It was all happening yesterday at the web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. After Bing announced that it had reached a deal with twitter to integrate real time tweets into Bing, Marissa Mayer (Google VP of Search Products and User Experience) announced that they too had done the same thing. See an extract from Marissa’s post on Google’s Blog about Google and Twitter
 “we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”
But it didn’t stop there Marissa Mayer went on to announce a new product launching soon, ‘Social Search’. By adding your social networks and Google profile, you will be able to see search results from people within your social networks. Read more about Google Social Search in this post from Search Engine Land.
Twitter have announced a new lists feature which is soon to be released to the public. This will allow users to group theyre friends into lists which they can then seperate out in their Twitter Homepage. Lists made by users are also made public by default, this could be a great way for companies to group their employees into one Twitter page. See below for a quote from the Twitter Blog:
“My name is Nick Kallen (@nk) and I’m the project lead on Lists, a new feature we’re testing with a small subset of users. The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.
Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.
We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps…. “
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and coder of Facebook has been interviewed by Fast Company Blog. In the interview he speaks about the value of viral loops. See below for a small quote from the interview:
“Penenberg: How did you get into coding? What was your experience with it from a young age?
Zuckerberg: Well I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
Penenberg: Did you take things apart and put them back?
Zuckerberg: I did that more with software than with hardware. You hear these stories about people who take apart their radio and put it back. Or just learn a lot from taking it apart. But I wasn’t as into that stuff as I was just into how computer programs work..
Penenberg: Did you teach yourself coding or what?
Zuckerberg: Yea, I mean I bought a book. Kinda messed around myself. Asked a lot of people questions….”
Read the rest of the interview here.
Tug have released a new whitepaper about Social Media Optimisation and Search Engine Optimisation, in this whitepaper we talk about how you can use Social Media to assist your SEO Campaign. See below for a small quote from the whitepaper:
“The majority of social media websites will allow you to post links to a website, be this your website or a related website; this could be done using profiles, videos, pictures, blogs and more. It’s also worth noting that once a user has interacted with you on a social media website; it’s highly likely that they will link to your website at a later point; this could be on a forum or just an email. This can all result in an increase in both exposure and traffic, which will result in a higher page rank and therefore an improved search engine ranking….”
To read the full whitepaper head over to the Whitepaper section on the Tug website and select “Social Media Optimisation (SMO) for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)“
Fast Company Blog report that Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology have carried out research on Twitter looking for keywords. In the research they found that 20% of Tweets made mention brands. See below for a quote from the Fast Company Blog:
“Twitter’s founder has indicated his lifecasting site won’t be getting into the advertising game anytime soon, but a survey has found something to indicate the contrary: 20% of Tweets mention a brand somewhere in their text.
The investigation was carried out by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology–they scanned through half a million tweets and looked for keywords. Perhaps amazingly, some 20% of Tweets were requests for product info or responses to these. The Tweets were flowing between users and friends, or particular companies, and the comments were both positive and negative.”
Read more here.
The long awaited Official Facebook app has finally reached the Android Market, although it is said to be official it looks to be made by a Google Developer on behalf of Facebook. As it stands the app is a bit basic, it allows users to update and view status’, check your friend’s news feed’s and check up to 125 of your friends’ phone numbers straight from the home screen. The app is completely free and available on the Android market right now. See below for a quote from the official app page on Facebook:
“Facebook for Androidâ„¢ makes it easy to stay connected and share information with friends. You can share status updates from your home screen, check out your news feed, look at your friends’ walls and user info. Share photos from your phone and can even look up up to 125 friends’ phone numbers from the home screen.”
Click here to view the apps Facebook page.
“A few weeks ago on the bit.ly blog, we commented on our appreciation for short, concise domain names. While the bit.ly domain is almost as short as it gets, for some people, every character counts. With that in mind, today we’re announcing j.mp, powered by the bit.ly platform.
j.mp has the same short URLs, metrics, history, user accounts (you’ll have to login again, but your bit.ly accounts will carry over), and customization you’ve come to enjoy on bit.ly, all on a short, memorable domain. In fact, any bit.ly URL also works as a j.mp URL….”
Great video showcasing Social Media, Courtesy of John Battelle.
Reuters report that the Social Networking giant, Facebook are to buy the new startup called Friendfeed. Friendfeed is similar to Twitter in that it works as a micro blogging platform. See below for a quote from Reuters:
“Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business.
FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.
The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 million in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.
Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang.”
Read the rest here.
