Some of TurboTax’s Google AdSense ads are actually displaying the most recent Tweets that have been registered on the TurboTax Twitter account, and the ad clicks through to the account rather than their flagship website. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

TurboTax is doing this in hopes that users will add TurboTax to their Twitter account and build up a “conversational vehicle,” as Intuit marketing director Seth Greenberg puts it. “We’re measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we’re a resource? We’re not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions,” said Greenberg in an interview with Abbey Klaassen of AdAge.

Intuit is targeting the ads toward other social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo.

Skittles had an experiment where they streamed their Twitter feed on the homepage of the company, but quickly abandoned it after goons posted nasty things on the feed. I’m not sure what filters Google has for the ads, but Intuit certainly would not want to display ads featuring nastiness.

It will be interesting to see how this develops over time. Having a Twitter account so users can see what a brand is having for lunch doesn’t too much good, but leveraging user generated content to provide real grassroots marketing is something of big value. We’ll see what kind of success Intuit has.

However, with Twitter’s 140 character limit and the urge for less text on Facebook status postings, the 23 character TinyURL is a vitrual monstrosity compared to other up-and-coming services, such as Bit.ly, which registers at 19 characters, and the tiniest possible 17 character Is.gd (prounounced “Is Good”) ,Tr.im, and Ow.ly.

Personally, when it comes to Twitter, what is the point of going with anything other than the shortest possible services? One possible reason is that TinyURL is fairly universally known, so people know what they are clicking.

But there are a host of features available for the smaller ones that make them the easy choice of a casual user. Twhirl users may like is.gd because it is built into the services. Tr.im gives users who find a good URL a toolbar shortcut that will shorten the URL and give users the chance to Tweet it then and there. Ow.ly has HootSuite, a Twitter toolbox that lets you manage multiple accounts. All have 301 redirects while Tr.im and Ow.ly offer tools for tracking clicks of your customized URLs.

Right know I’m going with Tr.im because it’s the shortest and has a toolbar shortcut that allows me to Tweet straightaway. But to each his own. There are many other different services not mentioned here.

Turns out this project is full steam ahead, and the Facebook crew is none too happy about it. In fact, Facebook sent letters asking former employees not to cooperate or comment on anybody that may be doing research for the film.

The film is to be based on an upcoming book by Bringing Down the House author Ben Mezrich. Some of the leaked pages include stories of Zuckerberg and his friends cavorting with Playboy models and eating koala on Sun CEO Scott McNeely’s yacht, though McNeely says he’s never owned one.

Who cares if it’s true? There’s nothing wrong with a little artistic embellishment. Besides, I’ll watch anything that has Aaron Sorkin’s name on it. I even liked “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

Though the move is partly explained by a switch from many have made from Internet Explorer 7 to IE8, and when combining all of the versions of IE together, they still lead Mozilla by about 10%. Still, Firefox is climbing very steadily up the ladder and Microsoft’s browser hegemony may be in trouble.

The milestone may be largely symbolic for now, but with Mozilla already holding onto a dominant position on one continent (Antarctica), who’s to say the whole world isn’t next?

Firefox has also been making inroads elsewhere, including the United States. However, they still face stiff resistance here from not only Microsoft, but Safari and Chrome, whose users may be more like to use Firefox if they didn’t already use one of the two.

So her dad, a web developer had an idea: lets go with Internet marketing.

Apparently, Asheville’s business community is very well connected on Twitter, Facebook, and Craigslist. All were utilized, along with mass text messaging, to get people to buy cookies. They even made a YouTube video.

However, the Girls Scouts of the U.S.A. specifically forbids selling cookies on the Internet. The Freeborns did have a site that included an order form.

Wild didn’t actually collect money on a credit card online. Instead, people would fill out the form and she would come to their door and collect the cookies along with the cash. In essence, the Internet presence was only a promotional tool.

It is understandable why the Girl Scouts would have such a rule. The point of selling cookies isn’t the bottom line, but getting out there, knocking on doors, and accosting people in grocery stores–the kind of interpersonal business skills that will benefit the girls going forward. Selling huge numbers of Samoans on a PPC campaign from the comfort of home isn’t exactly the point.

But so long as the girls are getting out of the house to deliver the cookies, using different marketing methods is a good way to get the girls involved with social media in a positive way.

