Marketing Pilgrim

AOL unveiled its social aggregator and publisher, Lifestream, as part of its instant messenger platform last Fall. Now they’re launching a stand-alone site at lifestream.aol.com. After it appears they’ve failed with Bebo, this social venture may have a chance of success, in the opinion of TechCrunch at least—they’re saying, “This is what Google Buzz should have been.”

Like most social aggregators, Lifestream gathers content from several social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube. Lifestream uses existing friend lists on those social networks, so users don’t have to recompile their friend lists. Users can also cancel updates from entire networks, users or users on networks (i.e. ignore your friend’s Twitter stream but keep following his Facebook). It’s also integrated with Facebook Connect, so there’s no separate login, and users can publish back to social networks from the platform.

Google has announced that a service that was previewed last December is now live for mobile devices. I’ll call it the “Blue Dot of Availability” which is stupid but it’s the best I can do. This function is just more evidence that Google is making mobile a top priority and it is giving retailers the ability to come along for the ride.

The Google Mobile blog tells us more

We’re happy to announce that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you. You’ll also see how far away the stores are from you — as long as you’ve enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

Reuters has sat somewhat silently in the background of all the hub bub surrounding whether Google should be able to index stories and make money off that content through advertising. That has been an AP fight for the most part. The strategy has helped Reuters, at least in my eyes, because by staying out of the fray they are implying that they are about journalism first. That’s my take and yours may differ which is fine.

What the news organization has not done until yesterday is put out an official social media policy but that’s now complete. Mashable reports

Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter.

Don’t go for second best baby

Put your blog to the test

You know, you know, you’ve got to

Make Blogger express how it feels

And maybe then you’ll know your blog is real!

I used to be a Blogger fan. However, just like my love of Madonna, I stopped liking Blogger when it started looking tired and old.

Well, Google has announced a new Blogger Template Designer, that might help breathe a little life into the service that arguable plays second-fiddle to WordPress.

With the new Blogger Template Designer you can–you guessed it–completely customize the look and feel of your blog–something my friend Vinny Lingham has being doing for years over at Yola.

Anyway, spam-scrapers bloggers can now enjoy these features:

Now here’s a great way to gather totally, completely unbiased information about a potential merger: ask the companies’ competitors. Okay, so the FTC isn’t completely crazy—of course other companies in the market would have a pretty good idea what the industry looks like and what a big merger might do. But still, we can only hope the FTC will remember to take their opinions with a grain of competitive salt.

AdMob, the popular mobile advertising company, and Google, the wanna-be-popular mobile advertising company, announced the deal in November. Google gave AdMob $750M in stock in the deal. The next month, consumer groups began lobbying against the deal. Now the FTC wants both advertisers and rivals to make sworn statements about the pending merger.

Google Reader Labs is adding a new way to view your feeds—Play. According to the blog announcement, this was conceived as a way to help introduce people to Google Reader—people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up” but are interested in using it. I hope both of you are happy .

But really this layout is primarily designed for people who want to view graphics or video—on autoplay, oh joy—and only a couple lines of any accompanying text. The white-on-black layout works well for showing off images, but not so well for that text.

Plus, to read a full article, you have to click on a “read more” link, which opens the full post within Google Reader Play—so still in the white-on-black layout that’s always so popular among people who read things online: