A new report from comScore measuring spent by users on various Internet sites found that Microsoft is way ahead of the pack.

A total of 3.920 billion hours were spent by users on Microsoft sites in September 2009, which is approximately 14.5% of the total online time by all users in that month. Of this, nearly 70% was on Windows Live Messenger.

In contrast only 2.512 billion hours were spent on Google sites, which is about 9.3% of the market share.

Google can take consolation in the fact that the usage of their sites has grown by 48% when compared with the usage in September 2008. Microsoft has grown by 44% in the same period.

Yahoo! sites, which accounted for 1.699 billion hours of online use have actually lost 14% in the same time frame.

The greatest (but not really surprising) growth was shown by Facebook. They clocked 1.387 billion hours in September 2009 compared to 474 billion hours in September 2008, which is a growth of 193%.

Graph showing change in user hours clocked on Top 4 Internet sites

A total of 27 billion hours were spent on the internet by 1.2 billion users over 15 years of age. The total population accessing the internet has grown by 20% in the last 1 year and is growing further.

Analysis of time spent online on a regional basis shows that Microsoft sites are largely preferred in Europe (16.8%), Latin America (35.9%), Middle East and Africa (33.1%), while Yahoo! has a sizable fan following in North America (11.2%) and the Asia-Pacific region (7.9%). Google sites are prominent in Latin America (19.4%), Middle East and Africa (9.7%), Europe (9.6%), and North America (9.1%).

Google announced yesterday that they have signed an agreement to acquire the mobile display advertising company AdMob.

AdMob is based in Silicon Valley and was founded by Omar Hamoui in 2006.

Google has agreed to pay $750 million for this acquisition which will help them to improve their mobile advertising technology. So far Google has been concentrating on Mobile search ads, while AdMob’s specialty is mobile display ads and in-application ads.

Besides helping improve Google’s technology, this deal is sure to bring cheer to publishers of mobile websites and applications as it will provide them with better tools for monetization, thus helping them to offer better services to their users.

It will also help advertisers to reach out to their audiences on the mobile web by providing them with more relevant ads through engaging formats.

Eventually these changes are good for the user, who will receive better mobile content, information and ads which will be useful to him for free or through low-cost mobile apps.

In other words this deal is a win-win situation for all concerned and will be good for the future of the mobile web which has already been gaining in importance in the recent past.

With both Microsoft and then Google announcing individual deals that give them access to real time information on Twitter, Yahoo! cannot afford to be left behind in the race.

While both Google and Microsoft’s Bing, have made separate deals with just Twitter, Yahoo! is reportedly in talks with OneRiot for a much broader real time search offering.

Reuters reports that Yahoo! Inc is looking to match its rivals in providing up-to-the-minute Internet search results. The company is supposed to be running tests with several real time search partners, according to sources familiar with the matter.

According to Reuters, Yahoo! is currently holding talks with several companies to provide users with realtime search results on a trial basis. OneRiot is one of those companies.

However, there have been no official announcements on this score from either Yahoo! or OneRiot.

OneRiot, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, taps into several sources including Twitter, Digg and their 3-million-strong user base to collect real time information.

Initially, Yahoo! will provide the real time search results in a separate box at the top of the search results page, to see how their users react to this service.

While Yahoo! and Microsoft have already signed a 10 year search deal last July, it is not expected to turn operational until next year. Until then, Yahoo! needs to fend for itself. Understandably, they would not like to be left behind in the real time search race, and hence this trial with OneRiot seems like a good option to pursue.

Google AdWords recently launched a new resource to help marketers reach mobile Internet audiences more easily. This service is called Go Mobile!

Go Mobile! provides tips to help marketers realise how best to reach their mobile clients. Google aims to make the site helpful to both new comers to the mobile marketing as well as to experienced marketers.

At present, the Go Mobile! site merely provide a one-page write-up with tips on mobile marketing, as follows:

Mobilise your website – if pages are specifically formatted for the mobile browsers, it becomes easier and faster for the user to see the highlights of the products or services being offered, thus saving the user’s time and improving the chances of making a sale.

Know your place – instead of asking the user for his location, make use of information from the mobile browser, or use Google Maps or other applications to know the customer’s location, thus impressing customers and providing more locally relevant information.

Offer ways to engage at any time – Since the mobile handset is always with the user, the marketer can engage them by providing a QR code or a phone number on a bus, for example, or by creating a downloadable mobile game to reinforce the brand.

Help customers spread the word – Encourage users to take part in events and ad campaigns etc. by sending MMS, IM, email etc to their friends.

Help them find you – make use of the ad products which Google offers to place relevant ads alongside the mobile search results when a customer is looking for something.

These basic steps are more common-sense than strategy, but could help marketers focus their mobile marketing initiatives more effectively.

Google Go Mobile!

Google has launched two new ad types in their AdWords service. The first is called AdWords Comparison Ads and the second is a feature called Ad Sitelinks.

AdWords Comparison Ads

As the name suggests, this new service will make it possible for users to compare offers provided by various advertisers.

Google Comparison Ad unit

The basic Comparison Ad allows users to specify what they are looking for, in a bit more detail than is normally possible on a regular search query, and then delivers a comparison of different offers side-by-side.

Users that engage with a comparison ad will now have to click on a promotion listed within the comparison table that they think is of interest to them. If they are not satisfied, they can provide some more details about what they want, to see better targeted ads.

When the user identifies a satisfactory offer, the advertiser can be contacted directly on the phone – making it a pay per call ad – or a quote can be requested.

Google will anonymise the user’s number with a unique code, through which the advertiser can then contact the user. Advertisers will not receive any user information unless the user wishes to release it. Advertisers will pay Google only if a user calls on the phone number allocated for that advertiser or if the user fills out a form requesting a quote.

The comparison ads feature is very speedy, as it provides relevant offers in less than one second, and the ads will only be for real products. There will be no teaser rates or bait and switch offers.

At present, the service is only available to a few users in some states in the U.S.A and it is only for advertisers in the mortgage and refinance field.

Ad Sitelinks

Just like certain organic results include sitelinks, certain ads can now also feature sitelinks via a new feature called Ad Sitelinks.

Advertisers with extremely high quality ads will be able to specify up to 10 links to deeper pages on their site. These can be links to special offers, featured products, support pages or other popular pages on the site.

Up to 4 Ad Sitelinks will show up below the regular ads for keywords that meet certain quality requirements:

1. The ad should have the first position above the organic search results
2. The ad should have a very high quality score, typically 10/10
3. The Ad Sitelinks URLs must direct users to pages that are part of the main website, and allow users to navigate freely

The links can be updated without changing the ads, as frequently as desired. The option to add sitelinks shows up in the campaign settings tab, under the “Networks, devices and extensions” section, and is labeled with the text “Show additional links to my site within my ad”.

How far will Microsoft go, in their bid to increase the market share of their search engine Bing?

The latest rumour making the rounds is that Microsoft may buy Ask.com, which has been up for sale for a long time now. Barry Diller, the Chairman of InterActive Corp, the parent company of Ask.com, has said that the search market is challenging, and he would be quite willing to part with his search engine (In exchange, for appropriate remuneration, of course.)

Under the circumstances, Microsoft would seem to be the most likely to buy over the company.

Although Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is doing quite well for itself, especially after announcing various deals with Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo!, it is still a distant third in the search engine market, with only about 9.4% market share in the USA.

Ask.com, which is ranked 4th in the search market, holds about 4% of the market share, which would help Bing gain a better foothold in the market. Also, this deal could interest Microsoft, as Ask.com earns most of its revenue from an advertising deal they have with Google.