Story via Robbie Brown of the New York Times

In 2002, Yahoo started charging $299 a year to appear in the directory. However, lately, many are reporting that Yahoo is not charging anything to renew in the directory and yet sites are remaining in it.

My guess is that somebody is behind, or there’s a problem, because $299 is nothing to sneeze and it’s doubtful Yahoo really gains anything from this. What is the point? They haven’t announced anything, and it’s basically free money that they rake in without much work.

Yahoo may be letting some quality sites remain free for the sake of having good results. Some site owners are reporting that Yahoo is charging them for renewal. So perhaps Yahoo isn’t behind and really is trying to do something helpful for its directory.

But as Twitter’s rise become more and more regarded by the mainstream, there is an element of echo going on, where brands and companies are more and more using Twitter for no purpose really other than because they’ve heard Twitter is big.

There was a recent example of this done by Skittles. They turned over their homepage to Twitter Search results page. This did not go well.

First of all, the page was littered with obscenities and racial slurs. And most of the content that wasn’t out of line was simply about how Skittles was using Twitter on its homepage. Brands are finding that the most talk about thing when they utilize Twitter is that they are utilizing Twitter.

There are genuine ways in which brands can use Twitter. If they make it useful, customers will follow the brand. If coupon codes and sales are tweeted, then people will see some value in following a company’s account.

But if a company is simply telling people what they had for lunch and how nice the weather is, nobody is really going to care. There is not a lot of use for social media unless there is some kind of plan behind it that is actually going to bring in converting customers.

I think that Twitter is here to stay and it will grow and create a useful niche, but I also think there is likely to be a backlash after companies have been told for so long how great Twitter is, only to find it virtually useless in practice.

Y-Combinator estimates that with the $2 million raised, it will be able to increase the number of startups it seeds from 40 to 60 per year. Typically, Y-Comb puts in $5,000 plus an added $5,000 for each founder in exchange for between 2% and 10% in equity, with the median being 6%. This is how Reddit got its start, along with Disqus and Dropbox.

This is the first time Y-Combinator has raised money beyond what its four founders have put in.

If you want to apply for some of the cash, it’s good to work fast: they did push back the application deadline for this Summer’s round, but its right around the corner on March 25. If you’re accepted, get ready to move out to the Bay Area between June and August.

The great thing about Y-Combinator is that they aren’t just going to throw money at you and hope for the best. Every Tuesday, accepted startups have a dinner with the founders and an expert is asked to speak to the startups on a subject helpful to them.

After ten weeks, the startups are asked to present to a group of other investors. Y-Combinator doesn’t care if you take any money from them, as they already have a contract for a percentage of your equity.

Good to see some additional money out there for startups.

Upon opening the site, I was shocked to learn there are about a dozen cannabis clubs within a mile of my home. Personally, I don’t have a weed card, but if I did, I’d be able to find clubs and dispensaries and rate my experience there.

Wow, Los Angeles is absolutely loaded with these places! For the novice user lacking in good word-of-mouth, this site can undoubtedly be helpful at locating the most trustworthy dispensaries with the highest quality marijuana.

With California perhaps on a path to legalization and the Obama administration claiming they will not raid dispensaries, weed culture is coming out of the shadows and out into the open. It will be interesting to see how Weedmaps reaps the benefits of these changes.

Initially, Google recommended this because they could only index a maximum of about 100 kilobytes of a single page. With a boatload of outgoing links, they wouldn’t be able to handle the entire load.

But now Google can index well over 100K per page. So why not load ‘em up?

First of all, pages loaded with links are often pass on very little PageRank. If you are interested in passing on more PageRank to certain pages than others, then you should either nofollow them or get rid of them entirely. This is important in terms of internal linking and PR sculpting: your internal links you are counting on will get watered down with a lot of other noise.

Cutts goes on to state that not all pages with hundreds of links are necessarily spammy or necessarily bad for the user experience. Google will not automatically dock you if there are a ton of links, unless there’s a lot of hidden text or other trickery.

In fact, many of the top sites on the internet have as many as 1000 links on their homepages and don’t seem to be seeing any negative effect from Google. Huffington Post can run 700+ links on it’s homepage regularly and has a PageRank of 8.

Essentially, as Cutts says, as long as the “user experience” of a page isn’t compromised, Google is fine with a ton of links. So link away, people: just remember that with every link, PageRank is that much more watered down.