Earlier this month Facebook announced their new social ad program called Beacon that sends and receives your personal information to and from advertisers that will allow them to make money in several different ways. It allows them to use your endorsement (without you actually giving it) to your Facebook network. It also allows them to send you more targeted ads, increasing your worth to their advertisers. It’s different from other services that try to do the same thing because it doesn’t obfuscate your information. It actually sends your purchase history and clicking history to advertisers in the Beacon program.
An unfortunate example of how this can backfire surfaced when Sean Lane' purchase of his wife’s Christmas gift was broadcasted to over 700 people – including his wife.
Thankfully, organizations like MoveOn have pushed Facebook so hard, they got them to fall over and add an opt-in option giving the user more control over what gets published. So now your purchase information might not be sent to your friends and a bunch of ad-buyers, but they’re still collecting it! This doesn’t make me comfortable at all. It didn’t leave some other people comfortable either, so they built a plug-in to Firefox that blocks Beacon from sending/receiving.
I’m a Facebook fan and although I’ll continue my membership, I have to say this had made me reluctant to click through Facebook ads and will make more more aware of my privacy options when it comes to online purchases. I think they’ve crossed a line here and although they’re now back-pedaling, their willingness to sell me out by violating privacy in such a way is not at all encouraging.
In response to the Facebook Beacon fiasco, Facebook has heard the voice of the people and is righting its wrong. The company which, as part of its social advertising program, implemented web beacons on its site for tracking users and ultimately, sharing that information on third party sites, is modifying this practice. The impetus to change came after MoveOn.org who spearheaded the campaign against Facebook's use of web beacons and Facebook's own users rallied against it, claiming it was violation of their privacy and security. MoveOn.org setup an online petition and Facebook group in an effort to curb the company's questionable practice.
Facebook is not eliminating the beacons but it is now providing more controls to users over the stories that get published to their Mini- and News Feeds allowing users to proactively consent to the sharing of their information such as recent purchases with retailers. They have provided more info about the program and easier access links to that info and has stated that they will continue to refine the program initiative with their users in mind. This is not the first offense by Facebook, when about a year ago its News Feed came under attack resulting in the installation of stronger privacy controls.
Google Reader, the Google web-based RSS reader and aggregator, has added new features to its core functionality. Yesterday, Google announced that they have just released personalized recommendations and drag-and-drop support in Reader. Personalized recommendations will allow users to find and subscribe to more feeds and the drag-and-drop utility allows users to move and re-order feeds and folders around for a more customized experience. If you click on "Discover" in the left nav, you'll see a tab for "Recommendations" and note the drag-and-drop in action in the screenshot.
Google just announced that it will apply to bid for wireless spectrum in a January FCC auction. Google will bid on a chunk of the airwaves that can be used to provide mobile phone and Internet services. "The spectrum in question has powerful propagation properties. It will give customers the right to use any application on any mobile device", said Ram Shriram, Google's Founding Member and Board Member.
"We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are," Chairman and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a press release. "Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet."
Network Solutions has come up with a clever way to promote your web site to 30 million visitors a month for a $1.
The service enables you to place an ad inside your own whois record. Instead of just displaying contact information and your address you can now place whatever text you want inside the record. The service called “Enhanced Business Listing” allows website owners to place more descriptive text inside their whois record. When anyone looked up the whois record they would see your opening sales pitch before they even approach you about buying your domain.
Enhanced Business Listing is the complete opposite of their Whois Privacy service which is designed to protect your website information from anyone looking up your whois record.
What would be a more valuable service would be if they verified information about your company and put that in the whois. Such as, Registered Doctor in New York City. If the registrar could authenticate claims I can guarantee Search Engines would use those authenticated claims and boost the sites in their index based on those claims. Now that would be an enhanced whois service", said Jay Westerdal of DomainTool.
Here are some tips on power searching using Google.
1. Explicit Phrase: Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing. Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.
2. Exclude Words: Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising. To do this, simply use the “-“ sign in front of the word you want to exclude.
3. Site Specific Search: Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the “site:somesite.com” modifier.
4. Similar Words and Synonyms: Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms. To do this, use the “~” in front of the word.
5. Specific Document Types: If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”. For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.
6. This OR That: By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).
7. Phone Listing: Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.
Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).
8. Area Code Lookup: If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.
9. NumericRanges: This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip. Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers. You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods. This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.
10. Stock (Ticker Symbol): Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.
11. Calculator: The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.
Google Labs is experimenting with new features designed to improve users' search experience. The features will appear on search results pages and help users customize and personalize their search experience.
