Yesterday I wrote about a new ‘feature’ in Facebook which meant that third party developers would now be able to easily pick up phone numbers and addresses from Facebook. To be honest, I wasn’t the only one writing about it.
Just shortly after their announcement on the subject last Friday Facebook now pulls back. The feature will be changed and until then the feature is “on hold”. It looks like Facebook listened to the criticism. (more…)
Last November Google launched Hotpot, in an effort to get a step closer to actually being social, combined with the local elements. As many “Social” products from Google it hasn’t really seen a lift off yet.
Google now wants to make another move into making Hotpot more interesting for its users. If you are using Hotpot you might see the most recent rating and review activity of your Hotpot connections integrated in Google Maps. (more…)
There is much discussion on the integrity of Google. They have the motto “Don’t be evil”, but there are many who believe that is a farce. Those people also don’t like the fact that Google puts their own sites in the search results or even on top. Whether or not that is done by hand or that it is justified is a different discussion.
The critics will now be at bit more silent if they read the latest update Google did last Friday on the results for music videos. A search for an artist or song which returns a YouTube video now has links to other video sites and search engines next to the results. If you search for the artist you will see links to sites like Dailymotion, vimeo, but also to search engines like Yahoo and Yandex. (more…)
If you project all of Google’s market share in Europe on to a map most of Europe would be covered with the colors of Google. Even worldwide there are few countries where Google is not the dominant force.
One of the countries in which that is the case is Czech. There Seznam has been the number one for years. Web measurement service Toplist however now suggests that Seznam has been taken over by Google. Seznam however believes the numbers are not right at all. Has Google taken another step in world domination or are they just closing in on the local giants? (more…)
In Europe we all know that the ‘marriage’ between German officials, government and other regulators, is not the best marriage you can have. They keep having issues. The Streetview blockage of specific houses is one of them, but a bigger problem is how the German regulators look at Google Analytics. Now the marriage seems to have been busted all together.
In an interview with German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” the German commissioner for data protection in Hamburg Johannes Caspar stated that the regulators have stopped talks with Google and that the use of Google Analytics should be illegal. (more…)
It seems as if Google is making some more changes to Google Maps at the moment. Either that or I haven’t been paying attention lately 
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I noticed two different things in the past two days. First I noticed Android continuing my Google Maps query where I left it at my computer and then this morning I noticed the checkin / check out options on Google Maps.
This morning I was looking on Google Maps for the Parking I had to go to for my meeting a bit later on. I then noticed that on top of the results there was the possibility to fill in check in and check out dates. Not for the Parking off course, but for the hotels nearby to the Parking. A quick check on Twitter and with some friends learned me they hadn’t seen it before either. So it might be something new, or we have looked over it.
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When you talk Social Media most people immediately refer to two options: Facebook and Twitter. So when a company decides it wants to go and implement Social Media on its website, they right away put up the Tweet and Like or Share buttons. But the question is, what drives the most traffic and what drives the most conversion?
When it comes to driving traffic in the US there is a for some surprising winner to this ‘contest’: not Facebook or Twitter, but Stumbleupon is the biggest social traffic driver in the US. That is what numbers over 2010 from Statcounter show us. StumbleUpon accounted for about 43%, while Facebook accounted for about 38%. Twitter was only good for 5%, a little bit less than YouTube (7%) and a little bit more than Reddit (4%). (more…)
For the second year running “Facebook” was the number one search term on the web. In 2010, a movie “The Social Network” was released, documenting the origins and rise to international domination (save for parts of Asia) of Facebook, as the social network of choice. Late Sunday night the New York Times’ DealB%k , broke a story about Goldman Sachs offering their clients the chance to invest in Facebook, in a deal that values the company at $50 Billion.
According to the DealB%k article… “the email sent to Goldman clients warns recipients who trade in secondary markets where private firms like Facebook trade may want to steer clear of participating because if they opt-in they may receive material non-public information on the unnamed company that will restrict future trading.”
Essentially, private investment in a non-public company gives the investor access to company information, and secondary market information that would exclude the investor from trading in the company are they to go public. Whilst Goldman decline to comment, DealB%k reference a source stating that investors “would be prohibited from selling their shares until 2013”. (more…)
A few weeks ago Danny Sullivan wrote a very interesting article on Searchengineland in which he discussed the use of social signals in the rankings of both Google and Bing. He had approached representatives of both search engines who both said they were using Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal.
In his webmaster help videos Matt Cutts last week confirmed this. And not only that, he added some more information to it. He said that they are also “trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author” on Twitter or Facebook, something he said they didn’t do in May this year. They changed that since May. See the video here:
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