Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.

Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.

In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.

StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.

Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.

Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.

Google has stated that they are doing this because they wish to create a “beautiful, simple and intuitive experience” for their users.

In effect, the new policy will make it possible to share information provided by a user on one Google product across all other Google products and features. This includes Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, Google Plus and others.

A major stumbling block of this new policy is the fact that users will not have the option to disagree with the policy if they wish to continue using any of these Google services.

Consumer Objections

Users have voiced their discontent via comments and votes on the YouTube video introducing the new, unified privacy policy. The major bone of contention for users seems to be that information from any one Google service will now be accessible to a host of other services.

Regular consumers are not blind to the fact that Google makes its money from advertising. They also accept that in order to advertise on all of its services, Google does need to be able to pull information from one service and use it elsewhere. What they dislike is the idea that Google is mixing the concept of privacy in a closed system such as GMail with that on an open network such as Google+ or YouTube.

Official Investigations Triggered

Not surprisingly, the announcement has not gone down too well with certain groups. Gary Davis, the Data Protection Commissioner in Dublin, where Google’s European headquarters are based, has said that their office would be “further assessing the implications of the changes now that they are launched to users”. He also said that “Google has a responsibility to ensure that any such changes are made abundantly clear to users”.

Greg Jones from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office said, “Failure to inform users about changes may not only lead to a loss of trust in the company, but could also mean that they are failing to comply” with U.K. law.

Exceptions to this new policy will be Google Books, Google Chrome and Google Wallet. These sites will continue to retain their own privacy policy.This exception is due to legal reasons.

The new policy will come into effect from the 1st of March 2012.

The report, released by online marketing company, Efficient Frontier, states that during Q4 of 2011 search spend continued to increase in both the U.S. and U.K.

Increase in search spend in the UK by quarter. Source: Efficient Frontier

Retail spend in the U.S. grew by 18% year-on-year and 40% quarter-on-quarter, indicating that the spend increases substantially during the last quarter of the year. Retail growth in the UK was not as good, and this was reflected in the search spend too, which grew by just 10% year-on-year in the country.

Although Google accounted for 80% share of spend in Q4, Yahoo! and Bing clicks were found to be 14% more valuable and showed 9% higher return on investment than Google. The click-share of Google has, however, gone up by 2.5%.

Search CPCs dropped by 5% overall, mainly due to an increase in mobile advertising and better ad delivery.

Mobile ad spend now accounts for 7-8% of all ad spend compared to just 2% a year ago. Of this, tablets account for 50% of the share. Google drives 96% of mobile search ads while Yahoo! and Bing have just 4% share of the market.

In 2012, mobile search spend is expected to account for 16-22% of all paid clicks as users gradually shift from desktops to mobiles. For the same reason, search CPCs are also expected to fall by 4%.

Projected mobile search spend forecast by the end of 2012. Source: Efficient Frontier

Facebook accounted for 2.7% of biddable online spend in Q4, as marketers now spend a larger amount on social networks. Yahoo! and Bing are set to increase their ad inventory, while Facebook is expected to reach 5% of all online ad spend in 2012. Other social networks, such as Google+ and LinkedIn are also set to grow further and deliver more ad impressions.

Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes (20%) of the time spent online was for social networking in the month of October 2011. Further, this activity is indulged by 82% of the world’s online population.

Social networking has grown in popularity over the past few years, and has provided a new way for people to build more contacts, as well as making it easier for people to remain in touch with their existing friends and family who may be spread out across the globe.

The Rise of the Global Social Networking Audience
Source: comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide, March 2007 – October 2011

One of the major factors fueling the continued growth of social networks is the increased use of the Web through mobile phones, which help people to communicate even when they are on the go or in regions where they cannot access a wired connection.

Only five years ago, in March 2007, social networking was used by less than 500 million people, while email was the primary online activity, with 528.7 million users. By October 2011, the graph has changed drastically and social networking now accounts for 1,179.4 million users while email has only 916.8 million users. The social network graph continues to grow parallel to the growth of Internet usage.

Worldwide Regional Popularity

Asia-Pacific regional users constitute one-third of the world’s social networking population. However, Latin America accounts for the largest amount of time spent on social networks.