On search results pages, if you like a result, you can move it up on the page and mark it with an orange asterisk to clearly denote it for future reference when you re-search for that keyword. If there's a result you don't like, axe it and you won't need to see it again when you search for the same keyword in the future. If you want to recommend a better webpage that should appear for a keyword search, you can do that and in future searches for that keyowrd, your recommended site will appear at the top of the SERP page marked again with an orange asterisk. And, like any good tool, it not only saves your changes for future searches of the same keyword but it also allows you to undo your changes by clicking on a link to view your results in their original ordering. More info.
First it was virtual worlds, then virtual shopping now it's virtual workspaces! Qwaq, a company that creates 3D collaborative environments for meetings just grew their piggy bank by $7M to grow the company. Similar to Second Life it uses avatars so that each person has a virtual self - but with the focus on an actual 'workspace' there is a focus on sharing and collaborating office apps including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and others. Their initial customer list which includes BP, Intel and HP, is impressive and it validates the growing interest in virtual 3D worlds.
Virtual Worlds and 3D animations is also a growing trend in marketing. Here are a few things that I'm aware of:
3D Product Demos Already companies like Cisco, Intel and even smaller companies like Mirapoint offer 3D product views. The virtual products are also starting to replace those that get shipped out for roadshows and tradeshows with the help of companies like Kaon Interactive which bring the interaction on a large touch screen so your products can be there without really being there.
3D Holographic Presentations Musion Systems takes that a step further with true Star Trek 'Beam me up, Scotty' type of functionality where you can have a 3D holographic image of a person appear next to you on a live stage - even if that person is thousands of miles away!
Virtual Websites Brookstone's 3D store is a good example of this for B2C situations. The Second Life sites like the one Microsoft has can also be considered a virtual website (or "island").
Tim Berners-Lee, the closest thing we have to an “inventor” of the web as we know it today, is calling for more integrated, broad studies of the internet rather than the mostly piecemeal academic work being done now.
He’s absolutely right of course. The internet is arguably the most profound change in human communication in history, and it’s just getting started. As social networking explodes into the dominant socializing mechanism for humans we are experiencing many new opportunities and many challenges, especially as the online environments create new relationships between people, generations, and cultures.
Universities would be well advised to heed this call from Berners-Lee and offer more “web centric” courses and degrees. More importantly academics should be spending a lot more time studying the complex, changing structure of the web. The technical aspects of the internet are fairly well studied in commercial circles. The sociological side is poorly and rarely studied in academia while the commercial sector is still struggling to understand the implications of the massive shift of human activity online.
eBay, the online marketplace bringing circa 248M buyers and sellers together, is embroiled in a legal battle with Tiffany & Co. which is claiming that eBay is a distribution network for the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.
This is a precedent setting case should Tiffany win which could open the floodgates for lawsuits against eBay from other retailers being squeezed by the online marketplace. But is it a reasonable expectation that eBay should be liable for the authenticity of each of the 102 million products sold at any point in time on their site. As eBay states, they "never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site" and they "go above and beyond what the law requires[...] to keep counterfeits off the site." Clearly, that's not working all that well. Some experts believe that if eBay really wanted to keep counterfeit off their site, they could.
Tiffany is arguing that eBay profits from these sales and as such is liable for copyright infringement. eBay's argument is that the burden of policing responsibility lies on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits of its products. The judge has cited legal precedents that have found that if a manufacturer or distributor continues to supply a product knowing it is engaging in trademark infringement, that manufacturer or distributor is "contributorily responsible" for any harm done as a result of the deceit. The jury's out on this one for now.
Fortune Magazine has come out with a list of the 25 most powerful people in business. At the top of the list is Apple's, Steve Jobs. Also in the top five are Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin of Google.
Other tech giants on the list include of course Bill Gates of Microsoft, John Chambers of Cisco, Mark Hurd of HP, and media mogul cum social networking giant by virtue of MySpace, Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp. Complete list.
Zoho, a provider of a suite of productivity web applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation tools announced that it has made its word processing app, Zoho Writer, available offline.
Akin to Google Apps and desktop based Microsoft Office, Zoho represents what can be deemed the next generation of Office 2.0 apps. Offline capability is enabled by Google Gears, an open source JavaScript browser extension. Writer users can now view and edit documents offline and synchronize their offline changes with the online versions of their docs and, as a result, eliminate costly downtime.
Microsoft Video showed a fairly significant market share gain in October, partly at Yahoo Video's expense. Alex at the Compete blog has an excellent graphic showing YouTube/Google with a commanding 54% market share. MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and MySpace Video all had about 8% of the market in October.
MSN was the big winner in October in terms of gains. YouTube/Google only rose about 1% while MSN was up 25% from September. This is a bit misleading since MSN's base number was so much lower, but it's a notable increase.
Brightcove's departure from this space is an indication that online video remains very competitive as well as posing a lot of difficulties monetizing the content.
The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:
1) internet access providers 2) internet search engines 3) web hosting 4) website design 5) internet retail commerce
"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom.
