Google Status
WSJ: Google is taking a swipe at Facebook and Twitter with new status updates via Gmail, Google Talk; http://j.mp/bgGSUg
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Blogging vs. Microblogging
Pew surveys [PDF]: Blogging loses appeal for teenagers against microblogging and social networking; http://j.mp/9h6oXD
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Nearby Places
Google adds Nearby Places to its Place Pages at Google Maps: free advertising to local competition; http://j.mp/agBVgj
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Now on Google Maps, you can get these types of suggestions automatically. Just look up a place that you know or love, and we’ll provide a set of ‘Nearby places you might like.‘ … We do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.”
SEL: “I’m scratching my head over this one: Google has added a new content block on place pages that, quite often, gives free advertising to a local business’s competition. It’s called “Nearby places you might like” and it appears below reviews on the place page; the content block will show up to ten recommended businesses – but sometimes less. … Google pitches these nearby suggestions as a very user-friendly feature, but it’s certainly not business-friendly. Perhaps a compromise is in order, like showing nearby suggestions only on place pages that haven’t been claimed? If the business owner claims his/her Google local business listing, then no recommendations get added. How about it, Google?”
TC: “Once the feature’s technology is streamlined, it should be a pretty useful addition to any search. It would be especially useful when searching for hotels, restaurants or bars in a given area. Google Maps will also be rolling out another compelling feature soon: Store Views. Similar to street views, Google Store Views will allow people to visually walk into the store from Maps.”
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Gerrit Eicker
12sprints
SAP launched 12Sprints, a collaboration environment, to public beta: alternative to Google Wave; http://j.mp/12sprints
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Gerrit Eicker
Bitly.Pro
Bit.ly Pro moves to an open beta, launches self-service site. Two tiers: free and enterprise edition; http://j.mp/d238WY
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Gerrit Eicker
Bit.ly: “What features are included in the free bit.ly Pro? 1. Whitelabel service for a custom short URL, with up to 10,000 shorten requests a day. 2. The bit.ly Pro dashboard, which rolls up analytics about the most viral content from your domain. 3. The bit.ly button, which lets users share articles on Twitter or Facebook from your site, using your custom short URL. – What features are included in the Enterprise edition? The paid service includes the following: 1. custom short URLs, buttons, and dashboards for multiple domains. 2. advanced dashboard features, including additional analytics and 3rd-party application support. 3. end-to-end branding – if you shorten a link at bit.ly, or use bit.ly on a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, you’ll notice that when you shorten or share an article from theonion.com (for example), it will resolve to an onion.com short URL instead of a bit.ly-branded URL. This will result in both greater transparency for end users about link destinations and in millions of additional brand mentions for publishers in the bit.ly stream. 4. a customer service and support plan. – What do I need to set up bit.ly Pro? To sign up for either version of bit.ly Pro, you need three things: 1. A registered bit.ly username. 2. A short domain that you own and manage, for custom URL shortening. 3. The domain that you wish to monitor in our real-time dashboard. – What about my existing short URLs created under bit.ly or j.mp? All of the statistics associated with your bit.ly or j.mp username will be preserved under your bit.ly Pro account. Once you have a custom domain setup under bit.ly Pro, those hashes migrate seamlessly to your custom domain (i.e. if you created the URL crainsnewyork.c… under your existing username, under bit.ly Pro, the URL http://mycustom.domain/1234 would redirect to the same destination with the same statistics when you look at the associated info page).”
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Store View
Google is experimenting with new features for Google Maps: Google Store View, the inside perspective; http://j.mp/9Tb2hS
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Mail
400M Facebookers might soon change eMail: Facebook Mail follows MySpace Mail and challenges Gmail; http://j.mp/bl9Y2k
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer.”
Neowin: “Project Titan, while being a webmail service featured on Facebook, will have a few additions to make it much more accessible to those who use messaging regularly. First of all, you’ll get your own email address; it’ll be your vanity name (the one you chose for your Facebook.com/username address) at Facebook.com. Project Titan will also provide POP and IMAP support for the addresses, meaning that you’ll be able to add the account to various third party services, and even mobile devices, should you desire to. In short, it’ll be exactly like a regular email address, except it’ll go through Facebook.”
Pocket-lint: “This could be one of the ‘cool’ things that Zuckerberg has promised to deliver monthly over the near future. It could also elevate the social network even further above its competitors and provide an alternative for those who’ve been stung by the latest Hotmail hacks.”
Gerrit Eicker
Landing Page Makeovers
Every page is a landing page, but when it comes to a call to action, testing and makeovers are key; http://j.mp/bxdAq8
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: #4 Traffic Source
Hitwise: Facebook is the #4 source of visits to news and media, after Google, Yahoo, and MSN; http://j.mp/c557Bo
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “At any given time, the news on your home page can consist of celebrity gossip posted by your sister, sports scores from the ESPN Page, and a political debate among your friends as they cite their favorite blogs. With so much information at your fingertips on one site, Facebook can serve as your personalized news channel.”
Hitwise: “News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site’s traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular). … Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category. And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch. We will continue to watch this space.”
RWW: “Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook – the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) – could be the web’s best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.”
VB: “All of the metrics services rank Facebook in the top 5 of all internet sites. The only sites that get more traffic are search engines (Google) and portals (Yahoo and MSN). Clearly the status updates Facebook users post to their pages have the power to drive large amounts of traffic to media sources when links are provided.“
Gerrit Eicker 17:27 on 6. February 2010 Permalink |
Pew: “Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.”
Pew: “Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens. … While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults. … Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly, yet there are shifts and some drops in the proportion of teens using several social networking site features. … Facebook is currently the most commonly-used online social network among adults. Among adult profile owners 73% have a profile on Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% have a LinkedIn profile. – The specific sites on which young adults maintain their profiles are different from those used by older adults: Young profile owners are much more likely to maintain a profile on MySpace (66% of young profile owners do so, compared with just 36% of those thirty and older) but less likely to have a profile on the professionally-oriented LinkedIn (7% vs. 19%). In contrast, adult profile owners under thirty and those thirty and older are equally likely to maintain a profile on Facebook (71% of young profile owners do so, compared with 75% of older profile owners). … Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens are bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter is an exception.”