Marketing Pilgrim

Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream. And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform.

Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr to analyze participating publishers’ followers, as well as how they receive ads.

The analytics offer information on user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad said the analytics, “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.”

As with all user-based social media advertising, there have been a number of ethical and practical questions floating around Ad.ly. Would a service like this increase the noise in the stream? Would it turn off or even drive away followers? Now users are better equipped to understand how their followers interact with their sponsored tweets.

Could this be the scariest tweet ever?

Twitter’s blog post explanation is somewhat vague and benign sounding:

Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working.

Boy, that’s an understatement! Twitter was hacked by a group claiming to be the "Iranian Cyber Army." TechCrunch has the screenshot and additional details:

Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

Admit it.

How many of you read that title and thought that your SEO career was about to come tumbling down? Yeah, I’m mean like that!

Anyway, while I have you hear, can you tell me what you think of this:

The "Guru" product is not showing for everyone, and apparently if you click the link it takes you…no where actually.

Any guesses what it may be? A return of Google Answers perhaps?

Back in July, Facebook was challenged by the Canadian government about some privacy concerns around third party apps and information shared that was taken about users. Many wondered how the social media giant would handle the situation. Would they thumb their nose at the information police? Would they stand up to the Canucks? Well, that was answered in August when they folded like a cheap card table and rewrote their policies to meet Canadian concerns.

Well, if that was a precedent then the folks who run the Facebook Legal team fan page (Is there really one of these? I just made that up) are about to get real busy. You see there are several privacy groups who are up in arms about the latest privacy policies handed down by Zuck and the boys.

You know how marketers will burn unused budget before the end of the year, so they don’t lose it next year? Apparently Google must have some end of the year M & A funds lying around to spend. The word is that they are ready to acquire the local business review site Yelp for a tidy sum. What a way to end the year.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has been busy coming up with the inside scoop:

Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million.

Once upon a time, MySpace was the most revolutionary thing on the social web (that most people knew about). These days, it’s passé. But several of its former executives are still actively pondering how they can revolutionize social interaction on the Internet—and they’re doing it through a new startup, Gravity.

Led by former MySpacer (then-COO) Amit Kapur, (then-SVP) Steve Pearman and (then-SVP) Jim Benedetto, the company is rethinking forums and groups, online social meetingplaces that haven’t evolved a whole lot since they began. Gravity is bringing forums and groups into the 21st century—and that’s just one of the things they’re working on.