However, they NASDAQ did not provide a break down of the index composition. Many in internet industry have relied on Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to be a proxy of the internet industry. Why not! Google operates:
1) the largest search engine 2) the largest online advertising network 3) the largest online video site 4) the third largest social networking site 5) one of the largest payment flow services, email and mapping services
Soon Google will be a big player in: 6) mobile applications 7) productivity applications 8) online storage services (other than email)
Brightcove, the much touted internet TV company headed by Jeremy Allaire is shutting down. Users were informed via email that Brightcove.TV will no longer be accepting direct consumer uploads after December 17, 2007. The company had BIG dreams of becoming the next YouTube and competing with YouTube. The company had raised US$80 million.
Here are some important pointers for entrepreneurs, partners, and investors alike:
1) Web start-ups should embrace openness. Successful web companies disrupt and bring efficiency to a market. To do so you have to become immune to the rules and limitations of the old market being disrupted. Brightcove was busy trying to compete with YouTube while working with old timers like Viacom. Therein lies the problem. Viacoms' business model comprises of a) restricting broadcast b) litigation (they have a big legal department including the CEO). For this to work you have to impose rules and restrictions and then litigate those breaking the rules and restrictions. So how could Brightcove disrupt a market, when every move they made was violating a rule set by a partner they were working with eg. Viacom.
2) Web 2.0 is demonstrating that nimble, smart entrepreneurs succeed time after time. Brightcove raised US$80 million! Where did it go? They certainly have a full management team, that is probably drawing super fat salaries, yet they have no product. At least a product that the marketplace wants. Smart investors fund agile teams that are disrupting a market using little capital.
3) Understand the web ecosystem - there are lots of people who don't understand the web including investors like Mayfield and Redpoint. Jeremy Allaire (co-founder of Allaire/ Macromedia) is not the first so called top gun that investors poured money on due to prior success and ended up losing it all. Terry Semel is a classic example of someone that never understood the web. To succeed on the web you have to have a narrow focus. Take money only from people who understand the web. Bring people on that understand the space. Just because someone was successful in the something else does not mean they can help you prevail on the web.
The video for "OpenSocial—High Octane For Widgets & Web Apps" is now available. The session is moderated by Daya Baran, President, WebGuild and features Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs, Google; Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo; and Akash Garg, Co-Founder/CTO, Hi5 Networks. Check it out!
Mashable is reporting that Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax software, has acquired Homestead Technologies for about $170 million. Homestead offers website creation tools and other e-commerce and marketing products made for online use, the combination of Intuit and Homestead will present opportunities for Homestead’s technologies to be used for small businesses both internally and with direct interaction with customers.
The plan is to basically offer a suite of solutions for companies looking for an integrated option to extend their businesses into the online sector, reach out to customers and retain them as well. Intuit had already been making some moves towards offering more self-administrative tools for business owners with the launch of services like their involvement with the online service for Quicken.
The company also already has a partnership with Google, which should be another advantage for the web-based tools and Google’s ongoing initiative. With the combination of Intuit and Homestead, these web-based tools move even further into the realm of Salesforce, but could present another level of competition for services like Upspring that are using the social networking angle for the promotion of businesses online.
There’s much that marketers can be doing right now to ensure a smooth and successful holiday marketing campaign, and email is an easy channel to plan ahead for.
Top tips for polishing your holiday email marketing campaign include:
2. Prepare an auto-responder for those periods when you may be too busy to create new content..
3. Promote your gift cards, which are proving to be a very popular gift option this year.
4. Increase convenience by providing easy web-to-store deliveries or entice users in to their local store.
5. Ramp up relevancy – your customers will be inundated with emails over the next few weeks, so make sure yours are relevant, targeted and relate to any historical shopping data you may have on each customer.
6. Keep your delivery dates clear or consider a delivery countdown clock to ensure your customers won’t be disappointed or caught unawares.
7. Offer free shipping, most of the big online stores are offering free or heavily discounted shipping rates.
8. Concisely categorize your products so consumers can go straight to the items they are looking for, i.e. Gifts for Her, Gifts for Pets, Gifts for Teens.
9. Include a call to action in every email, whether it be to update their personal information, download a new brochure, view a special offer or enter a competition.
10. Last, but not least, check your email deliverability to ensure your messages aren’t being deleted before they even get to your customer’s inbox.
Yahoo! Small Business the service for powering shopping carts for small businesses is down and closed for business. The services is suffering from intermittent outages today as shoppers flock to e-commerce sites on company time. “Cyber Monday” is an important day for e-tailers, and such an outage is quite embarrassing for Yahoo.
ABC News and Facebook have joined forces to create an online political 'initiative' to provide the latest presidential campaign news along with discussion and forum capability.
ABC is looking to leverage the Facebook platform to extend informal political conversations already taking place on Facebook by adding the full range of ABC News political reporting. Reporters will post stories on Facebook on which users can comment and debate.
