Maximize Your Twitter Followers

Cincinnati Ad Agency

2011-08-29T02:13:00.000-04:00

Cincinnati Ad Agency

On Eve of Healthcare Vote, Democrats Fight Brushfires but Remain Confident - latimes.com

2010-03-20T00:08:00.001-04:00

On Eve of Healthcare Vote, Democrats Fight Brushfires but Remain Confident - latimes.com

Posted using ShareThis

Vitaminwater’s Facebook Users Have Chosen a New Flavor: “Black-Cherry Lime”

2009-10-06T21:57:00.000-04:00

Vitaminwater’s Facebook Users Have Chosen a New Flavor: “Black-Cherry Lime”: "

The idea of combining lime with black cherries in a beverage may not be intuitive for some foodies out there, but it appears to have been for the nearly 116,000 users on vitaminwater’s flavorcreator application. The Coca-Cola-owned company has been running an ambitious campaign over the past month that includes a Facebook app, an active Facebook page, television commercials, YouTube videos, and more.

Vitaminwater is going beyond normal brand marketing, and trying to figure out Facebook users’ tastes to determine what new flavor of vitaminwater to introduce next spring.

The app actually has three steps, two of which are now complete. The first step asked users to pick their favorite flavors, and scoured a wide range of web sites for information about those flavors — see the screenshot for “Mint” for what that looked like.

And because this is vitaminwater, the new flavor will also have its own special selection of vitamins. Actually, all vitamins, and then some: “vitamins a to zinc + caffeine.” This is the result of the second step, a series of light-hearted games and quizzes that tried to figure out what sort of vitamins each user needed most — the answer was apparently “a lot.”

The company based the app as a tab on its vitaminwater Facebook page, and as a result the page itself was one of the fastest growers for a couple weeks in September. By this point it has more than doubled from 410,000 to 981,000 today. These are fans that vitaminwater can now promote the new flavor to when it becomes available, as well as any other campaigns it does in the future.

However, users who came to the fan page still had to install the app to participate. Given that the app has 116,000 fans, it seems the company did not convert hundreds of thousands of users from fans to market research subjects.

Now, in the third part of the campaign, users can form teams within the app on Facebook and enter a contest to design the bottle for the new flavor. The winning team will get $5,000. Celebrities Carrie Underwood and long-time vitaminwater business partner 50 Cent will help choose the winner.

Top 20 Up and Coming Facebook Apps: Playfish’s Quiztastic Surges, And More

2009-10-06T19:58:00.000-04:00

Top 20 Up and Coming Facebook Apps: Playfish’s Quiztastic Surges, And More: "

Based on growth over the past seven days, AppData’s top 20 up-and-coming applications for this week include a broader variety than usual. Many are simple applications, like number one on the list, “What will happen tomorrow with you?” It’s a strange sort of questionnaire, that at every turn blends questions in with quiz ads, or asks users to spread the app by inviting their friends or posting about it on their walls.

Top Gainers This Week (100K-1M MAU)

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.	What will happen tomorrow with you?	929,844	+812,611	+693.2	—
2.	Animal Hunter	210,223	+210,223	+0.0	—
3.	Quiztastic!	682,016	+188,652	+38.2	Playfish
4.	Chakpak Movies	769,682	+186,749	+32.0	Chakpak Media
5.	O-Meter App Factory	334,161	+181,062	+118.3	3happybytes
6.	Birthday Countdown	509,206	+152,299	+42.7	Internet Design Zone
7.	QUE CLASE DE MAMA ERES	218,093	+108,932	+99.8	Clara Carolina Martinez Junge
8.	Promotions	720,989	+108,450	+17.7	Wildfire Interactive, Inc.
9.	What do they say about me?	499,691	+90,647	+22.2	3happybytes
10.	World War II	277,944	+73,416	+35.9	CrowdStar
11.	EIDI	360,000	+72,064	+25.0	—
12.	Hari Raya Cards	378,596	+68,199	+22.0	—
13.	SocialVibe	167,546	+67,346	+67.2	SocialVibe Inc.
14.	Photo Books	308,969	+63,836	+26.0	2pad
15.	How Sexy Is Your Name Calculator	269,064	+61,826	+29.8	Internet Design Zone
16.	Tetris Friends	667,232	+56,980	+9.3	Tetris Online, Inc
17.	Baby Adopter	292,462	+56,186	+23.8	x2line
18.	Pirates of the World	834,525	+53,833	+6.9
19.	Dailymotion Videos	479,628	+53,397	+12.5	Dailymotion
20.	World Poker	801,651	+50,047	+6.7	6 waves

It managed to gain 813,000 users in the last week to reach 930,000 monthly active users total; we’ll see how long it keeps growing. More credible is number two on the list, Animal Hunter. It’s a simple game that lets you “hunt” animal icons in a small grid. It grew by by 210,000 users in the past week — its entire growth, although the likely explanation is that we just started tracking it.

At number three, meanwhile, is Playfish’s Quiztastic, a quiz game that had gotten off to a slow start when it launched towards the end of August. It had less than 60,000 users as of September 7th, but grew 189,000 this past week to come in at 682,000. Playfish has no doubt been fine-tuning the game dynamics and cross-promoting it with its more popular apps — whatever is going on, things are looking up.

And, as usual, we’re continuing to see strong performances among international app developers. Argentinian developer 3happybytes has a couple apps on the list, there’s a new Indian movie-fan app called Chakpak movies, and a poker game from Hong Kong developer 6 Waves.

Collection Agencies Turn To Facebook To Remind Users Of Old Debts

2009-10-06T16:58:00.000-04:00

Collection Agencies Turn To Facebook To Remind Users Of Old Debts: "

Facebook has proven to be an excellent way to re-connect with old friends, but collection agencies are now using it to re-connect with old debts. A recent article from the New York Daily News highlighted one Long Island resident who had an agency find him through Facebook, where they tapped into his friend network to attempt to collect a 15-year-old debt, and there are also reports of agencies posing as attractive girls to lure debtors into accepting friend requests.

Collection agencies have been using Google to find these people on social networks. Traditional methods of collection through the mail and phone calls can be easily ignored, but it’s a little harder to turn a blind eye to a collection agency sending messages to friends and family on Facebook.

In the case of Michael Buccello, the collection agency tracked him down on Facebook, going as far as sending his mother messages that his debt could lead to jail time. While it isn’t uncommon for collection agencies to contact relatives by phone to attempt to collect a debt, Facebook news feeds and wall posts can spread word of a debt much further and quicker. The negative social stigma of an unpaid debt may lead to a quicker resolution, as most Facebook users are not likely to enjoy having their dirty laundry aired through their news feeds.

So how can one avoid having a debt collection agency pollute his or her page with notices? The obvious answer is to pay off one’s debts, but that’s not always possible. Being cautious about what friend requests get accepted is a good first step, but all the agency has to do is find one friend or relative in your network to accept their request to spread notice information. Another way would be to set your privacy settings to make your profile hidden.

The simple fact is that being a part of a social network like Facebook means putting yourself into the public eye, making it easier for agencies to track you down. This is just another reminder that it’s important to think about what information you put out on the Web; it seems there’s always someone out there looking to use social networks for less-than-friendly reasons.

App Developers Driving Facebook Page Fans Through Fan Box Interstitials

2009-10-06T15:56:00.002-04:00

App Developers Driving Facebook Page Fans Through Fan Box Interstitials: "

While developers and Facebook Platform ad networks are double-checking their ad inventory this week after several large apps were suspended this weekend, some developers are beginning to explore alternative forms of advertising.

One interesting tactic we’ve seen more of lately is the use of Facebook’s Fan Box widget to drive fans to Facebook Pages before showing users the results of a quiz or friends-stats calculation. For example, check out this interstitial page from popular application Friend Facts:

As you can see, there’s nothing incentivized about the promotion; rather, the developer of the application is simply promoting certain Facebook Pages while “Friend Facts are being computed.”

With over 3.3 million monthly active users, Friend Facts is likely able to drive a reasonable number of fans to Facebook Pages. Currently, it’s sending traffic to a combination of what appear to be active business Pages (like CityMommy) and generic Pages (like Gadget Purse).

We’ll keep tabs on new forms of advertising we see popping up inside the Platform.

