Marketing Pilgrim

When your announcement claims you’ve launched the "World’s Most Advanced Mobile Homepage," you’d better live up to the hype–or this Pilgrim’s going to cut you down.

Well, the verdict is in on the new Yahoo mobile homepage, and it’s actually pretty darn good.

The new mobile homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) is now compatible with more than 1,900 different mobile devices and has new functionality–built with iPhone, Android, and Pre users in mind.

Here’s what you’re getting:

• Dynamically updated content with pagination – without using additional screen real estate or refreshing, users are able to access a wealth of content. For example, the ‘Today’ module now surfaces ten of the leading stories from around the Web and gives users immediate access to 48 of the top news, business, sports and entertainment articles directly to consumers’ fingertips.

There has been much talk about the survival of the traditional media in the online era. Magazines have avoided much of the focus as it relates to the transition to their online presence. Why? It’s likely because magazines are not a daily publication that has its weaknesses exposed by the more “real time” acquisition of information that the social web and search engines (to an extent) can provide.

Recently though there has been fallout in the magazine industry, as the venerable Conde Nast dropped some major publications. Along those lines major papers in the UK have introduced their version of having to pay for content. The latest and probably most recognized name to join the ‘pay-wall’ fray is The Eonomist. The Guardian reports

We don’t need to go over just how valuable the data that Twitter gathers on a minute to minute basis can be to the world as a whole. We can sit and bemoan the fact that the search capability leaves something to be desired, however. Of course, when it comes to Twitter the discussion wouldn’t be complete unless you discussed how they plan to make money other than getting large VC dollars based on big valuations.

So Kara Swisher over at BoomTown reports that Twitter is talking with Microsoft and Google separately about how the two search giants can get their engines on a full feed of the Twitter fountain that is the real time reflection of what many people are doing and recommending.

Traditionally, PDF’s and search engines have not gotten along as well as most would like. While being indexed is not the problem it once was there have been difficulties in the rendering of those PDF’s from the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

Google today has moved closer to true harmony between the PDF and engine environment by introducing the Quick View link that is now applied to an increasing percentage of the PDF’s now indexed by Google. The official Google blog tells us

We’re always on the hunt for Google’s next big thing. This week’s report is from Google Operating System, who’s found an internal tool that might roll out to all users. Google Cloudboard is a server-side clipboard that makes cutting and pasting between Google Apps—specifically Gmail, documents from Google Documents and spreadsheets from Google Documents, and more—work even better.

GOS had linked to an extensive internal feedback form (which Google has now disabled, GOS has a screen shot of it). The form gives several examples of Cloudboard capabilities, starting with “if you copy a formatted cell range in Trix [Google Docs spreadsheet] (cell border, colors, etc.) and then paste into Writely [Google Docs document], it’s transformed into a comparably-styled HTML table.”

Other examples in the form included:

Whether they’re trying to keep us from going design-blind or they just get bored with their layout periodically, Facebook has regular redesigns. But the new features and redesigns aren’t always popular, and Facebook users seem highly resistant to change.

But apparently it’s time for a bunch of new “i h8 the new lay out” groups to crop up, because Facebook has confirmed to The Next Web that they’re testing a new layout for the top news/recent updates pages.

For side-by-side comparison purposes, here’s the old layout:

And the new:

The major differences include losing the publisher box, which Facebook was so excited about with this redesign. Instead an “Update Status” button appears in the upper right. This frees up more real estate in the center column for friends’ updates, photos, wall posts, etc.