Microsoft would also not have to deal with any regulatory concerns, as they still have a very small percent of the total market share even after their deal with Yahoo! is factored in.

Lastly, Microsoft would certainly have the resources to takeover Ask.com if they are so inclined.

With 64.9% of the U.S. market share and over 85% of the European search market still securely tucked under its belt, Google can still rest easy.

A recent report released by analytics firm Hitwise, does not provide good news for Twitter. According to the report, the growth curve of Twitter has taken a fairly steep turn for the worst between July and October 2009.

Graphing Twitters Decline on Compete.com

The graph above, taken from Compete.com shows a clear decline in the total number of visits over the last three months and a slight decline in the number of unique visitors to the site in the last month.

As far as the subject of Twitter competing with Facebook is concerned, quite contrary to the general expectation that Twitter may soon overtake Facebook, Twitter is actually way behind Facebook in the race, and seems to be losing ground, as can be seen in the graph below:

Comparing Twitter’s Decline to Facebook ’s rise, based on Alexa traffic ranks

While neither Compete.com nor Alexa.com’s numbers areprecise, they do give a very good general idea of trends, and in both cases, the trend for Twitter over the last month has been downward.

On October 24th Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer studied the number of U.S. Internet visits to both Twitter and Facebook. He found that while Facebook accounts for 6.1% of the market share, Twitter has only 0.14%.

Tancer also says that “At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus, referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per Twitter account is 1”.

The final admission that Twitter is not doing too well at present comes from none other than its CEO, Evan Williams, who told CNN, “It’s grown a little bit slower lately, but we have some things in the works that we think will change that.”

We can only wait and watch to see if that actually happens.

With the number of smartphones available in the market increasing, the number of people now accessing the Internet through their mobile handsets is shooting up very quickly. This could lead to mobile traffic data jams in the near future.

Mobile analysts from Informa have predicted that mobile online usage is set to grow to 25 times its present levels by 2012.

While this sounds like great news for mobile operators, the revenues are not likely to grow at the same rate. In fact, it is expected that mobile revenues may only double in the same time period.

Also, mobile networks are not yet geared to accommodate such a sudden growth spurt. This may very well lead to widespread mobile data traffic jams in time to come.

Dimitris Mavrakis, an analyst with Informa, says, “The decoupling of revenues from traffic presented operators with a problem because it deprived the phone firms of cash at a time when their networks were in need of upgrading.” He further informs that the hardware required to build the next generation mobile networks that could handle such high traffic will not be easily available until late 2010, thus further aggravating the problems of mobile operators.

Graham Carey of Bytemobile said that the fact that many laptops and smartphones are always in the ‘on’ mode further compounds these problems. The flat rate pricing which had been introduced to encourage users to access the mobile net, now seems to be having a boomerang effect, as users are using it extensively while mobile operators are not earning as much as they would, if the users were being billed at an hourly rate.

For now, mobile operators are using methods of optimization, like shrinking files, wherever possible without affecting the quality of the download.

John Spindler, Vice President Product Management at network optimization firm ADC, said that the unequal distribution and sudden spikes in mobile data use were also adding to the problem.

Over the years there have been several articles based on surveys conducted that have suggested that employees spend a lot of their working hours on personal or non-productive work. Some consider Twitter to be such a non-productive pursuit.

IT service company, Morse, recently conducted a study to find out the amount of time employees spend on various social networks when they should have been working instead.

The survey was conducted across 1,460 office workers. The results of the survey are quite appalling at first glance to say the least. They have come to the conclusion that employees spend 40 minutes every week on social networks, when they should have been concentrating on more official matters. The financial cost to their employers is estimated to be about $2.25 billion a year.

Another study claims that Facebook alone costs ₤130m a day in the U.K. and 233 million hours are lost every month due to this, while a study in the U.S. found that just web surfing costs U.S. $63 billion per year.

While these figures are indeed serious, and employers would be justified in trying to look for ways to cut their losses, it is not possible to plug the holes completely.

Employers would do well to remember that employees are bound to take some breaks from time to time. In fact, 40 minutes a week is less than 10 minutes a day for a typical 5-day working week. It is also possible that a short break may refresh an employee and inspire him or her to work better and be even more productive than usual, which is beneficial to the employer.

Thus it may seem advisable to overlook such lapses as long as they remain within reasonable limits.

Yahoo! has permanently closed down their property, GeoCities, as of the 26th of October 2009.

The site, which was first created way back in the 1990’s, was one of the world’s oldest Internet neighbourhoods. Most new surfers built their space on sites like GeoCities and Tripod, marking their space on the Internet long before the arrival of social networks and social media profiles.

Yahoo! bought the site almost a decade ago, for a whopping $3.57billion, in stock.

All the data and information on GeoCities, which was stored on Yahoo! servers has been deleted. Some sites like the Internet Archive and the newly formed The Archive Team have tried to retrieve and store some of this data but have probably not managed to save all of it.

Yahoo! had stopped accepting new users for this site last April itself, as they were considering this move, and in June they announced that the site would be closed on the 26th of October 2009 for good.

A spokesperson for Yahoo! said that they will now “focus on helping [their] customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways”.

Once again, Facebook has redesigned their homepage and though there are no major changes this time, users have protested against the changes in large numbers.

As with previous occasions, when the homepage was redesigned, this time too several groups of users have formed to object to the recent changes. One group called ‘PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!’ is over 500,000 members strong.

Some of the complaints these users have raised are as follows:

• The Live Feed is not “live” enough
• Alerts are not shown when new content is posted
• While the alerts are actually being posted on the News Feed, they are not very prominent
• The news feed is not very good as some of the stories are almost one day old
• This time, Facebook did not give them enough notice about the impending changes and suddenly incorporated them in the homepage.

To be fair, Facebook has made these changes only to correct some errors in their previous design, like adding information about friends of friends, and placing the events and birthdays column above the fold.

Facebook has also improved some of their features like the ‘Share’ button. Facebook will now be able to provide detailed analytics to their publishers, so they can find out how popular a particular link is, and how many actions have taken place on Facebook, how many comments have been received etc. This feature is quite similar to the retweet counters that work with Twitter.

They have also updated their APIs to allow for the building of new apps.

In spite of the large number of protests, the allegations are not really serious and Facebook is sure to be able to survive and continue growing.

If marketers and advertisers could find out exactly when, and on which browser their users were most active, it could help them to reach their target audience better. Towards this end, Erik Hansen of Microsoft conducted some insightful studies.

Hansen started with the assumption that most users may have access to 2 browsers; one at home, and another at work. Some of these users may use the one at home for most of their internet browsing, and occasionally use the one at work, while others may use the work browser most of the time and the one at home may be used much less frequently.

To analyse further, he counted the weekday days, and weekend days during which browsers saw ads and then divided the browsers into 3 groups.

• Mostly Weekday browsers
• Mixed Day browsers
• Mostly Weekend browsers.

The first category had more than 2.5 weekdays with ads for every weekend day with ads. The second category had between 1.0 and 2.5 weekdays with ads for every weekend day with ads, while the last group had at least as many weekend days as weekdays with ads.

It was found that most browsers were in the mostly weekdays category. The maximum number of ads also went to the mostly weekdays browsers, while most of the weekend ads went to the very active browsers who also saw ads almost every day in any case.

These findings seem to imply that users who browse on a weekend mostly do so from the same browser which they use on weekdays also. Alternatively it is also that very active browsers have more than one browser and they use both very regularly and with almost equal frequency.