BusinessWeek articles on Google

2009-10-05T23:34:00.001-04:00

BusinessWeek articles on Google: "

A few weeks ago we had a visitor at the Googleplex: Rob Hof, the Silicon Valley bureau chief at BusinessWeek. Rob talked to a bunch of Googlers and sat in on one of our weekly quality-leads meetings. The resulting story is out now. The first part of the story covers some of the challenges facing Google, but the second part gets into more detail than we normally get into.

What’s even more interesting is that BusinessWeek put up transcripts of some of the interviews. You can read interviews with:

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO
Udi Manber, vice-president of engineering and head of the search quality group
Amit Singhal, head of Google’s core ranking team in the search quality group
Scott Huffman, head of the group that evaluates quality in the search quality group
me (Matt Cutts). I’m the head of the webspam team in the search quality group

Org-chart-wise, it looks like this:

Eric Schmidt would be at the top of the cloud, Udi would be the “Search Quality” box, I’d be in the webspam box, and Amit and Scott lead teams within the “Other groups” part.

The two interviews I liked the most were Amit’s and Scott’s. Amit sums up Google’s philosophy toward real-time, he discusses our pragmatic (yet algorithmic) approach to search, and our attitude toward our users:

Q: I think the criticism is: Where’s the money in those [non-search/ads parts of Google]?

A: The right way to look at it is not the money. Is there value to the users? If you bring value to the users, I think we will succeed in the long run. Some things make more money than others, but as long as we keep bringing value to the world, we will be successful.

I liked Scott’s interview because he goes into more detail of how we evaluate search quality than I’ve seen in the past. Evaluating search quality is really hard to get right. I also liked this quote:

But the other thing we always do is we go in and look in more detail at what are some of the individual positive and negative things that we’re getting out of this. Are the positive things really that positive, will they really make a difference to our users? And maybe more important, for the negative things, how important are they, can we live with them?

At the entrance to Google’s main cafe, there’s three doors. Two are normal doors that you pull to open, and they always work. The other door is a spiffy automatic door that slides open for you–except that the automatic door seems to be broken about 5-10% of the time. When the automatic door works, it’s very cool and you’d definitely prefer to use it. But when the door is broken, you’re left standing in front of a glass door and you feel like a dork as you wave your hands, move around, and generally try to get the “automatic” door to open for you. I’ve noticed that many people stopped using the sometimes-broken automatic door and instead always go straight to the reliable doors.

Search can be kind of like that door in a lot of ways. Spiffy features are great, but if they’re wrong or don’t trigger in some reasonable way that your mind can predict, the failure is worse somehow. The same holds true with the organic search results: a catastrophic search failure can stick in your mind much more than the 200 searches that worked well. Search quality evaluation is tricky because you need to take that factor plus hundreds more into account. It’s taken years for Google to really evaluate our quality well, and we still continue to learn important new things.

If you really want to understand more about how Google thinks, I highly recommend Amit’s and Scott’s interviews. They’re a great reminder to me that we have a very deep bench of smart, well-spoken people in the search quality group and in Google in general. I would love to see more Googlers talking about their work.

And finally, on the subject of Googlers talking about their work, a whole bunch of Googlers will be at the Search Marketing Expo East in New York this week. Joachim Kupke will talk about duplicate content, Ari Bezman will talk about maps, Jack Menzel will talk about what’s next in search and universal search, Jeremy Hylton will talk about real-time search, Maile Ohye will talk about best practices for search, Matthew Liu will talk about YouTube, and Frederick Vallaeys will answer questions about AdWords.

Also, don’t miss Bruce Johnson and Kathrin Probst from Google. They’ll be on the “CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO” panel. If you’re at SMX East, I think you’ll enjoy that panel.

Post Tweets Directly from Facebook with Social Twitter

2009-10-01T13:26:00.001-04:00

Post Tweets Directly from Facebook with Social Twitter: "

Social Revitalizer is the latest company to offer a tool to bring together Facebook and Twitter — Social Twitter, a Facebook application that lets users of both social networks to post Tweets directly from their Facebook page.

Using Social Twitter to update your Twitter feed from your Facebook page is pretty straightforward. You need to add the app, then give it your Twitter handle and password. In the app, there’s a 140-character counter and tabs to post or clear your entry. You can also create a profile box on your wall or Boxes tab which shows your Twitter avatar, name and latest Tweet on your home page.

