Marketing Pilgrim

Over the last couple years, Google has pushed more and more social features in its apps. They’ve converted our contact lists into friend lists, they’ve added notes to shared items, they’ve even moved the conversation that normally takes place in the comments onto Google Reader itself. And now Google Reader is getting even more social with its latest additions: following your friends and “liking” stories.

Google Reader has long had a feature to subscribe to your friends’ shared stories. Now you can subscribe to just about anyone’s shared stories. Search for someone by name or enter their email address to follow their shared stories. Searching by name integrates the Google profile:

So here we are a day after Twittergate broke and what is the result? Not much really. Everyone is talking about it in some way or another. Was it lax security at Twitter? Was it a security issue with Google Apps? Did TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington go too far? What are the ethical implications of obtaining documents illegally then using them to advance your own cause? Will the new show that Twitter develops for TV be called “Twitter Legal”? Why do hackers find it cool to mess with other people’s stuff and so much more.

Let’s sum it up:

Compete has already weighed in on traffic to Microsoft’s new Bing for its first month. Now comScore is joining the big Bing parade: the new search engine has seen some traffic increases over Microsoft’s last month.

But before we strike up the band, comScore notes that the traffic increases aren’t much. In May, Microsoft garnered 8% of total Internet searches. In June, Bing got 8.4%, an increase of 0.4 percentage points. While that represents 5% growth, it’s probably not the kind of growth Microsoft was hoping for.

Of course, it’s early on in the game—with Microsoft still hitting hard on the advertising front, they still stand to grow their share.

A year ago, Gmail added a “lab” to introduce optional and experimental features. If you were worried about the future of Gmail Labs when Gmail finally came out of beta last week, I think we don’t have to worry anymore.

This week, another app that lost its beta status premieres a new Labs feature—Google Calendar. Google Blogoscoped noticed the addition today.

The first Labs features are:

• Adding a background image
• Attaching a Google Documents document, spreadsheet or presentation (but you have to share the doc in Gdocs to give others access)
• World clock so you can see your friends’ local times
• Jump to date for faster navigation
• Countdown clock to your next meeting
• Your friends’ status—free or busy (depending on whether they’ve shared their calendars with you)

Facebook has been a little quiet as of late. Apparently if you aren’t a search engine moving in on the flagship product of your sworn enemy or you’re not the media darling with apparently little or no security in your fiefdom it’s just not news.

Well, it looks like Facebook has been keeping their heads down and their noses clean and doing something that they have deemed pretty important; finding ways to make money. The Inside Facebook blog tells of three new additions to the ad network offering that make it easier for advertisers to target folks within Facebook. These additions come on the heels of some other improvements that are almost flying under the radar but the numbers are starting to show some progress. Considering that these actions are around actually doing business it’s a breath of fresh air as compared to the speculation and drama that is in the Internet industry news.

The OS wars are running pretty hot and heavy these days. Whether it’s Microsoft trying to fend off the European Commission as to the rights to package their products as they see fit or it’s Microsoft responding to the early buzz around Google’s entry into the desktop OS space, it’s a busy time. Since Microsoft is still by far the dominant OS provider in the world with Windows you would expect that they are going to be at the center of most of these musings. Well, it appears that the rumblings were enough to awaken the Poppa Bear of Microsoft, Bill Gates, as he puts his 2 cents into the talk. He doesn’t appear to be too worried. cnet brings us the word