This is forward thinking of ABC to leverage a clearly lucrative platform. However, I wonder if the informal, organic, and fluid nature of Facbook discussions won't be impaired by the entrance of such a formal presence. Yet to be seen. This is another example of ABC tapping into the web.
Another Googler has moved on. This time is it Dominic Preuss. He is moving on to Meetup, an event listing and networking website. At Google he worked in local ads. However, at MeetUp he will be a BIG CHEESE, VP Marketplace. He’ll be helping the company to create a new stream of revenue by coordinating sponsors with Meetups, and earning revenue from sponsors as well. Hmmm... If you are Googler that is leaving or know of one leaving or about to leave let us know. See also: Google Adsense God Says Goodbye
Online retail spending was up on Thanksgiving Day 29 percent to $272 million and Black Friday 22 percent to $531 million. Per comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni "the Friday after Thanksgiving is known for heavy spending in retail stores, but it’s clear that consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet to make their holiday purchases. We would expect Cyber Monday sales be even stronger than Black Friday’s and to exceed $700 million."
And what are people buying: (detailed breakdown) - Video Games, Consoles & Accessories - Furniture, Appliances & Equipment - Consumer Electronics - Sport & Fitness - Apparel & Accessories
For the uninitiated, I will first explain what the social graph is and why it is so talked about today. Almost all of us are on some social network today. In that network, we are linked with people we know either because we were class mates or are colleagues or neighbors, etc. Now, try to imagine every person as a node in a graph and if two people are connected on a network, it means an edge or line is drawn between those two nodes in a social graph. One instance of it would be the following picture which illustrates a sample social graph.
As one can very well imagine, the whole world can be said to be a huge social graph. This graph has, for instance, an interesting property called six degrees of separation.
Now when a person has an account in a particular social network like Myspace or Facebook, they have an almost similar social graph in both of these sites. There are then many new social networks or services with social network features springing up all of which require or are based on our social graph. So presently, a user has to create a new profile and re-make all those connections that they already have in other networks to be a part of new network. For instance, if a person wants to join Friendfeed, they need to create new connections that they already have in MySpace. A solution for such a problem has been offered by saying that a user should be able to carry his social graph with him. That is, if each user has an open social graph that any service can access, then all the services that need social networking features would be very easy to implement. Thus, social graphs should be open and owned by the user rather than the social networking site as it is today where user data is not accessible by other services.
It is also understandable that Facebook or MySpace would not want to open up this information, as the social graph is the main reason that people come to these sites. Facebook is a platform which allows many applications to be developed using its social graph. Now if Facebook opens up, all these applications that need such information won't need to be on Facebook. Presently, a Friendfeed-like application in Facebook has more chances of success rather than Friendfeed's site, simply because Facebook owns the social network while Friendfeed doesn't. But if Facebook opens up, it loses this advantage.
There are presently attempts being made to solve this problem. Some of these are:
1) An open non-profit software for handling identity and the social graph that will manage user identity using OpenId. eg. manage the social graph on behalf of users therefore, enabling social applications to bloom. 2) Maybe, its OpenSocial which aims to create common standard APIs on which to build social applications. Note that it solves the above problem in a different way. While there may be many different social networks where users have social graphs, it creates a common, public API for accessing them and hence eases development of social applications. However, after its initial hype and release, response has been a bit underwhelming as I noted in this article. 3) Another attempt is Plaxo Pulse. In their words, it is an online address book which syncs with many other address books like Gmail and Yahoo that I own. You can also read a possible implementation of building an Open Social Graph.
An Open Social Graph that is owned by the user and not any company is needed as it will solve the many problems presently faced by users. Once it comes up, we can expect the bolstering of countless services that depend on the social graph of a user.
Earlier this month Facebook announced their new social ad program called Beacon that sends and receives your personal information to and from advertisers that will allow them to make money in several different ways. It allows them to use your endorsement (without you actually giving it) to your Facebook network. It also allows them to send you more targeted ads, increasing your worth to their advertisers. It’s different from other services that try to do the same thing because it doesn’t obfuscate your information. It actually sends your purchase history and clicking history to advertisers in the Beacon program.
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Google will bid on a chunk of the airwaves that can be used to provide mobile phone and Internet services. "The spectrum in question has powerful propagation properties. It will give customers the right to use any application on any mobile device", said 
"We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are," Chairman and Chief Executive 
Google Labs is experimenting with new features designed to improve users' search experience. The features will appear on search results pages and help users customize and personalize their search experience.
Fortune Magazine has come out with a list of the 25 most powerful people in business. At the top of the list is Apple's, Steve Jobs. Also in the top five are Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin of Google. 
Zoho, a provider of a suite of productivity web applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation tools announced that it has made its word processing app, Zoho Writer, available offline.
Mashable is reporting that 
