation infrastructure – For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
Caffeine: It’s Google On Red Bull, Or Something – washingtonpost.com – But today, the company has begun testing a new engine for its search product that's a big enough change that it felt compelled to let the world know about it. Codenamed "Caffeine", it promises to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."
The test, available here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, really doesn't look any different at first glance. And Google notes as much, saying that these changes are primarily under the hood. When you hear that, most people will probably assume this means speed in showing results.
Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index – Google has just unveiled a “secret project” of “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. Instead, they’re providing a developer preview and are asking webmasters and power searchers to try it out and give them feedback. Unlike Google’s now-defunct SearchMash, which was intended for search experiments that wouldn’t necessarily be incorporated into Google’s main web search, the caffeine index seems to be an entirely new search infrastructure that will repace what exists now.
More info on the Caffeine Update – Google recently opened up a preview of our new Caffeine update, and I wanted to give a little more background on this change. At the Real-Time CrunchUp a few weeks ago, I joked that the half-life of code at Google is about six months. That means that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure. Six months is an exaggeration, but Google is quite serious about scrutinizing our codebase regularly and rewriting the parts that don’t scale well to make them more robust, more elegant, or faster.
Welcome to the Official Goldstein Media blog. We frequently post about all types of Internet-related topics ranging from Social Media, Internet Marketing, and Viral Marketing to the latest in Web Design and Development.
You'll see that there is a trend with our posts and we hope that you find them informative and helpful.
We are constantly on social media platforms of all types. Some of our favorites are:
We love comments on our posts and welcome your feedback and thoughts.
If you have any questions about what we post or if you would like to talk to someone at Goldstein Media about hiring us for Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing, Viral Marketing or Web Design, please contact us today!
Please explore not only our blog but our entire Website. We've worked hard to provide you our visitors and our clients with a good resource.
Thanks again for checking out our blog!
Contact Us:
(215) 645-2298
Please use the top navigation to browse our site and contact us for a free quote or any questions or comments you might have.
-