Social Twitter offers users a way to selectively post their Facebook status updates to their Twitter feeds, sort of like Facebook’s new in-house app for posting from pages to Twitter. Facebook, however, doesn’t currently let you selectively post status updates from your personal profile to Twitter (something MySpace has notably recently turned on). Most of Twitter-Facebook applications already available, including Twitter’s own Facebook app, third-party apps like TweetFace, Selective Twitter Status and desktop app Tweetdeck, are built around Twitter, then let you selectively post tweets into Facebook.

Social Twitter is also a little different in that it also allows users to create a Twitter tab on their Facebook pages where they can access their Twitter account and track all of their own Tweets.

Social Revitalizer offers a range of other Facebook applications and services for individuals and businesses, and it seems that it has done a good job of addressing some of the concerns that arose with similar programs. The convenience of posting directly to Twitter while seeing your feed from Facebook is a nice touch, but it could be even better if there was the ability to view the feed of those your following, or at least those that are also using Facebook or the service. This is still a rather new application, so it will be interesting to see how it develops as more people beginning using and commenting on the app.

Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go

2009-09-29T22:43:00.001-04:00

Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go: "

Dropbox, the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud.

One of Dropbox’s core features is sharing your files and folders stored in the cloud with anyone else who has a Dropbox account, and the iPhone is no exception. Users can easily share their Dropbox files and folders from their iPhone to any other Dropbox user by putting in their email address, just like on the web. The app allows users to upload photos for 3G users, and videos if you have an iPhone 3GS.

What’s really cool about Dropbox’s iPhone app is that you can even stream music and movies from your Dropbox straight to your iPhone, without any noticeable delay. Dropbox’s app is also heavily integrated into Apple’s camera API with straight photo and video uploading available too.

Just a few days ago, Dropbox reached 2 million users. Dropbox was a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos Joins Benchmark As Entrepreneur In Residence

2009-09-29T22:37:00.001-04:00

Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos Joins Benchmark As Entrepreneur In Residence: "

Mårten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).

Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.

Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.

In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Financial Startups Demo Their Dashboards At Finovate

2009-09-29T22:37:00.000-04:00

Financial Startups Demo Their Dashboards At Finovate: "

The following guest post is written by Larry Chiang, a co-founder of Duck9 who also regularly blogs for BusinessWeek. Today he is reporting from the Finovate startup conference.

At the FinovateStartup conference in New York City today, it is clear that financial startups are pushing forward regardless of funding woes or a lackluster economy

Companies here at Finovate center around financial innovations. They track personal finance and are aggressively plodding forward because consumer adoption of the internet is rising. These companies did not just present ideas, they brought along established industry stalwarts to their demos. What’s more, many of these start-ups are already white labeling their product and integrating into established company sites (T-Mobile ads, Yahoo, Bank of America). The user interfaces are better than average, which is perhaps influenced by Finovate’s previous winner Mint.

Best in Show went to Kasasa, an Austin, Texas-based financial website that uses real-world rewards and charity donations to get people to open free deposit accounts. They dragged a community banker up to the stage who gave a testimonial about Kasasa’a ability to generate new saving accounts. bank account selector. Canopy has tools to better understand and manage healthcare cost, including Health Savings Accounts. Their oh-so-chic iPhone App matches up medical services to your personal HSA.

A typical company presenting was SmartyPig, which adds a social component to saving. It crowd-shares personal saving goals for a vacation or a set of golf clubs. FinanceWorks demonstrated online banking data aggregated into TurboTax. Outright takes and scrapes sales data for one-person businesses (such as eBay sellers) and helps the entrepreneur alleviate the burden of quarterly tax pre-payments. Home-Account seeks to be a Kayak for loan mortgage shopping. It plugs into Homes.com, Movoto.com and Bills.com and ‘B’- and “C”-grade paper companies like Freedom Financial Network.

Most of the sites demoed today offer features such as interest payment tracking, loan shopping, expense account summaries and more everyday, core consumer finance applications. Many of the demos featured summaries of expenses, and visually extrapolated spending behaviors to identify trends. For example, Credit.com boils down 20+ pages of credit reports into one graph (with a trend line).