These results, based on the Atlas Ad Serving System, suggest that advertisers reach most of their users at least once a week, through their most active browser.

In keeping with their concerns about social responsibility, for humanitarian and ecological causes, Google has released a series of Google Earth tours.

This initiative on their part is a precursor to the UN Conference of Parties 15 meeting in Copenhagen, this December.

The first of these tours is called ‘Confronting Climate Change’ and has narration by Al Gore. This tour presents scientific data collected from the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change. This tour gives details about the rise in temperature models, precipitation changes, water stress, food scarcity, sea level rise etc. in the world. There will be a series of such tours presented and the first of these teaches about mitigation techniques and the adaptation strategies which have to be dealt with by people all over the world.

One of the chief causes of rise in the carbon dioxide levels in the air we now breathe, is the large scale tropical deforestation which is being carried out in the world. While this is being done ostensibly for the purpose of farming and cattle grazing, it is severely harmful to our future. The next set of tours which have been released by the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, have been created from regions which have been reasonably successful in limiting the deforestation and have also helped the locals in their efforts at reforestation. These regions are Borneo and Madagascar.

Alongside these moves, Greenpeace is also working in collaboration with several large Multinational Firms in the food industry to set up a mutually acceptable ban on the farming of soybean plantations, which are among the primary causes of Amazon deforestation.

Just about 24 hours after announcing their search partnership deal with Twitter, Bing has gone ahead and finalised a similar deal with Facebook, according to reports from the Telegraph.

The Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has confirmed the deal, and she says that the feature is likely to be launched within the next two months. She has however reassured Facebook users that their privacy will be respected and therefore, Facebook will only stream data from those users who have their privacy settings mentioned as ‘everyone on web’. In fact sorting out this public data from the more private one is the reason, it will take about 2 months to launch this new feature.

Ms. Sandberg has also confirmed that Facebook will not be receiving any monetary compensation for allowing Bing to access their data. In due course of course, it is reasonable to expect that the increased access of Facebook data will lure more marketers and advertisers to Facebook. Thus indirectly this deal between Facebook and Bing is sure to help Facebook to earn more money.

The deal should also help Bing to boost its market share in the search market as they have managed to get these deals through before Google. Bing search results are now likely to be more real-time based than those on Google thus attracting more customers to Bing.

At the same time, Bing must make sure that they do not just clutter up their search results by adding data from Twitter and Facebook. That would only serve to confuse users, instead of providing better quality search results, which is the aim of these partnerships.

At the recently held Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Qi Lu, the President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, spoke to Tim Reilly of TechCrunch, about the new facilities soon to be launched on their new search engine Bing.

Qi Lu said that Microsoft was in talks with Twitter to introduce real time search on Bing.

The new features due to be Launched have been labeled ‘Bing Wave 2’.

He also provided a demo of what the new search results would look like. Apparently the new service will incorporate the best features of both Bing and Twitter.

Microsoft will now have access to all of Twitter’s public feeds, and so, when a user conducts a Twitter search on Bing, they will not only see the most recent tweets and top links, but they will also have the various search features of Bing. The most recent tweets of Twitter will be constantly updated in real-time on Bing. The results will also have a retweet button, so it will be very easy for users to forward the tweets if they wish to.

Although the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, Qi Lu did admit that this would be a non-exclusive deal, thus fuelling the rumors that Twitter is in talks with Google for a similar deal.

Bing will be able to use Twitter content and will keep track of the number of followers to each tweet, in order to determine the quality and ranking of each tweet. Spam will of course be filtered. Tags will be used to identify the trending topics and Bing will also provide the shortened URL as well as the final URL of the topic.

There has been speculation about similar deals between Bing and Facebook but nothing
has been confirmed on that score as yet.

Suddenly, the market is abuzz with rumours that Google is going to launch a mobile handset, which has actually been manufactured by them.

The rumour originated on TheStreet.com, which said that an official handset branded by Google is to be launched soon. The rumour further suggests that the handset is being made by Google in partnership with an as yet undisclosed manufacturer of smartphones.

It has also been mentioned that the said phone is most likely to be launched before the end of this year, and will be made available to users through retailers instead of carriers, as has been the practice so far. It is also believed that this phone will be compatible with any service provider in sharp contrast to the exclusive tie-up which the iPhone has with AT&T.

The article mentions that the source of this rumour is one Mr. Ashok Kumar of Northeast Securities, who claims to have spoken with Google’s design partners about the said phone, and its product release strategy.

The article says “If talk of the Google phone plan is true, the entrance of a unlocked, low-cost, web friendly touchscreen device will probably undercut other Android phone efforts by players like Motorola, Samsung and Dell.

Obviously, if these rumours turn out to be true, the new phone will provide stiff competition to existing as well soon to be launched handsets. While this news does seem too good to be true, only time will tell, whether this is just another rumour or fact.

U.S. authorities have finally decided to do what many felt was long overdue. They are making it compulsory for bloggers to disclose that they are receiving remuneration in cash or kind for reviewing any product.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has laid down new guidelines which will come into effect from December 1 2009. These guidelines are being revised after nearly 30 years during which the world has obviously undergone a sea change.

Until now it had not been necessary for bloggers to reveal that they were being paid to reveal their views on a product. This is now about to change and the policy will include celebrities as well as research firms, and popular social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook etc.

The penalty for flouting this rule could be as high as $11,000 per violation.

With consumers increasingly depending on the internet for purchase information, various consumer groups have been demanding such a policy. According to Jack Gillis of the Consumers Federation of America, unless this connection between bloggers and the company is disclosed, consumers can get mislead.

The guidelines , do not however lay down any rules about how this disclosure is to be made. That has been left to the parties concerned, as long as it is clearly mentioned.

The FTC has stated that “bloggers who make an endorsement, must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

Some of the inducements received by bloggers in the past range from an evening of pampering with manicures, pedicures etc. by Proctor and Gamble, Acer Laptops from Microsoft in 2006, and the use of a Ford car for 1 year.

These new guidelines have generated mixed results. While some bloggers are in favour of such legislation, others have criticized it as being misguided, foolish and even dangerous.

Internet giant Google has reacted quickly to this change, to ensure that they don’t get into any trouble with the authorities or become a scapegoat to set an example to other publishers and advertisers.

Google already label most of their ads with an ‘Ads by Google’ tag. In the future they will overlay an “i” icon in the bottom right corner of rich media ads, which currently don’t include the usual proclaimation. This icon will expand to read “Ads by Google” when the user hovers over it and link to a page providing more information about Google’s advertising practices.

The results of the Annual Local Search Study conducted by TMP Directional Marketing and comScore have been released. Additionally comScore has also conducted a comparative study of media trends and consumer behavior regarding local search over the last 3 years.

The study was conducted through an online questionnaire, answered by 4,000 users and through a behavioral study across 2 million users.

The results show that the number of people depending on digital sources for local sources is increasing along with the number of digital sources available.

Thus search engines have now become the primary source of local information, while the print media seems to be declining.

The number of local business searchers who own print directories has gone down from 89% in 2008 to 84% in 2009. The use of Internet Yellow Pages however has been increasing steadily.

While the online media is obviously prospering, the offline media also continues to hold a fairly steady following especially among users over 45 years of age. 40% of this section of users, uses the print directories, while only 24% of them use search engines by choice.

Social media and mobile searches are also growing sources of local business information and thought hey account for only 1% and 3% of market share respectively, they are definitely on the upswing and marketers would do well to keep this in mind.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps has improved their market share of local search from 15% in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 24% in the second quarter of 2009.

