Facebook has announced their new app center.

From the Facebook Developer blog

Today, we’re announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps. The App Center gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and creates opportunities for more types of apps to be successful.

In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included for the launch.

The App Center will apparently be driven by some strict quality control measures and high ratings for apps will be the way that apps get promoted. If you are not meeting the standard you won’t get the audience.

A few weeks ago I heard some SEO friends talking about how an SEO they know of had screwed over a bunch of his clients. After talking with them a bit more it also sounded like this same SEO didn’t know very much about SEO at all. It got me thinking about a strange phenomenon I have witnessed in the field of marketing.

If you are bad at marketing, there’s a high probability that you are also a scumbag. Think about all of the jerks you have met in marketing, now ask yourself, were they good marketers? Probably not. This odd reality seems to only be true in marketing though. For example you can be a really horrible plumber and also a really nice guy at the same time. You can be an amazing dentist, but a huge jerk as well.

The ad business has always been stressful and cutthroat. I know this because I grew up watching Darren Stevens on Bewitched burning the midnight oil desperately searching for that brilliant tagline. Then, on the verge of losing his job, his wacky witch wife would make a mistake which would end up leading to the best ad campaign ever created.

Oh, if only we were all married to witches or to Don Draper. He makes the ad business look cool.

In the real world, without magic and martinis, it’s become even harder to land that big client mostly because the rules have changed. AdAge says the agency review process has gotten “totally out of control.” They participated in a panel discussion with top agency search consultants and what they heard was a lot of frustration and few solutions.

Poor Yahoo. Just the other day we reported about their new small business marketing dashboard. It looked pretty neat and you got the sense that the company was trying to do something relevant that was pointed at a market segment in need. It seemed as if the company under the direction of their latest CEO, Scott Thompson, was heading in the right direction. Not only were new products being brought to market but the company was in the process of streamlining its offerings. All positive things.

That was until it was discovered that Thompson has a little discrepancy on his resume. Apparently the computer science degree he claims to hold from Stonehill College is, well, not real. According to All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher both Yahoo and Stonehill have confirmed that despite Thompson’s claims to having a degree in accounting and computer science only the first half is true.

In what should come as no surprise to anyone, today Google has announced more changes. This times they are focused on Google News but as with most changes and updates from Mountain View these days, Google+ is along for the ride.

The Google News blog reports

Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

One gets the sense that with all the turmoil that has beset Yahoo in the past several years there may still be hope for the company.

Unfortunately, there have been cuts in both product offerings and thousands of employees of the company and thus there has been a lot of pain. The company that once stood as an Internet icon even removed an iconic billboard from the San Francisco landscape last year.

So why have hope? Well, today the company announced a marketing dashboard for small business that looks pretty interesting. From the Yahoo corporate blog we get

Today, Yahoo! Small Business launched the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, a free tool that helps entrepreneurs discover new marketing opportunities to grow their businesses, while getting a comprehensive picture of their marketing results, online reputations, and website performance, all in one place.

Whether anyone would like to admit it completely or not, because of the need to perform in Google’s search results, the search engine, at least indirectly, dictates how websites should be built. Fun things like Flash were vilified because of the havoc it caused in being properly seen by Google. There are probably many more examples that you folks who build sites could come up with as well (feel free to share them in the comments if you feel the need to vent).

Today (maybe to clear up some concerns?), Google has issued The Google HTML and CSS Style Guide. From the post on the Webmaster Central blog we get