At the heart of the functionality for consumer finance are apps that summarize “money in” / ‘money out’. In the same way that dashboards revolutionized the ability of C-suite officers to forecast a company’s revenues and expenses, the average consumer now is able to get dozens of data points that paint a picture of their personal budgets.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Microsoft Courier Gets Demonstrated More Fully, Limitations Suggested

2009-09-29T22:35:00.001-04:00

Microsoft Courier Gets Demonstrated More Fully, Limitations Suggested: "The trickle of news about Microsoft's Courier device continues, and this time there's a bit more of a realistic walkthrough. The device is being shown to be much more of a next-generation notepad than all-purpose tablet, and that's probably for the best; Microsoft overreaching with a device like this could result in a real crash and burn. I suppose the best way to picture the Courier is just as a web-connected organizer — you know, one of those leather-bound ones that business people used to have, and which the Courier seems clearly designed after.

Of course, with an internet connection and full-color touchscreen, much more is enabled and the device becomes much more complicated. Microsoft's (and Pioneer's) task has been to pare that down to a product, and it really looks like they've done it right. Still all renders, though.

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

MySpace Co-Founder And CTO Aber Whitcomb Leaves, To Be Replaced By Alex Maghen

2009-09-29T22:33:00.000-04:00

MySpace Co-Founder And CTO Aber Whitcomb Leaves, To Be Replaced By Alex Maghen: "

MySpace has just announced that CTO and co-founder Aber Whitcomb will be leaving the company, to be replaced by MySpace Music’s current CTO Alex Maghen. The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise — we speculated that Whitcomb would be leaving as part of the core executive shakeup that swept through MySpace last April (if anything it’s surprising that Whitcomb stayed on this long). At this point the last remaining member of MySpace’s old guard is Tom Anderson, who remains onboard in a limited capacity.

Maghen will take on the core responsibilities for running MySpace’s platform and will report to COO Mike Jones. Before joining MySpace, Maghen has previously served as CTO of MTV Networks and CTO of Yahoo Entertainment.

Other recent MySpace hires include former AOL and Tsavo exec Mike Macadaan as VP Product and former Facebook Director Katie Geminder as SVP of User Experience and Design. But it’s still seeing a trickle of current executives leaving — earlier this month SVP of Business Development Jason Oberfest left to join social and mobile gaming company ngmoco.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors

2009-09-29T22:31:00.000-04:00

Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors: "

Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The later two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More

2009-09-28T12:42:00.001-04:00

Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More: "

When Facebook announced that it had reached 300 million monthly active users last week, it also updated granular statistics about what its users are doing on the site. Here’s a closer look at how these numbers have changed versus the last set the company released in July. Most striking is the increase in overall shared items, the number of photo and video uploads, and the rapid rise in mobile adoption.

As a baseline comparison, we’re looking at these numbers versus Facebook says its overall traffic is. On July 15th, when the last set came out, it said it had 250 million users. So the company’s overall monthly active user base has grown 20 percent. All of the numbers that it updated last week show at least as much growth as Facebook’s overall traffic. In other words, these stats are not growing purely because the total number of Facebook users is growing — instead, it appears that Facebook users actually are sharing more as time goes on.

Status updates: 40 million users are updating their statuses at least once each day, a 25 percent increase from the 30 million who did as of July. [Update: This isn't quite right, as the terminology has changed since July. Now, it says 'More than 40 million status updates each day' -- which does not necessarily mean that there are 40 million users updating their statuses once a day.]

Pages: 10 million users became fans of a page each day, up 20 percent from the 8 million who did in July.

Videos: 14 million videos are now being uploaded each month, up from 40 percent from 10 million.

Photos: 2 billion photos are now being uploaded each month, double the 1 billion before.

Shared content: 2 billion pieces of content, whether links, posts, photos or anything else, are now shared each week — doubling shared items as of July.

Mobile: Earlier this month, Facebook said that 65 million people accessed the site through a mobile device. In July, only 30 million people did — that’s a whopping 117 percent increase.

Facebook’s overall goal is to get more people sharing more information, in part so it can learn more about them, and then target ads to them more accurately. The numbers suggest that this plan is working, no doubt aided by ongoing improvements to features like status updates and video uploading. These sharing increases — not just overall traffic growth — could be contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth.

Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook

2009-09-28T12:41:00.002-04:00

Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook: "

Web publishers have no great way to keep track of how many times articles gets shared on Facebook, as the company keeps that information private. So, if you’re trying to figure out how frequently your content is being shared on Facebook, the best way to approximate is simply to watch your analytics for how many visitors to any given content come from Facebook.com.

Awe.sm has devised a button-style widget called fbshare.me that lets readers share an article on Facebook, and then tracks clicks through that link. The service shows you the total number of times your article has been shared through the button, as well as the number of times those shared links were clicked on. Note that this number includes all shares of your article through Awe.sm, including from services like Sociable and AddToAny.

It’s not quite the same as the Retweet button for articles on Twitter offered by companies like Tweetmeme and Backtype, as those show you the total number of retweets across all of Twitter. But it could shed some light on the world of Facebook sharing.

The button was built as a weekend project on top of the company’s “Aggregate Data” API, which shows you anonymized, aggregated data for a given URL shared through the service. Awe.sm is more generally a URL shortening service with an analytics service layered on top, so this is another way for the company to get traffic to measure. Every time somebody shares content through Awe.sm, a unique link is generated. This link is encoded with metadata about the shared item, including where the link is being shared to — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Among other details, the button comes in either large or small sizes, and also lets you include parameters for Google Analytics.

Diditz Makes It Easy To Post Facebook Photos To The Web

2009-09-28T12:41:00.001-04:00

Diditz Makes It Easy To Post Facebook Photos To The Web: "

There are already a number of applications that allow sharing of photos and videos from a Facebook album — including the company’s own widgets. But a new application called Diditz lets you post photos to the web in ways that make them especially accessible.

When you connect to your Facebook page through Diditz, the application automatically picks up your albums and allows you to create pages for them one at a time. You can select which photos from the albums to include on the shared page, add a brief description and searchable key words, then assign your album one of Diditz’s existing categories.

You have the option of sharing the page with only Facebook friends or opening up the page to the public. It’s then accessible from a link that the site provides — and of course you can post the new page to your Facebook news feed. If you choose to allow unlimited access to your page, anyone can find it and view your albums and videos from the Diditz home page. Facebook users that view your pics can even leave comments or post links to your photos in their own news feeds.

The application isn’t fancy, but that’s what makes it appealing. It’s especially useful to businesses trying to reach a web-wide audience. For example, if your album is public, it can be spidered by search engines and so could show up in search results. For those organizations with Facebook pages, there is an option for creating albums intended for pages.

And, for individuals, it’s a great way of sharing select photos and videos with someone that may not have a Facebook account and access to those albums otherwise.

DORI, Twilight Lead Boom in Facebook Pages Top 20 List This Week

2009-09-28T12:34:00.000-04:00

DORI, Twilight Lead Boom in Facebook Pages Top 20 List This Week: "

It got harder to make our PageData Top 20 leaderboard for this past week versus the week before. Overall, the top 20 pages this past week gained a total of 3.45 million fans, versus 1.89 million from September 13th to the 19th. At the top were two exceptionally big gainers, the page for Pixar’s DORI fish character from the movie Finding Nemo, and the page for teen pop vampire show Twilight.

DORI gained 741,000 fans to reach 1.75 million, while Twilight gained 432,000 to reach 3.73 million. Both appeared to have grown because Facebook manually folded unofficial pages for the brands into these official pages, something the company has been doing a lot lately. Of the top 20, at least six pages in total appear to have made the list through adding fans from unofficial pages.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	DORI	1,754,984	+741,401	+73.15
2.	Twilight	3,728,327	+432,229	+13.11
3.	Stride Gum	348,619	+300,356	+622.33
4.	Dancing With The Stars	394,498	+249,569	+172.20
5.	Amy Winehouse	785,461	+230,253	+41.47
6.	Starbucks	4,056,459	+209,175	+5.44
7.	Saw	1,032,315	+169,181	+19.60
8.	Mafia Wars	4,378,787	+135,550	+3.19
9.	Grey’s Anatomy	1,999,225	+111,164	+5.89
10.	Cadbury Wispa	778,624	+108,730	+16.23
11.	David Guetta	1,241,501	+99,139	+8.68
12.	Taylor Swift	2,288,335	+88,546	+4.03
13.	House	2,284,275	+85,034	+3.87
14.	Fame	126,301	+75,851	+150.35
15.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,178,621	+72,527	+2.33
16.	Hulu	122,784	+70,822	+136.30
17.	The Bible	609,191	+70,260	+13.04
18.	Facebook	5,222,654	+70,156	+1.36
19.	Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts	873,141	+68,873	+8.56
20.	Glee	336,773	+61,737	+22.45

Also in the top 20 this week were Taylor Swift, whose page has been growing in popularity since the Kanye West incident a few weeks ago, Cadbury Wispa, which we took a look at recently, and popular TV shows Grey’s Anatomy and House.