The usage of consumer ratings and reviews has gone up from 22% in 2008 to 25% in 2009 among Internet Yellow page searchers, and has gone up from 22% to 27% among general searchers. While the overall usage of ratings is only 24%, it goes up to 57% during the business selection process as users depend on these reviews while selecting companies whom they wish to do business with.

The availability of smartphones has also increased the use of mobile search. While only 19% of regular mobile users use mobile search, 60% of smartphone users do so, and this may well become the primary source of local search in time to come.

Yahoo!’s popular photo sharing site Flickr continues to grow in popularity, leaving Google Picasa far behind. Only last Saturday, the 12th of October 2009, one of Flickr’s users posted the 4 billionth photo on the site.

This landmark has been achieved in just five and a half months since photo number 3 billion was posted on the site, and that in turn was achieved almost 18 months after photo number 2 billion was posted there. This shows that the rate of growth of photos being posted on the site has gone up by over three times what it was between photo numbers 2 billion and 3 billion. While photos number 2 billion and 3 billion are still posted on the site, photo number 1 billion is no longer available.

At the centre of all the hullabaloo thus created over the 4 billionth photo is user Punimoe, who has been receiving a lot of congratulatory messages on uploading photo number 4 billion.

While this growth rate is certainly substantial it is nowhere near to the rate at which the numbers of photos on the popular social network Facebook, are growing. Their unlimited storage space has lured away a lot of users. They had reported having 15 billion photos on their site, way back in April 2009, and are believed to be getting about 2 billion new photos every month since then.

Flickr, which was set up in February 2004 by Vancouver based Ludicorp, and was bought over by Yahoo! in 2005, is still a very popular photo sharing site, but is facing stiff competition from Facebook.

It has been noticed of late that more and more people are turning to social media instead of the usual portals or search engines when they want to find out something online.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

Two new tools went live on Google Webmaster Tools today under a new section called ‘Labs’. The new tools are called Malware details and Fetch as Googlebot.

The first feature, Malware Details, simplifies the tough task of finding out if pages on a site are distributing malware. Webmasters previously had to depend on manual testing, use the Google Safe Browsing API or rely on malware notifications in the Google SERPs to find out if pages on their site had been compromised. Now, this task should be a lot simpler, as Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of the pages, which they feel could be malicious.

Malware details will not only be helpful to webmasters who wish to eliminate malware from their sites quickly but might also help a number of webmasters, whose sites fell in ranking due to the presence of malicious code on their site, now understand why this happened.

The other feature, Fetch as Googlebot, was previously launched in Google Labs. Webmasters are often curious to know what exactly Googlebot sees when their page is accessed. The text only cache on Google SERPs and the keywords and HTML suggestions tools in Webmaster Central help site owners to understand, to some extent, what information Googlebot sees on the page and what details are extracted during the crawl and indexing phases.

Now, with the Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters will be able to get real-time feedback on what the Google search robot sees when it crawls and indexes a page. This information will be especially useful when users update their sites with new technology or find that their pages have been hacked. It might also help some understand why they have not been ranked on specific keywords.

Microsoft now recognises the value of the social Web and is trying various means to get people to search on Bing. Rather than trying to displace Google as the go-to search engine they are prompting users to search and then share the information as well as the search query with their friends.

In order to enable social sharing of Bing search queries, Microsoft introduced a feature called ‘Bing and Ping’ last month. The service has now been launched in limited beta, with  a handful of users who signed up for the test on Facebook.

Henceforth, whenever one of the beta testers is signed in and searches for something on Bing (U.S. only) and feels that this information would be of interest to their friends, all they need to do is click one of the links to share it with their friends.

Microsoft Bing and Ping

Users can share via Facebook or Twitter or they can email the search result and a link to the SERP. Surprisingly, they have not included the Windows Live service for this sharing.

The service can be used to share things like news reports, recommendations, local movie times and flight status at present. Microsoft has only just started Beta testing this service, and is looking for feedback from users in order to fine tune and expand the service.

Interestingly, Microsoft made quite a blunder while sending out their invites to users for this service. They listed all the email addresses of people who had signed up for the service in the ‘To:’ field, thereby disclosing everyone’s addresses to all the recipients. They tried to set things right soon after, though, by sending an apology letter admitting the error.

The image the world has about the stiff upper lip of the British is changing. They have now become very interactive and sociable. According to a report released by uSwitch.com, the average Britisher is now spending almost 30 hours a week online.

The survey shows that on weekdays most people spend about 5 hours online, of which 2 hours are related to work while the remaining 3 hours are for personal reasons including emailing, shopping chatting socializing etc. Even over weekends users spend 3 hours a day online. Youngsters between the ages of 18 – 24 years of course spend much more time online.

The time spent by users online is put to various uses. The vast majority of internet users (93%) now do their shopping online, which serves the dual purpose of saving time, as well as offering the best bargains available without having to move from shop to shop. This means that an estimated 38 million people spend up to 2 hours every week shopping online.

82% of users are believed to now manage their finances online, for which they spend anywhere up to 2 hours a week online.

At least 25% of people are quite addicted to the social networking sites and must access theses sites at least once every day. Amongst the elderly and senior citizens there is some resistance tot his trend as 67% do not use social networks at all, but 30% of those between 18 – 24 years of age spend over 5 hours a week on these sites.

A communications expert at uSwitch, Jason Glynn says, “this research shows the huge impact that the internet is having on British life. Broadband is rapidly becoming a necessity – as important as gas or electricity”. He further indicates that this trend is only likely to increase even further in times to come.

Well, there is an old proverb, which says that too much of anything is bad. Addiction to the Internet is bound to bring its own set of problems, most notably poor health due to lack of physical activity and being cooped up indoors.

Users would do well to guard against going to such extremes!

Women, today, seem to be taking the lead over men in a lot of technical. Only recently it was found that working moms are the real power users of mobile phones.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

AdWords advertisers can now measure real conversion rates for display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network through a new feature called View-through Conversion Reporting.

Display ads have long been an important tool used by marketers to influence users and to create brand awareness. This new tool from Google will now enable marketers to measure the effect a particular ad on their target audience, even if it is not immediately clicked upon after viewing.

The new service will be able to measure the number of conversions that occur within 30 days from the date of viewing, even if no click was recorded at the time of viewing.

If a user sees an ad on a given site without clicking on it, but later visits the ad site within the next 30 days and converts into a lead or sale, this conversion will be reported in the AdWords campaign tab.

This facility will also allow marketers to better compare the performance of their ads on the Google Content Network, vis-à-vis its performance on any other content network. Marketers can then decide for themselves, which is the best place to advertise and thus get the best value for the money they spend on advertising.

To make use of this service, marketers will need to ensure AdWords conversion tracking works for their accounts. Google Analytics goals are not compatible with View-through Conversion reporting, and this service is not available for search campaigns and for text creatives.

Social networking site LinkedIn has been very useful for professionals to interact with each other and also to help companies to recruit staff for a variety of jobs.

LinkedIn is now going a step further to endear itself to its identified niche market segment by helping corporations recruit appropriate people for various positions. Until now, human resources personnel had to bookmark the portfolios of candidates who seemed to be appropriate or interesting for a particular post, and then save these for reference at a later date when required.

Now LinkedIn has started a new service for their Premium users, called ‘Profile Organizer’. As the name suggests, the service will allow users who pay for advanced features on LinkedIn to bookmark and save the profiles that they find interesting.

