Marketing Pilgrim

Google Friend Connect can help convert any site into a Google-supported social network. In addition to allowing members of your site to send each other private messages, now Google is bringing its personalization home to your site with Friend Connect.

The shared interests that draw people to your site can make it easier for you as a site owner to appeal to them—but not just through your website. Google Friend Connect adds new capabilities for webmasters to communicate with their users in personalized ways, specifically with:

Send custom newsletters: The new “Newsletter” section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of “Interests,” you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.

It looks like Yahoo isn’t going to be left behind in the real time search race that was kicked off last month as bing and Google both announced deals with Twitter. As we saw last week, Yahoo is partnering with OneRiot for real time results. I’m glad that they are throwing their hat in the ring actually. Why? Well, I actually needed the reminder that Yahoo! is still a standalone search engine. While I have never used Yahoo search personally other than to gather up prospecting data I keep forgetting that the marriage of bing and Yahoo is still off on the horizon. Until then all we can do is combine their numbers with bing to see if there will be any impact at all felt by Google when the dust settles on the bingahoo deal-ahoo.

Let’s hope this post doesn’t mess too much with Google’s head–I don’t want Marketing Pilgrim marked as a Spanish language site.

Anyway, for all of our Spanish speaking readers, we have good news from Twitter!

A principios de mes invitamos a algunos voluntarios a traducir Twitter en más idiomas. Gracias a estos entusiastas voluntarios hispanoparlantes, Twitter está ahora oficialmente disponible en español. Puedes cambiar el idioma en la Configuración o visitar Twitter.com y cambiar la configuración del idioma en el la opción situada en la esquina inferior derecha.

Feliz tweeting!

You know that domain name that you don’t want anyone to know that you own? The one that you’re either testing out some SEO stuff that’s in the "gray hat" area? The one you don’t want your competitors to know that you own? The one you’ve been considering for sending spam emails?

Yeah, that one.

Well, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals just ruled that using any kind of domain privacy service could get you into legal trouble:

Earlier today, we posted news of the MSN.com redesign.

Actually, we posted it a little too early.

Despite my almost obsessive-compulsive checking of the post publication time and making sure my WordPress settings showed the correct time, the post published one hour before it should have.

Unfortunately, I was already tucked-up in bed by 11pm, so didn’t know about it until this morning.

It was a complete accident and I’m still scratching my head as to how the heck it happened. That really doesn’t matter much though, because the blame stops with me–regardless of the mitigating circumstances.

So, Microsoft, the MSN Team, Scott Trepanier (and team) my sincere apologies. Safe to say, I’m sending myself to embargo rehabilitation therapy and won’t be getting any desert the next time I go to the cheesecake factory!

We could spend all day every day telling you about the latest and greatest flame out in the traditional media world. Every day a newspaper or magazine or some other bastion of the “old world media order” goes away but that gets kind of old. I would even go so far as to say that we on the online side of the world have gotten a little cocky and maybe receive a little too much joy from the tumble of the old media outlets. As a result it is possible that we clump all of these properties together and make a broad (and likely incorrect) assumption that eventually there will be no room at all for the traditional delivery of newspapers and magazines because everyone and everything will be online only.