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Feb 5, 2009 - Spotting things you'll want to see today.


Google as a friend finder
You won't easily lose your best friends with Google Lattitude

On Wednesday Google announced a long anticipated location based service named Latitude. The service, which will allow users to track the physical location of their friends, was tested and reviewed by Katherine Boehret in the WSJ. Privacy was an obvious concern with Mark Evans leading the Orwellian charge. Latitude does, of course, provide a number of privacy settings as detailed in a video produced by Google. Users can blur their location by friend and they have the ability to override their actual location with one that they manually enter (a feature likely to be popular with cheating spouses and moonlighting employees).

The technology was universally acclaimed as exciting but several bloggers, including Alexander Van Elsas wondered if it was in search of a true need. Google's boast that you could see that a buddy is in town might seem helpful but, as Louis Gray pointed out it also assumes that your good friends somehow failed to let you know via Facebook status, Tweet, SMS, email or phone that they would be in the neighborhood and ready to party. Many bloggers (including ReadWriteWeb) insisted that the service would best be handled by an entity where you actually had friends, such as Facebook or MySpace as opposed to Google (or even the fledging mobile networks such as Loopt, Where, Pelago's Whrrl, or Brightkite). The monetization angle of mobile ads is huge. MediaPost took a look at what Google stands to gain from recommending a nearby McDonalds where you and your lucky friend could sit down for a happy meal.

 

Facebook at five
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reaches a milestone

Facebook turned five years old yesterday. The social network reached middle age in impressive style according to usage numbers supplied by Hitwise showing increased user engagement. The users themselves seem to be having a large number of birthdays, with 25-34 now being the largest age cohort. The blog Connect With Your Teens looked at the graying of Facebook and wondered if teens would soon want to hang out somewhere else.

Still, the future of the huge network is viewed brightly. The Social ascribed the ongoing vitality of the Palo Alto company to its northeast Harvard roots. Inside Facebook looked at how the site has changed over the years and Valley Wag spoiled the party just a bit by mentioning the problems of monetizing a growing cost base.

Will Facebook find new ways to make money from their huge base? They provided an ironic clue last Friday when they announced a plan to automatically send out birthday gifts to friends.

 


The most useful posts of the week

[Note: You can bookmark a permanent copy of these lists via Facebook Facebook , Digg Digg , Delicious Delicious, or LinkedIn LinkedIn]

Search Marketing

  • Editing Your AdWords PPC Campaign Settings For The Best Possible ROI (VKI)
  • Share of Online Searches by Engine, December 2008 (Marketing Charts)
  • Open redirect URLs: Is your site being abused? (Google Webmaster)
  • 9 Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page (Search Engine Journal)
  • A How-To Guide For Position Preference (Volusion)
  • Discovering keywords on the cheap (PPC Hero)
  • 5 More Ways to Improve CTR (Red Fly)
  • How To Write and Effectively Test Your PPC Ad Texts (PPC Hero)
  • 9 things you MUST know before you start any conversion rate optimization (Search Engine People)
  • 2 Cool FireFox Addons for PPC Managers (Search Engine Journal)
 


Please follow us on Twitter!
Special thanks to @starmackgroup and @anne_bain.

Social Media

  • The 20 Words and Phrases That Will Get You the Most ReTweets (Dan Zarella)
  • 5 Ways to Use Social Media to Find B2B Influencers (Hubspot)
  • Find ‘Em On Twitter: 15 Twitter Directories Compared (Mashable)
  • New Tools Add to Twitter's Networking Potential (Search Engine Guide)
  • 4 Simple Ways to Promote Your Site on Facebook (Search Engine Journal)
  • 3 Easy Tips For Improving The Potency Of Your StumbleUpon Account
  • Top Social Brands of 2008 (Behind The Buzz)
  • How to Launch Your Web Show on Facebook (NewTeeVee)
  • The Top 10 Social Networks for Generation-Y (Mashable)
  • 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know (AllFacebook)
  • 20+ Great Twitter Tools for Firefox (Mashable)
 

User Experience

  • 50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus (Smashing)
  • Recreating the button (stopdesign)
  • 40 Useful Photoshop Web Layout Tutorials (Six Revisions)
  • Determining Where You Lose Users - And What to do About it (KissMetrics)
  • 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography (Smashing)
  • Landing page testing for success (CDF Networks)
  • Want More B2B Conversions? Reduce Your Visitor’s Anxiety (Search Engine Land)
 

eMail

  • Answers to Common Questions about Whitelisting (Aweber)
  • Top 10 Most Common Spam Filter Triggers (Mail Chimp)
  • Could Email Previews Increase Retail Email Opt-In? (Get Elastic)
 

Analytics

  • Measuring Value of 'Upper Funnel' Keywords (Occam’s Razor)
  • 6 Tools Every Google Analytics User Should Have (Unofficial Google Analytics)
  • Great Firefox Extensions for Google Analytics (VKI Studios)
 

Radar Screen:

  • Sing or hum with speech search engine MELODIS (Alt Search Engines)
  • Kosmix introduces sponsored widgets (Alt Search Engines)
  • Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE (ReadWriteWeb)
  • Red Herring, Magnolia, and Pageflakes go dark (WebWare)
  • SEOs Lose Rankings Due to New 'Did You Mean' Feature (SEO Roundtable)
  • The Current Facebook Developer Dilemma (AllFacebook)
  • Exclusive Screenshots Of Bebo 2.0, Launching In February (Silicon Alley Insider)
  • What Gives Muxtape An Edge With Gen Y (Ypulse)
  • Google’s Ajax SERPs Could Break Keyword Web Tracking (Web Analytics)
  • SocialWhois: Whois Lookups for the Social Web (ReadWriteWeb)
 


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