Percentage of Online Population Using Social Networking around the World
Source: comScore Media Metrix, October 2011

Another interesting finding of the report is that women are more social across the globe.

Facebook is of course the most popular social network, and has 55% penetration. Three-fourths of the time spent on social networks is on Facebook, and one in seven minutes spent online are on Facebook. Google+ is a fast growing social network, and it is the only network to have signed up 25 million new users in less than one month.

Inevitably, micro-blogging has also gained in popularity. Twitter is, of course, the most popular micro-blogging site – in October 2011, it was used by about 10% of Internet users worldwide.

Interestingly, these social networks are growing in popularity across all age groups. In fact, males and those above 55 years of age are the fastest growing group.

Revenue Lagging Growth

Social networks deliver the most online display ad impressions, but they do not generate the largest revenue. 25% of ads are displayed on social networks but they generate only 15% of the revenue.

U.K. Social Statististics

Snapshot of social networking in the United Kingdom
Source: comScore Media Metrix

A tweet sent out by Experian Hitwise says that Google has seen a growth in their membership last month, that has more than doubled the number of users they had in the previous month.

According to Hitwise, Google+ had more than 49 million visits in the U.S. itself in that month, which is a 55% increase in traffic compared to the month before.

Google+ share of visits to all categories. Source: Experian Hitwise

Analyst Paul Allen, who is the founder of Ancestry.com, has estimated that Google+ now has over 62 million users, and, of this, 25% of users have signed up in December itself.

While these figures are insignificant compared to the membership that Facebook has (over 800 million) the growth rate itself is significant. In fact, Facebook could not cross the 60 million mark until four years after it was launched.

According to Paul Allen, over 625,000 members are signing up every day. Part of this growth is definitely due to the fact that over 700,000 Android devices are being sold every day, and Google+ is integrated into many of these devices, making it easier for users to sign on.

The holiday season, TV commercials and celebrity endorsements may have further contributed to the growth.

Google has refused to confirm or deny the numbers.

It is being further estimated that at this rate, Google + will cross the 400 million mark by the end of this year.

According to this report, the list is similar to the one they had released last year. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of unique visitors to most of the top sites.

It is no surprise that search, social networking and video remain at the top of the reasons for mobile browsing with Google, Facebook and YouTube scoring the top three rankings respectively.

The world’s 10 most popular mobile websites are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vkontakte.ru
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com
10. twitter.com

The report has compared the findings between November 2011 and November 2010. Apart from seeing rapid growth in Asia, Opera Mini has also found a substantial increase in mobile Web usage in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia.

Over the last year or so tablet devices have been growing in popularity. A study conducted by Google found that 65% of users that have tablet devices use them for at least one hour a day. It was also found that these devices are used mostly for personal and fun purposes such as checking email, shopping, gaming and other such leisure activities.

91% of the time spent on tablet devices is for personal activities as opposed to desktops, which are used for work related activities and mobiles, which are carried everywhere and used mainly for local search and other related activities. As a result of this, the tablet devices are used mostly in the evening or night and are not usually carried everywhere.

In order to make the most of this growing popularity of tablet devices, Google also studied how users interact with ads on the tablets. The study showed that users expect the advertisements on tablets to be more interactive and interesting than ads shown on desktops and mobile phones.

Naturally, this is an opportunity Google won’t miss, as they are continuously trying to find new ways to woo big brands and win over more advertising money from traditional media via formats such as online video. The new ad formats introduce by Google are for search and display advertising on tablet devices and have a heavy emphasis on video and rich media.

Rich Media Designs for Mobile are basically rich media ad templates with in-built interactivity. This will make it easy for advertisers to create rich media ads for tablets by porting creative used on other display ad campaigns.

Google Media Ads for tablet search. Image courtesy of Google

On the search side, Google will take advantage of the interactive touch-screen of tablets test video ad placement directly onto the search results page. Google had tried similar video advertising on desktop search results pages in the past, but that experiment never took off from beta.

