Marketing Pilgrim

Forrester analyst Charlene Li has an overview of the recent successful IPO of Japan’s largest social networking site, Mixi.

She crunches some numbers and tries to apply Mixi’s valuation formula to giants MySpace and Facebook.

A rough back-of-the-envelope would value MySpace’s 100 million users at US$1.86 billion and Facebook’s 7.5 million users would be worth $139.5 million. Granted, the I’m not taking into account the multiplicative network value of additional members, so this is likely undervaluing the value of MySpace’s and Facebook’s audiences.

$140 million valuation for Facebook? Someone should have given them that figure, before they turned down the rumored $1.4 billion buyout offer from Yahoo!

Usability diva, Kim Krause Berg, briefly mentions a new tool that reads the content on a web page – yes, it talks to you.

Obviously, the tool has benefits for those visually impaired, but Kim also points to another use – testing your copy to make sure it sounds right.

Unfortunately, my quick visit to the Textic Talk site was less than successful. The tool kepts restarting itself and was very jerky in its audio. It also sounded like it was placing the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble.

We suspected Google’s recent market share slide was nothing more than an anomoly. Now Bill Tancer confirms that Google regained its market lead and then some.

Google’s market share:

July = 60.23%
August = 59.99%
4 weeks ending Sept 9th = 60.29

Phew, now we can all sleep easy.

Forget Snakes on a Plane, there’s a bigger problem at Google’s Mountain View offices.

Judging by software engineer, Niniane Wang’s blog, it looks like snakes attacked the campus and brought down Google’s servers!

Someone snapped a photo of the suspected snake and signs point to one culprit…

You’ve got until September 22nd to take advantage of a 10% discount at our sponsor TextLinkBrokers.com.

Be sure to also request your free SEO report.

SEW reports…

…Yahoo has partnered with Acer, the fourth largest PC manufacturer to set the default search engine to Yahoo Search on those machines.

SEO Egghead has compiled 21 top SEO tips from Google engineer, Matt Cutts.