Not only can users bookmark interesting profiles, but they can also create files to categorise their contacts. This way, users can have different folders for personnel in different departments, such as manufacturing, sales, marketing etcetera for easy reference at a later date.

These folders can be categorised under different headings such as occupation and location. The details stored in the folders are not accessible to others, so users can make their own notes about each applicant. Details such as the hobbies and interests of a candidate, as also the details of any interaction with them can be stored here.

The service will be available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30 day trial period. Business members will be allowed an upper limit of five folders, while Business Pro and Pro members can create up to 25 folders. Users can test this new service on:

LinkedIn.com/organizer

With the number of mobile web users increasing at such a great speed, it definitely makes good business sense for Internet service providers to start serving up ads on mobile phones, and that is exactly what Yahoo! has already started doing.

Yahoo! has now started serving ads from the Yahoo! Search Marketing system on mobile phones. These ads are served on all smart phones including iPhones and Android mobile handsets.

Ads on Yahoo! Mobile Search

The best part about this new feature for marketers and advertisers is that unlike Google AdWords, the Yahoo! Search Marketing system will not require the usual process of creating new campaigns, mining keywords and writing new ads.

Standard sponsored search ads are displayed automatically on mobile search results pages. The ads are just 2 lines long, consisting of the ad title and the display URL.

One ad is displayed at the top of the search results page and two more ads are displayed at the bottom of the page.

All advertisers will be able to reach an ever increasing audience of mobile Internet users with the introduction of this new feature.

Marketers who wish to specifically target mobile search users will also be able to continue using the Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search service at:

Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search

With millions of users all over the world using Google search everyday, certain topics are bound to be very popular or ‘Hot’ among searchers at any given point of time. Google will now inform users about the popularity of such topics when a user searches for them.

Google Trends already shows users which topics are among the 100 most popular searches on a given day. Google has now incorporated this feature in Google Search, so that users do not need to visit another page to find out what the trending topics of the moment are.

Now, when a user Google’s a particular topic which is among the top 100 in popularity, Google will display a graph at the bottom of the search page to indicate the rate of rise of that topic and other details about it.

Google highlights trending topics within organic SERPs

Google Trends’ Hot Trends feature has also been pruned from its existing top 100 topics to only 40. However, when any of the top 100 topics are searched for it will show up on the homepage.

This move will brings Google a bit closer to imitating Twitter’s popular topics and real-time search functionality. It also allows users to not only know what are the most popular topics at the moment, but will also provide them with additional information about those topics. These Hot Trends will be updated every hour to show how the scenario is changing.

The Hot Topic being searched will not only get a number to indicate its rank in the popularity list but will also be classified with terms such as ‘On Fire’ and Volcanic’ etcetera.

This feature is officially launched only in the U.S. and Japan, but can be seen by some users in the UK at present.

It would be reasonable for most people to assume that the demographic of people who use the mobile phone the most, would be the typical high profile executive, or the youngsters in school and college who like to chat with and SMS their friends constantly. But, surprisingly, according to a survey by Scarborough Research this is very far from the actual facts.

The study conducted by Scarborough Research has shocked most people by revealing that as a matter of fact it is the working mom who makes the maximum use of mobile phones.

A working mom has been classified as a lady who has a full time job and at least one child at home.

Thinking about it, it does make sense that these multi-tasking women should make full use of the technology available to them, in order to be able to coordinate the several tasks that need to be done by them. This way they can be reasonably sure that things are in control back home, when they are away at work or commuting between their homes and place of work.

According to the study, the average mobile telecoms bill incurred by a working mom is $94 which is 21% more than that of the average mobile user in the U.S.

What is even more of an eye-opener is the fact that these working moms do not use the mobile phone only to make and receive calls and messages, but they are also likely to download content from the Internet on their mobile phones.

These ladies have also been found to be responsible for the purchase and use of several other high tech gadgets in their homes, which would help them to do save time by doing their work faster and thus enabling them to accomplish more in a given span of time.

When the iPhone was first launched in the U.K. in 2007, its manufacturer Apple, made a deal with service provider O2 through which, O2 had exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in the U.K. Obviously this monopoly proved very good for business, but the deal which was for a period of two years has now ended.

The competitors of O2, Orange and Vodaphone, have lost no time in jumping into the fray, and both have now got permission to sell the iPhone in the U.K. in both the 3G and the more recent 3GS models.

Although neither of them has set any specific date from which they will sell the phones yet, Orange is expected to start selling the iPhone before the end of this year, while Vodaphone is likely to do so in the beginning of the next year.

While Vodaphone says that they will sell the iPhone mainly to their existing customers, O2 had used their exclusivity deal to attract a lot of new clients. In fact in February 2009 itself, O2 claimed to have sold over a million handsets, thus generating a lot of new clients for themselves, including luring away some of the customers from other networks.

O2 now has an exclusive deal to ell the Palm Pre which is a competitor of the iPhone. This handset will be available from October 16 onwards.

While neither Orange nor Vodaphone have yet specified the price a t which the iPhone handsets will be sold by them the competition between the three service providers is bound to prove beneficial for users.

Facebook and Nielsen are teaming up to provide a new service to marketers on the popular social networking site. Nielsen will make use of their vast marketing experience to help marketers reach all Facebook users more effectively.

The new service being provided will be called Nielsen BrandLift.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook says, “Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effective data”.

BrandLift will make use of opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage. The poll will help marketers to understand the opinion users have of a particular brand and thus the likelihood of purchase intent.

According to John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen’s online division, Facebook has now become a vital link between consumers and brands, and with this partnership Nielsen will be able to add tot heir knowledge of media measurement. He further says, “we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”

This survey will help marketers to receive better market data and it will be made available to them sooner which is a great plus point for them.

Facebook will take care to see that individual users are not flooded with too many polls at once. Also no personal identification will be gathered through this poll, thus maintaining user privacy, which should please users.

The survey will consist of two questions put forward to consumers in standard ad positions. The survey will help advertisers to measure brand awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration.

The service has already been used by a few brands such as Proctor & Gambol, and Sony Pictures on a trial basis. They have reported encouraging findings.

The service will be made available to all marketers in due course.

Google has just introduced a new feature to enable all their users to add their own comments or experiences to every website which they visit.

This new feature is a toolbar, which has been christened Sidewiki. With this new toolbar, it will now be possible for all users ranging from an ordinary layperson to an authority on the subject concerned, to put in their own insights to every article on the net. This will help other users to get more information on the given subject.

To further improve the quality of the service, Google has used an algorithm that will allow the most high quality, relevant and appropriate comments to appear at the top of the comments column, and the other comments will come lower down, instead of letting just the latest comments come at the top as is seen with blogs.

Google will also incorporate entries from other relevant posts, blogs and other sources, if they happen to be about the same page that the user has accessed.

This may be Google’s way of staying ahead of the competition, Yahoo1 in particular, which has just launched a new search update feature.

Currently, Google Sidewiki is available on Internet Explorer and also on Mozilla Firefox, and Google is working to make this service available on their own browser, Google Chrome.

Those who wish to use Google Sidewiki can start doing so by going to ‘google.com/sidewiki’, from where they can download the sidewiki toolbar and then add their own comments to the web pages they use by clicking on ‘Write an entry’ after logging into their Google Account. The comments previously entered by others will be displayed in the right hand side column.

Google’s new keyword tool, currently in beta has a lot of good new features – integration with other tools, filtering options and categorisation – but the best feature is almost un-noticeable: The ability to see stats for mobile searches.

Mobile search volumes have been a long-requested feature that Google representatives have been historically reluctant to share. Speculators always concluded that this was due to the low volume of mobile searches.

The new feature is not immediately obvious in the new keyword tool. Advertisers need to click the “Advanced Options” link and then check the “Show stats for: Mobile search” box.

The network statistics setting allows advertisers to change search volume data to show mobile device statistics only. This setting changes only search performance columns and does not affect traffic estimate columns.

Mobile website owners and mobile search marketing agencies will welcome this new feature as it finally gives them the ability to estimate PPC costs and traffic volumes they can expect from search.

A quick review of the mobile search volumes shows that even in popular mobile search categories such as local information and gaming, the volume of mobile searches is a mere fraction – as low as 0.3% – 0.6% of traditional Web searches for the same 1-word keyword queries.

If the latest buzz in the mobile industry is to be believed, AOL seems to be getting ready to shut down their mobile advertising network.

AOL acquired Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company, in 2007 for $80 million. According to sources in the know, the new CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, and the head of the advertising department Jeff Levick are planning to either shut down the mobile advertising network or just letting all their contracts lapse over a period of time.

It has been reported that AOL is not renewing the deals they have with their existing publishers for their mobile ad network. Instead, these publishers are quietly being allowed to go to AOL’s competitors. AOL has also not put out any new publisher proposals, which obviously means that they are losing a lot of clients, and surprisingly this does not seem to be bothering them, which again indicates an intention to discontinue the business.

A number of current employees of Third Screen Media are reportedly out in the field, hunting for new jobs.

It is believed that AOL will instead focus on developing mobile content and will also rebuild their mobile ad technology, which will then be able to service other AOL-owned properties.

This is certainly a good move at this stage, since AOL will be turning into a separate entity from Time Warner shortly. They will then have businesses like mobile web publishing, AOL Mail, MapQuest, AIM and iPhone apps, which they can monetise.

AOL could always rebuild their mobile advertising business again later with even better technology when the market turns and demand for mobile advertising really picks up.

While it is true that in general that the effect of online ads on social networks is not quite as strong as the effect of online ads on search sites, it has been found that ads on Facebook have definitely begun to show very good results, even surpassing the performance of ads on search giant, Google.

Several advertisers have admitted that of late, the results they get from advertising on Facebook are better than those achieved from advertising on Google, and that is in spite of spending less on Facebook than on Google.

According to several advertisers and marketers, the response they have been getting from Facebook has improved substantially in the last 6 months, and due to this, more and more businesses are buying ad space on Facebook.

Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook, however, maintains that the advertising growth curve at Facebook has maintained a steady pace and there has been no sudden jump in the demand for ad space on their site. It is true, though, that the number of advertisers on Facebook has tripled over the last three years.

One important factor for this growth surge at Facebook is the ability of advertisers to find their target audiences accurately from the profile data available about Facebook users. Facebook has always been very strict about users using real names and information on the site, and has often deleted profiles that posted false information. As a result, demographic data on Facebook is more reliable than on other networks.

When a Facebook user likes a product they are likely to recommend it to most of their friends, who are already on Facebook. This feature has certainly attracted a lot of marketers to Facebook.

While Google has not commented on this topic, Facebook has announced that they have logged annual sales to the tune of $500 million. Coupled with Facebook’s fast growing user base, it may only be just a matter of time before the social networking leader out performs Google on the advertising front.

A study of 27 prominent mobile websites, conducted by the Yankee Group has shown that most of these sites deliver results that are far from satisfactory. In fact, it was found that on a scale of 1 – 100, the average score achieved was just 52.

The number of mobile websites has been growing rapidly, and so has the number of mobile Web users. The number of mobile websites has now grown to almost 2 million while an estimated 31% of mobile phone users browse the mobile web at least once a month, to look up routine things such as weather, news and search.

While mobile websites are improving in general, the report from the Yankee Group found that only 4 of them received good usability scores. These were Google, Google News, Yahoo! and MLB.com.

Carl Howe, a director at Yankee Group, says, “Unlike last year, most of the sites we reviewed adapt their content to many differing feature phones and smartphones. And some companies are also starting to incorporate location-awareness, something other sites should strive to emulate.”

Of the 27 sites studied, it was found that for news, both Google and Yahoo! have done well and scored 73 points each. They have managed to walk the tight rope between providing sufficient information and flooding the user with excessive details.

Again, in the field of search, Google has retained the number one slot as would be expected with 81 points and is followed quite closely by Yahoo! with 76 points. Yahoo! just needs to strengthen itself regarding some of the relatively minor features such as extraneous content and HTML validation errors.

In the field of sports, the Major League Baseball mobile site scores 71 points and is followed by Rival.com with 58 points and ESPN.com with 57 points.

As far as U.S. mobile carriers are concerned, they all need to improve their own mobile presence. Sprint, though not very good, is the best with just 53 points.

Read the full report: Best Of Anywhere Web 2009

The latest innovation to hit the marketing industry is the introduction of video ads in traditional paper magazines.

Believe it or not, this is already happening!

Video ad loading in a magazine

The first video ads in the print media were published last month in an American magazine, Entertainment Weekly.

A full-page cardboard insert was placed within the magazine containing a small screen, which advertised the diet drink Pepsi Max, and also had trailers of shows on the U.S. television network, CBS. As if that is not sufficient, the insert also contained built-in speakers for the user to listen to the ads.

This amazing feat has been achieved by inserting a small chip in the cardboard page within the magazine. The chip gets activated automatically when the concerned page is opened. It works in a manner similar to a singing greeting card.

The screen is about the size of a mobile phone’s display screen, contains rechargeable batteries and can carry up to 40 minutes of content.

While the invention is quite interesting to say the least, some users do not like it as it makes the magazine quite bulky and the cardboard insert makes it impossible to fold the magazine. It also makes it quite difficult to flick through the pages of the magazine.

Another drawback is that once the page is opened, it takes several seconds for the video to load and start, which could result in users losing interest.

Copies of the magazine have been sent out to several subscribers in New York and Los Angeles.

Americhip, the company that manufactures these screens, has estimated that each screen would cost about $20. The novelty of this medium, though, could easily justify the additional advertiser expense.

Oonce this form of advertising gains greater acceptance, it could drive the manufacturing costs down, but could also result in user apathy or even frustration at technology turning a quiet few minutes spent reading a magazine into a noisy, flashy flurry of images.

While plain text ads are very popular on the Google Content Network and form a very important part of the AdWords online advertising platform, display ads still lag far behind in popularity. Google’s new Ad Exchange hopes to change this.

One of the reasons for their low adoption rates could be the complexity involved with display advertising. Display ads are available in several formats, such as images, videos and interactive gadgets. It can be a laborious task to manage the organisation of such varied ads across thousands of Google Content Network sites. Hence, advertisers have not been too keen on this form of advertising.

Publishers on the other hand, are left with a lot of unused ad space on their sites.

To help simplify this process for both the parties involved, Google has now launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This ad exchange will be a platform from which publishers can sell and advertisers can buy the required ad space via their existing Google AdSense and Google AdWords accounts.

The exchange will function as a real-time automated auction market. Advertisers will try to get better ad space, while publishers will try to extract better rates from the advertisers and also sell more of their available ad space.

The exchange will also allow advertisers to measure the performance of their ads, thus offering a degree of accountability. It will also make display advertising more accessible to all advertisers.

In 2008, the total revenue generated from online advertising was $23.4 billion, while display advertising accounted for only $7.6 billion of that total. Hopefully, the new, better integrated Google AdWords / DoubleClick Ad Exchange will help to increase the revenue generated by display ads.

