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Twitter Truly Mirroring the Internet

posted on July 3, 2009

Twitter Bird GoofyWell, looks like Twitter has arrived for real. Companies are considering the service for their marketing and customer efforts. There still appears to be significant hype around every time someone at Twitter has gas. Twitter is looking to protect its trademark and is looking to trademark other sounds from nature like chirps and peeps. So what’s next? Well, since it is the Internet what would talking about Twitter be without now mentioning porn and spam?

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has said recently that the service will be a success when people stop talking about it and just accept it as a utility. With MediaPost talking about the proliferation of porn and spam that chatter isn’t likely to end anytime soon. That is, of course, unless Twitter does something about it.

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Facebook Rolling Out New Privacy Settings

posted on July 2, 2009

Last week, we saw that Facebook was taking status updates public for selected test users (a la Twitter). Those selected users were ones that had already set their profiles to a high level of sharing—everyone could see their profiles already.

Now Facebook will make it so that all users will have a very granular control over exactly what gets shared with whom.
facebook privacy 3
These settings can be applied on a message-by-message basis, but there will also be changes to the full privacy settings for every member. As paidContent points out this will eliminate the need to view at least six pages of privacy settings.

And now Facebook announces that they’ll be rolling out this change to the full site very shortly:
facebook privacy 1

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FeedBurner Adds Custom Email Subject Lines

posted on July 2, 2009

gooburner logoFeedBurner, an RSS management utility that was purchased by Google a few years ago, has long offered an RSS-to-email service. One of its major drawbacks, however, was that as an RSS publisher you could only set one subject line. So every email from your feed (generated and sent daily) had the same subject line.

The lowly likes of us regular bloggers complaining in the support forums didn’t have much of an effect. The only solution offered until now was logging in every day and manually changing the subject line to match your post—not fun.

But after Darren Rowse’s open letter to FeedBurner two weeks ago on ProBlogger, things are finally changing. Today, the Google AdSense for Feeds blogs announces that “Happiness is more subject in your subject line.” And it’s true!

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Web Advertisers Try to Avert the Government’s Eyes Somewhere Else

posted on July 2, 2009

GovernmentAn important element (read: selling point) of Internet marketing is the ability to know more about consumers and their behaviors. Everything can be tracked on the Internet, for the most part, and there is obvious value to marketers and their efforts. The flip side of this ability to track people is the privacy issue and lately the US government has been raising it’s regulatory eyebrows at the online world. In the past this may not have been such big news but with the current administration’s bend toward a ‘name it and claim it’ government style, web advertisers are looking to self police before they draw any more attention from the feds.

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Early Returns for US Search Traffic are In. Bing!

posted on July 2, 2009

bing-logo1What would be the best way for a research firm to get some notice in a market that has two or three dominant players that most turn to? Well, get the first numbers into the market place around how well Bing has performed for Microsoft. Reuters reports that StatCounter, a Dublin based research firm has done just that.

The company is based in Dublin and has published results that are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Drumroll please?

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

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Twitter Twademarking Tweets

posted on July 2, 2009

Twitter is attempting to gain some kind of control of the use of "Twitter" and "Tweet" in a way that reminds me of Google’s attempt back in 2006.

TechCrunch got its hand on an email that was sent out to one Twitter app developer:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

That prompted an official response from Twitter’s chief of damage control Biz Stone. The use of "Twitter" appears to be pretty much off limits, but his comments about using "Tweet" have me puzzled:

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Bing Announces Twitter Integration, But Don’t Get Too Excited

posted on July 2, 2009

All of us that have called for more “real-time” search results or better Twitter integration, should have done a better job of spelling out our needs.

Apparently Bing misread the memo.

In a move that appears to have more bark than bite, Bing has announced the integration of Twitter with its search results. Before you leap for joy, the announcement is a non-starter.

What we get is a few thousand Twitter profiles added to the Bing index. Search for “Andy Beal Twitter” or “@andybeal” and you’ll get a box at the top of your results that looks like this:

What you don’t get is Bing tapping into those tweets for its actual search results. Let’s take the text from the second tweet listed above and “Bing” it: