Marketing Pilgrim

Facebook is a hot property, in case you haven’t noticed. Rumors of an IPO have run rampant for three years, but still there’s no news on that front. Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to clamp down on secondary sales of its privately-held stock—especially by employees, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Last week, Facebook announced a new employee stock policy:

The policy says employees who sell their shares could face disciplinary action or be fired, one of these people said. The new rule also leaves room for the company to open a trading window during which employees would be allowed to sell shares in the future.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said the company implemented the “insider trading policy to better comply with insider trading laws and to protect the interests of the company and its employees and shareholders.”

Google is moving forward with all things Buzz even as they try to finally put the privacy issues to rest. Today in the Google Mobile blog it is reported that Buzz is now integrated into your mobile Gmail inbox just like it is on your desktop. You even get the little Buzz icon! Here’s a picture.

Google’s version

With the latest iteration of Gmail for mobile, we’ve worked to integrate buzz with your mobile inbox. Now, you’ll see buzz in your inbox on your phone just like you do in the desktop version of Gmail, complete with the little Google Buzz icon. When you open a buzz post from your inbox, you can perform all the standard functions, such as liking the post or commenting, just as you can from the desktop Gmail inbox.

As Mashable predicted, Google Buzz issued a “privacy reset” to all users yesterday. As Mashable mentioned, Google Buzz has worked hard to make its privacy settings more legal user-friendly—but many of their changes were implemented after early adopters opted in. Present users didn’t have to go through the extended sign up process that safeguarded users’ privacy and preferences.

But now Google is changing that, for that exact reason:

But many of you started using Google Buzz before we made these changes, and we want to help you ensure that Buzz is set up the way you want. Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us, so if you started using Google Buzz before we changed the start-up experience, you’ll see the following confirmation page the next time you click into the Buzz tab:

From what I remember of former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott–it’s been 10 years since I left England–he was a bulldog of a politician, who always liked to pick a fight.

It appears he’s still up to his old tricks and inadvertently learned a new one as well: click fraud!

In what he may have considered to be a innocuous tweet, Prescott suggests Labour Party supporters click on Google AdWords ads paid for by the rival Conservative Party.

The link actually refers to this AdWords ad:

You could argue that all is fair in love and politics–after all, the Conservative Party is pretty brazen to buy the ad in the first place–but click fraud?

Yelp has been under some fire recently because of its review system and charges of strong-arm sales tactics. These are not the kind of headlines that any company wants to make. As a result, a post in the Yelp blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman outlines some changes that have been made by yelp to address some of the controversy.

What was most interesting in the post perhaps was, though, the last paragraph

Most consumers probably won’t notice the product changes announced here, but we hope this new ability to “look under the hood” will help everyone understand the lengths we’ve taken to ensure Yelp is the most trusted resource on the internet for connecting people with great local businesses.

Does anyone really care about Digg anymore?

It seems like I’ve asked that question before and now it appears that Digg’s original founder is asking himself that same question. I’m guessing he didn’t like the answer, because CEO Jay Adelson is out the door and Kevin Rose will once again assume the reigns of the social bookmarking site.

If you go by Adelson’s internal email…

Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Dig…The entrepreneurial calling is strong…

…you get the picture that he’s just ready to move on to something new. Whether you buy that or not will depend on whether you believe Digg is still a fresh and exciting company or mature and boring. Personally, I think it has the potential to be both at this point, so I’m not inclined to believe Adelson’s motives.