So far, Yahoo! remains the market leader for display ads ever since they bought RightMedia in 2007 for $680 million. Google, no doubt, hopes to be able to now overtake Yahoo!

Introduction to the new, open Google Ad Exchange

According to a report released recently by HubSpot, search is no longer necessarily the best source of traffic for online marketers.

While Google continues to remain the undisputed leader among search engines, HubSpot’s study shows that it is no longer a good idea to concentrate only on marketing through Google, or even through other search engines.

The survey conducted by HubSpot, across 40 of their customers in four industries, has shown that though search is responsible for a lot of the traffic, that traffic does not necessarily convert into leads or sales.

In fact, they found that social media, email and even blogs are very important sources of traffic and sales. Even links coming in from various websites and directories contribute quite significantly to the traffic and leads that a marketer receives.

Quite contrary to the findings of this study conducted by HubSpot, other recent studies have found that while social media alone now accounts for almost 20% of online ad impressions, the number of actual conversions and the influence exerted by a social media presence was substantially lower.

For the last several months now, Google has been displaying a 10-pack of local business listings along with regular search results for most queries that include a location element in them.  This has definitely affected the amount of traffic reaching local directories negatively.

Along with the search results for most location-specific queries, Google provides this list of geo-specific search results, which they determine from the keywords in the query and the geographic location of the searcher.

Local Business Results on Google Web Search

The local business results within the universal search results are quite extensive and inclusive. Earlier, they used to appear only when the user included a specific location in his query, but for some time now, Google provides these local business results even for queries without a specific local qualification to the keyword if the query is deemed to be typically meant for localised searches, such as “nearest pizza”.

This universal search result includes detailed information about the businesses in the given location, including phone numbers and direct links to the website.

Due to this addition, the number of referrals to Internet directory services has shown a marked downward trend.

A study of the progress graph of various internet yellow pages, including those in the U.K., Canada and Australia, shows this downward trend.

Decline in percentage visits from search engines

The graph above charts the percentage of visits to the leading UK directory assistance services’ websites that came from a search engine. Over the past 3 months, most of these services have seen a fall of 1% to 8% in the percentage of traffic being referred from search.

While this is bad for these local directories, it is certainly a great convenience for Google’s users, as they do not need to go from one page to another, to find answers to their queries.

It is, of course, possible for these directory assistance sites to fight back, if they are innovative and put in a lot more effort. In fact, some directory services such as Yelp, Zillow and ServiceMagic have managed to maintain steady growth internationally in spite of Google’s onslaught.

With Twitter growing larger by leaps and bounds everyday, it is getting increasingly difficult for users to decide whom to follow and which tweets they would find interesting and relevant. To help users, Mixx has now stepped in to simplify matters.

Mixx has launched a new site, called TweetMixx, which aims to help users to sort and categorise all types of content, including stories, videos and photos, thus making it easy for users to decide which tweets they want to see and which ones they would likely skip, thus saving valuable time.

Now that almost everybody from VIPs to celebrities and the guy next door are joining Twitter, the site is getting pretty crowded with tweets. Following many people and finding interesting users can be extremely confusing, since tweets are not tagged. It is difficult and very time consuming for users to determine which of the tweets they will find relevant and significant.

The new service from Mixx will allow users to easily find the content that they are interested in, instead of having to sort through thousands of tweets. Users type in keywords they are interested in and TweetMixx provides the most relevant recent tweets.

TweetMixx also provides a shortcut to just the links tweeted by a user’s friends, ignoring all the “pointless babble“.

Shortened URLs are also automatically unpacked and presented as useful links with explanatory titles and descriptions, which can be very handy when trying to decide whether clicking on a link such as http://bit.ly/xpp5L.

Users can send tweets, save pages and check incoming links from their friends on a single dashboard page instead of having to jump from one page to another. When a user receives new tweets, a message at the top of the TweetMixx page says so. To use TweetMixx, users can log in to their Twitter account through OAuth.

While the benefits of TweetMixx for Twitter users have been discussed at length on the service announcement on the Mixx Blog, almost nothing has been said about how the service integrates with Mixx.

TweetMixx Spams Mixx

A bot called TwitterSubmitter on Mixx automatically adds all tweeted stories that get pulled by TweetMixx onto Mixx. When these tweets are listed with further information regarding the links, TweetMixx also provides a count of the number of times the same link has been retweeted and a link saying “Details on Mixx”.

Clicking on the details link brings users to a page on Mixx that shows the very same article, as if a real user had submitted it. However, since the link has actually been submitted by a bot, it hardly ever gets any votes and ends up languishing like spam on the site.

Mixx obviously has the right intentions in mind. They should have thought of a better way to integrate the service and provide more informative content on Mixx, rather than just spamming their own site with every inane tweet possible!

TweetMixx enabling spam on Mixx

It looks as though, Facebook will do all that is required to slow down the growth of Twitter and to retain their own popularity.

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

Results of a study recently conducted by campaign measurement firm, Dynamic Logic, regarding the effectiveness of in-call advertising have just been released and are looking very positive for the new ad medium.

The study, which was conducted in December 2008, delivered 900,000 audio ads to targeted mobile users. The aim was to measure the effects of the direct insertion of audio ads into the call stream of certain targeted customers.

Brand awareness as well as purchase intent was found to be greatly increased through this form of advertising.

Callers in the study were put on hold while calling a popular US toll-free movie ticket line. These callers heard various 10-second ads about redbox, a company that has fully automated kiosks to rent out newly released movies at $1 per night. The ads were meant to build awareness about redbox and to encourage users to use their kiosks. Those interested in finding out more about redbox had the option to engage further or to get an SMS coupon for the same.

A survey of these callers after the call found that the in-call ads increased aided brand awareness by over 9 percentage points on average.

Among those who rented DVDs frequently, the brand awareness increased 11.9%. Among occasional DVD renters, the likelihood of renting a DVD from a redbox kiosk went up by 10.7 percentage points.

A single exposure to this form of advertising increased brand awareness significantly. Regular online campaigns were estimated to require about 10 exposures to achieve the same level of awareness.

comScore has revealed that display ads on social networks accounted for more than 20% of the total number of online ad impressions in the USA during the month of June 2009 .

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.

BusinessWeek has reported that Google’s popular video sharing site, YouTube, is in talks with various Hollywood Studios to rent out movies to their users.

Talks are still reported to be in extremely early stages, so there is no date set as yet for starting the service. In fact, it may never even materialize.

Apple’s iTunes Store, which has such a service in place, charges users $3.95 per movie. It is expected that YouTube would be looking at a similar figure.

If the deal does come through, it will be a first for YouTube, in that it will be the first time that they will charge their viewers to access content.

In spite of being one of the most popular websites, YouTube has never been financially successful. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has admitted that the site has not lived up to its revenue expectations. Last April, he had said that YouTube would try out various ways of monetisation, including micropayments and subscription models.

YouTube even started allowing ad sales on videos from big media companies, on a revenue sharing basis with the producers, in an attempt to capitalise on the TV ad budgets that already are allocated for these companies.

If talks with some of Hollywood’s studios do succeed, YouTube will start earning some revenue through this new channel.

Discussions were started with Warner Bros. The two companies had reached an agreement in the past to allow clips from Warner Bros. TV shows to feature on YouTube, but so far they have not allowed airing of full episodes on the site.

YouTube is also in talks with Sony, Lion’s Gate and MGM. Though Walt Disney and Fox, who are very particular about their copyrights, have not yet come to the discussion table.

