Marketing Pilgrim

No matter how you slice it one trillion is a big number. It’s one of those milestone numbers (unless you are talking about the US debt which left little ol’ one trillion in the dust long ago) that makes people stand up and notice.

Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner shows that Facebook hit this number in June of this year. Since the chart is in rank order of unique visitors so Facebook sits atop that category comfortably as well.

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It may not be news to you by now that Steve Jobs, one of the most iconic figures in business, has resigned from his post as CEO of Apple. He is being replaced by COO Tim Cook and will continue as Chairman of the Board, director and an Apple employee of the company.

Here is the letter that Jobs sent to the Board of Directors

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

Google is hoping that this one gets caught up in the news cycle real fast and flushed down the proverbial news john. It’s not so much that the US Department of Justice is making Google pay $500 million for allowing advertising for online Canadian pharmacies to sell drugs illegally in the US. As with most things and Google, money is not the issue. They have plenty of that.

What does happen is that when people start to peel away the onion layers on this one the whole thing starts to stink real bad, real fast. Why? Well, it seems hard to believe that Google would be able to get away with what they did by just paying some cash to make it go away.

Google has turned another experiment into a full tie feature this time in their Maps environment and much to the chagrin of URL shortening services it cuts into their business much like Twitter’s t.co shortener announcement did recently.

Now if you have a link in Google Maps that you want to share or whatever you can shorten it within maps without having any add-ons to get you there. Here is a picture of the newly full-time option as incorporated in Google Maps (this comes from the Google LatLong blog).

What this really means is that Google is making sure that they get the attribution credit for traffic coming from maps through ‘standardizing’ this feature. It has worked well for Titter thus far so why not in this instance. Also, when it comes to mobile, less is more. The blog tells us

This week, Facebook is introducing a batch of tweaks that are all designed to “make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want.” Or, as the rest of us see it, make it easier to stop certain people from seeing posts, photos, tags and other content.

A lot of the change is all about clarifying the terminology so there’s no mistake. They’ve removed the word “everyone” as a sharing option and replaced it with “public” and even though they mean the same thing, “public” does feel more. . . well. . . public.

To make switching it up easier, Facebook is adding the functionality to a drop down alongside photos and status updates so you can assign items individually on the fly.

Twitter started out as fast way of telling everyone you’ve ever met that you just saw Johnny Depp eating a hot dog at the airport. But soon after we learned that anyone could say they saw anything which led to the creation of the phrase, “pics or it didn’t happen.”

From there, third party apps took over such as TwitPic and YFrog (leading me to wonder why frog?), giving you a way to upload the photo of Johnny that you snapped with your phone.

Soon, Twitter got tired of sharing the glory, and made it so you can upload photos directly to your account without the use of a third party but you still had to click and leave Twitter to see it.