These are my links for January 4th through January 6th:

• Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday – So, this year, you've resolved to lose weight, take a class, learn a new language and buy a better mobile device. Good for you – but we all know how well most new year's resolutions go.
• Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots) – Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." In our very early testing it's a pleasure to use, but we're going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
• Social Media Today | 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists – We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.
• Social Media Today | 3 Helpful Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2010 – I read a lot of 2010 predictions to end up with 3 that I felt were truly helpful to a seasoned marketer from a major business. There are a lot of common clams out there from "this is the year of mobile marketing" to the many ways people guess that location-based marketing will take off (this ranges form the 'augmented reality' fans to the predictions that Four Square is a harbinger of major innovation).
• Social Media Today | 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content –
• How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business – Outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, Daytum (Daytum), FlowingData, and InfoChimps have proven that painting our world in data (and metadata) is a rather valuable endeavor for any business.
• Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Adds Push Notifications, Address Book Syncing – Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.
• 28 Days Later: Say Goodbye to the Netflix New Release Rental – Today is sad day for Netflix customers. The online video rental supplier has just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. that will forever alter your online rental experience. Now should you wish to rent a Warner Bros. flick you’ll have to wait out a 28-day holding period after the film’s initial DVD release date.
• Analysis: Yawn, Google Introduces iPhone Clone | Epicenter | Wired.com – Congratulations, Google. You’ve spent untold millions of dollars to produce another iPhone — two years late. That about sums up the company’s Nexus One phone launch today.
• Exclusive: Apple to Buy Quattro Wireless for $275 Million | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.

Google opened up its latest search engine update to the world yesterday. Though most of the changes are under the  hood and the basic user interface is the same, some subtle changes are occuring. One of which appears to be the the weight that social media profiles and pages rank in the SERPS.

Patricio Robles over at Econsultancy writes:

As you can see, there aren’t many noticeable changes to the UI. In fact, you probably won’t notice much difference at all. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, “this update is primarily under the hood” and has involved “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure“.

And yes, that means that there will be some changes in site rankings. From my limited initial tests, the impact on rankings seems subtle — most of the time.

One exception appears to be social web results. For instance, certain high-profile Facebook Pages appear to be receiving a major boost in the rankings with Caffeine. One commenter on the Google Webmaster Central blog also noted “I’ve noticed more Twitter pages in the results with this version of Google“.

I decided to test this for myself. Using the sandbox I did a search for my name. Sure enough at the #2 spot was my twitter page. When I searched for my company’s name (Goldstein Meda) I noticed another change. The map results were farther down the page. And though a few random results popped in my Twitter account for my business still showed up in the results.

Though there are some subtle differences, I have yet to see anything jaw dropping. The higher ranking positions of social media profiles and pages does give more weight to having a presence on some of the more influential social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin  and YouTube.

In my opinion this is only the beginning social media’s impact on online business and SEO.

I’d love to hear what you think of these developments. Post your thoughts in the comments below.

Rand over at SEOMoz has another great Whiteboard Friday. This week he’s talking about how to organize your tactics to get your company competitive in the market place. Often times it’s not just Organic SEO but also PPC and Social Media Marketing. Check out the video below and post your thoughts in the comments.