Paramount Movies has raised objections to YouTube’s proposals. This was to be expected as Paramount’s parent company, Viacom, is involved in a law suit against Google. The suit which is on its way to trial, for $1 billion in damages, is based on Viacom’s allegation that Google allowed the viewing of pirated TV shows and other material on YouTube. If YouTube hopes to deal with them in the near future, Google will have to come to an amicable settlement with Viacom first.

While the studios have not been too concerned about pirated TV shows, movies are a different matter altogether.

However, the studios could also be interested in forging a deal with YouTube as DVD sales have dropped quite significantly in recent months and such a deal could be one way of making up for the losses thus incurred.

Facebook Mobile is growing very rapidly in popularity. Recently released numbers indicate that the service is now used by more than three times as many people as the number that used it eight months ago.

In January 2009, Facebook Mobile had a respectable 20 million users, which it had amassed since its launch about three years ago, in 2006. Now, they have suddenly accumulated 65 million users, as reported on The Facebook Blog.

This growth does not look likely to slow down, either, as Facebook has recently introduced Facebook Connect on mobiles.

Logging in on various websites, which is never easy on a mobile handset, will now be made much easier for Facebook users, just as it is on their computers.

Facebook Mobile was first launched as a very basic mobile service in the English language only, with basic features like status updates and photo uploads. The service is now available in more than 60 different languages and has features such as Facebook SMS and several others incorporated in it.

Facebook mobile has two portals – m.facebook.com, which can be used on any handset and x.facebook.com, which is to be used on touch-screen handsets such as the iPhone, Android G1 and Palm.

Digg recently added the rel=”nofollow” attribute to some links on their site, whose quality and veracity they are not sure of. This move comes hot on the heels of Twitter, who did the same for all their links last week.

Stopping link juice from flowing out from Digg to dubious sites became a necessity, in some ways, due to the spread of spammy material on the site.

The nofollow attribute will be added to all external links, comments, user profiles and story pages whose popularity happens to be below a particular threshold limit set by Digg.

Digg submissions that cross the required threshold will automatically have the nofollow attribute removed from the link pointing to the articles.

This way, spam-based content on the site should be reduced, while still allowing good quality content to benefit the content owners with search engine friendly links to the publisher’s site.

A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar.

SEO professionals are mostly in agreement with Digg on this new system, though. It allows the site to give credit where credit is due and not penalise everyone, like Twitter is doing, because of problems created by spammers.

Google uses a similar policy on Knol: Authors who regularly contribute and are thus well-known and trusted get their links freed of nofollow, while those who are new, need to gain the trust required before the nofollow attribute is removed from their links.

Digg’s Nofollow Criteria

Digg has not officially specified, however, what the threshold of reliability is.

As of now, all profile links are nofollowed, even for extremely popular and trusted Digg users, all newly submitted links are also nofollowed, even if they have been submitted by power users and all sponsored links are nofollowed – which was probably done to keep Google happy.

The only links that have nofollow removed from them at present are those that make it to the homepage, category popular pages or sub category popular pages.

Even the most dugg upcoming or ‘Hot In’ category / sub-category stories have the nofollow attribute on them.

The criteria for getting rel=”nofollow” removed from a link, at present, seems to be simply making it reach the ‘Popular’ list, which is the homepage or the individual category / sub-category main pages.

Online advertising is no longer meant only for online marketers. More and more studies are showing that online advertising can be beneficial for offline sales as well.

comScore and DunnHumby recently conducted a study on the effects of online advertising versus television advertising, across 200,000 consumers, recording their behaviour through the use of supermarket loyalty cards.

Their research showed that the boost given by online advertising to offline sales was not only higher but also faster than the boost provided by TV advertising.

The comparative study showed that the sales lift achieved by TV ads was 8% over a period of 12 months, while the lift from online ads was 9% over just 3 months. In parallel terms, the percentage of sales lift achieved through TV ads was 36% and that through online ads was 80%.

In 2008, Google had commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct a study among 3 consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, in order to study the effects of traditional TV ads versus the effects of online platforms.

Accordingly, the study was carried out by running identical ads on TV, on a computer screen replicating a YouTube video environment, and on a computer screen replicating a click-to-play video embedded in the content. The results revealed that all the platforms were equally effective in the ability to convey their message about the brand and its strength, and thereby encourage users to go ahead and make a purchase.

While these findings should encourage marketers to shift their ad spend towards online advertising, TNS Media Intelligence has found that the ad spend for TV ads remains static at 58% since 2005, while ad spend on online ads has grown in 2009 from 2% to 4%. And that additional 2% has come through relocation of funds from radio and newspaper ads, but not from TV.

Gian Fulgoni, the executive chairman of comScore says, “these early results confirm the ability of online advertising to successfully build retail sales of CPG brands on par with the impact of television advertising. It is likely that the more precise targeting ability of the Internet – especially in terms of accurately reaching the desired demographic segment – is a key reason for its effectiveness.”

A study of the global search market undertaken by comScore recently found that over 113 billion searches were carried out online in July 2009.

The study shows that the search industry has grown by 41% in July 2009, compared to what it was in July 2008.

Expectedly, Google cornered the lion’s share of the searches conducted. It had 76.7 billion searches which is 67.5% of the total number of searches carried out in July 2009.

Google’s competitors were left far behind. Yahoo! received 8.9 billion searches or 7.8% of the market share. Yahoo! was closely followed by the popular Chinese search engine, Baidu, which received 8 billion searches which is 7% of the market share.

Microsoft’s Bing, which was launched only in June 2009, registered 3.32 billion searches which is a 41% growth compared to July 2008’s volume of searches on Live Search.

Generally speaking, all the well known search engines showed a significant growth in the search volumes they received compared to the same time period last year. Most notably, the Russian search engine Yandex grew by 94%.

comScore has further revealed that the behaviour of search engine users varies markedly from region to region.

They found that Europe accounts for the maximum number of searches with 32.1%, while the Asia-Pacific region follows with 30.8% and North America has 22.1%.

On the other hand, Latin America had the largest number of searches per person. They had an average of 13 search usage days per person in a month, and each searcher conducted 130 searches on an average.

They were followed by Europe which had 117 searches per user and North America which had 12.5 usage days in the month.

The Middle East and Africa lagged behind with only 5.8% of searches conducted worldwide, 10.5 search usage days per person and 97.3 searches per person.

According to the BBC, Sony will start incorporating Google’s Chrome Internet Browser, which had been launched last year, in their new personal computers in North America.

Sony has already conducted a test run this last May, and the test phase is now almost over.

It may be safe to assume, though, that other browsers will also be available on Sony PCs as they would not want to upset their users.

The deal is a first for Google, and they hope to be able to win similar deals with other computer manufacturers as well, in order to promote Chrome.

Chrome’s market share might get a slight push by this means. Personal computers from Sony account for less than 5% of the US market share. This could be a very good first step in the right direction. However, Google should have probably waited to win some bigger players over to their side before announcing their strategy to their competitors!

With competitors like Microsoft, Google had better watch its back when trying to make in-roads into the PC market. Microsoft pretty much has that market cornered. Internet Explorer comes with the Windows operating system, which is used on over 90% of all PCs shipped.

Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browser are way ahead of Chrome in terms of market share. They have, of course, been around for a much longer time.

According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer currently has about two thirds of the market share among Internet users, with 67.7%, Firefox has 22.5%, Apple’s Safari has 4.1%, while Google’s Chrome has a mere 2.59%.