Google Books hearing officially delayed

2009-09-25T01:07:00.003-04:00

Google Books hearing officially delayed: "

The judge overseeing Google Books settlement has agreed to the plaintiffs' request for a delay of the final hearing scheduled to approve the controversial settlement, which is being reworked by the parties.

Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had been scheduled to oversee a October 7 hearing about whether to approve a 2008 settlement between Google and several groups representing authors and publishers. However, the settlement, which gives Google sweeping rights to digitize out-of-print but copyright protected books, has drawn staunch opposition from many corners of the literary world as well as the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a result, the settlement is in the process of being reworked, and Judge Chin agreed to give the parties more time to rework the settlement following a request from the plaintiffs filed earlier this week. 'Under all the circumstances, it makes no sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement, as it does not appear that the current settlement will be the operative one,' Chin wrote in a letter sent to both parties.

Instead, the parties will hold a status conference on the 7th to figure out what to do next. Chin noted that this case has been in the works for over four years, when groups representing authors and publishers sued Google in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Twitter phishing scam spreads via direct messages

2009-09-24T14:24:00.001-04:00

Twitter phishing scam spreads via direct messages: "

A new phishing scam is spreading through Twitter via direct messages, according to several reports.

Itamar Kestenbaum writes on his JewNews.net blog that he received a direct message on his Twitter account from someone he didn't know that said 'rofl this you on here?' followed by a link to what appeared to be a video-related Twitter page.

The page looks like a legitimate Twitter log-in page but nabs your credentials if you type in your password, he warns.

Meanwhile, a posting on the Mashable blog said the site had received multiple reports of the new phishing scam and that someone there had even received one of the phishing-related direct messages themselves.

No word on this yet on Twitter's official blog or from a Twitter spokesperson. We'll keep you posted as we hear more.

In the meantime, if you clicked on the phishing link and typed in your credentials, you should change your password immediately.

Update at 5:30 p.m. PDT: Twitter acknowledged the phishing scam in a tweet on Wednesday that said 'A bit o'phishing going on--if you get a weird direct message, don't click on it and certainly don't give your login creds!'

JewNews.net captured this screenshot of the phishing-related direct message Twitter users are receiving and the fake log in page the link directs to.

(Credit: JewNews.net)

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

Another $100 million for Twitter?

2009-09-24T14:17:00.001-04:00

Another $100 million for Twitter?: "

Twitter's long-anticipated business plan had better be close on the horizon, because according to the Wall Street Journal, the site has some new investors on board: Mutual fund T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, and a handful of others have reportedly pumped $100 million into the microblogging phenomenon.

TechCrunch reported last week that Twitter was putting together a round of funding at around a $1 billion valuation. But that report suggested that the company would do so by raising about $50 million--half of what it actually has, per the WSJ, in a deal expected to close Thursday.

Twitter still doesn't make significant revenue. But its founders have said that paid corporate accounts, in the form of a sort of 'analytics dashboard,' are imminent. Advertising isn't out of the question either, despite what some of the company's executives have said in the past.

The company's initial round of Series B funding last year valued it at about $80 million, but soon added to the round in a deal that upped the valuation well into the hundreds of millions.

Originally posted at The Social

Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue

2009-09-24T01:43:00.001-04:00

Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue: "

Comscore's monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a regular alternative to Google. I am also a fan of the recently unveiled visual search interface - I think it augurs some serious new - and useful - approaches to sifting through massive amounts of related data.

From the Thomas Weisel's analyst coverage, sent to me in mail:

Google maintains dominance within 'core search' but Bing Nudges Up m/m at Yahoo's and Google's Expense: Core search excludes searches conducted on video, local and map portions of the companies' websites. Google's U.S. query share of core search queries was down 11bps m/m to 64.6% in August but increased nearly 1.3 percentage points from August 2008. Yahoo's share was flat m/m at 19.3% in August and decreased 39bps y/y. Microsoft's share increased 35bps m/m to 9.3% in August and up 89bps y/y. Ask.com's share were was flat m/m at 3.9% in August but decreased 45bps y/y. AOL's share decreased 14bps m/m to 3.0% in August and decreased 133bps y/y.

Our take: Google continues to dominate audience market rankings in the U.S. while Microsoft has shown some signs of stabilization and a modest uptick with the launch of Bing in June. Yahoo, while having shown signs of stability over the past 12-18 months, has recently started to lose market share again, declining from 21.0% in January to 19.3% in August. Taken together, Yahoo and Microsoft represent 29% of the core search market in the U.S., flat with the previous month. Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, was launched at the beginning of June alongside an $80-100mn advertising campaign. This is the third month of data reflecting Bing's impact. While the data indicates a very modest near-term bounce, we will be watching closely to see if any query pickup is sustainable.

Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC

2009-09-24T01:41:00.001-04:00

Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC: "

Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok's self service CPC platform, which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company's recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it:

I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on Facebook. Many of them are also purchasing ads on Google (GOOG) and other online venues. The overwhelming sentiment? Facebook ads are actually more effective and do a better job of getting them in front of their target audiences.

The piece is worth reading and really contemplating. How many of you use Facebook ads? Do they work better than AdWords?

The Facebook Marketing Bible – October 2009 Edition is Now Available

2009-09-23T14:44:00.001-04:00

The Facebook Marketing Bible – October 2009 Edition is Now Available: "

Purchase this report

The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition

Buy PDF: $49 USD

OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – October 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, and Italian. (A special edition with additional content designed for agencies and big brands is also available.)

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains four detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, Tools for Application Developers, and Tools for Webmasters. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through October 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 250 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The October 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

The latest updates on Facebook Pages, including new status tagging and Twitter integration. We’ve broken down all the new elements piece by piece and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before – including details on why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, key SEO strategies every Facebook Page owner should know, and the best tools to manage your Facebook Page. See the table of contents below for more details.
The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including several powerful new targeting features and the new “free sample” direct response ad unit. With Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences better than ever before. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
The latest details on Facebook’s new “Open Stream” API and what it means for marketers, publishers, and developers, including how Facebook Lite fits in. With the new Open Stream API – which just opened up to everyone last week- Facebook has released the power of the Facebook stream to live anywhere developers can put it – including publisher websites, desktop applications, and mobile phones. Find out exactly what you can do with the new Open Stream, and what it means for the future of the Facebook Platform and Facebook Pages.
The latest details on Facebook’s new developer Gift Shop program and “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, including the new Connect for Mobile. With Facebook Connect (now available in dozens of languages) and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With enhanced Facebook targeting tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
Plus, more updates on Facebook’s “Live Stream” widget for live events on your website or Facebook Page, recent rule changes for Facebook Platform ad networks, and more.

Purchase this report

The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition

Buy PDF: $49 USD

OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 with 12 months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Purchase this report

The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition

Buy PDF: $49 USD

OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

Compete: “Facebook” Was Top Search Term in July

2009-09-23T14:43:00.001-04:00

Compete: “Facebook” Was Top Search Term in July: "

Facebook was buy far the most-searched term in July, according to a fresh look by Compete at the data today. Among the fastest-growing terms, it was searched for 69.5 million times. Number two was Craigslist, in distant second, with 32.9 million queries.

The number of searches for a company often correlates with its overall popularity. Facebook got much more popular this year, growing 495 percent from 11.7 million in July of the previous year. Microblogging psuedo-rival Twitter also saw notable growth, going from only 300,000 queries in July of 2008 to 4.68 million this July, an increase of 1,461 percent.

As a reference point, Google Trends shows searches for Facebook continuing a halting climb through this month. Twitter, is staying relatively flat, although it continues to get relatively more press coverage, according to Trends. Note: It’s not clear if the drop-off in press coverage that both sites are apparently seeing now is an actual drop-off, or just an incomplete projection of the most recent data.