Media Ads, which will show on Google search pages on tablet devices, though, are more likely to succeed as tablet users are much more open to interactivity and the entertainment aspect of such a device and on the format will help advertisers to engage users in new ways as tablet devices continue to gain n popularity in the days to come.

Lopez narrowly beat another comeback queen, Mariah Carey, into second place and Take That into third to be named the “World’s Greatest Musical Comeback Act” in a study of online searches since 2004.

The first global ranking of the world’s “Greatest Musical Comeback Act” comes from analysing over one billion online searches via Google by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency.

The study also shows that, above all, the death of a musical star is by far the biggest driver of online music searches. Searches for Amy Winehouse after her death equalled those for Jennifer Lopez’s comeback and searches for Michael Jackson almost quadrupled those for Lopez.

So what constitutes a big comeback? According to Farhad Divecha, AccuraCast’s Managing Director, “It is when a previously well-known act registers a low starting search index which subsequently goes through the roof for a sustained period of time. We have been careful to include acts that have had true comebacks not just more or less successful periods in their careers. Using figures from Google we have been able to analyse rises and falls in popularity and produce a unique league table”.

The Jennifer Lopez comeback began in early 2011 when she released the single “On the Floor” which achieved worldwide success and gave Lopez her first top ten on the Billboard chart since 2003. Combined with her stint as a judge on TV hit “American Idol”, Jennifer’s comeback is still happening.

Mariah Carey’s singing career was believed to be over in 2002 after poor reviews for her last two albums. She came back with the critically acclaimed album, “The Emancipation of Mimi” and has rarely looked back since.

Take That had split up in 1996 and after almost ten years apart re-formed as a foursome to release, “Beautiful World”, which would sell over 3 million copies. Their musical comeback continued when Robbie Williams completed the original line-up and another album and a record breaking tour followed.

In the U.S, Lopez and Carey saw off comeback competition from Ricky Martin, New Kids On The Block and ex-Beach Boy now soloist Brian Wilson.

The U.K. top five after Take That featured Blur, The Spice Girls, Rage Against The Machine and Take That ‘leader’, Gary Barlow.

“The UK results feature more bands than the U.S”, adds Divecha, “They also show the importance of sustaining a comeback. The Spice Girls reunion was just that and Rage Against The Machine saw incredible interest around a Christmas record before immediately falling back to previous low levels.

“Gary Barlow is interesting. His comeback is via Take That but also due in part to his X Factor appearances. His score is increasing but unlikely to ever get close to the Take That total.

USA’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

UK’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

Google highlights three important aspects that currently characterise the Web scenario:

1. The number of online users are growing
2. The number of mobile phone subscribers will double in a few years
3. The amount of digital information exchanged worldwide is destined to see a huge growth too.

During the event, Google representatives spoke in detail about these 3 aspects, and how developing countries are reacting to changes.

The UK is believed to benefit from this growth. The Internet contributes to 7% of the UK’s GDP, with a growth of over 10% each year (this, of course pales in comparison to Chinese growth levels, which are massive!)

The Internet levels the playing field, representing a great benefit for SMEs, which can now effectively compete with big players.

Google+ In The Ad Ecosystem

Presenters at the even went to pains to point out that Google+ is not just a platform. It is a project. Their mission is to organise information and make it more accessible. Google+’s 40 million users help make this mission more personal.

Google+ is also aimed at engaging people with brands, through the set up of a Google+ profile. Once people add your business to their circle, you can also add them to any circle and segment your audience.

Intel directly asks which circle you belong to, so as to target the right campaign to the right consumers.

The 1+ button was confirmed to affect ranking. The extent of the effect remains unknown as Google employees continue to dodge direct questions about it.

AdWords Express

Made for businesses that are not yet ready for Adwords – 40% of small businesses do not have a website – AdWords Express is simple to set-up and easy to manage.

Google are keen to drive adoption of the new system. They even offered to reward a credit of ₤250 to all agencies that bring in five new clients to AdWords Express by the end of the year.

The benefits of AdWords Express are as follows:

• Targeted – specific to the area where the business operates
• Simple – no need to create /manage campaigns
• Measurable
• Eligibility – no need to have a website

Tips and tricks for Insights:

Let’s assume that faster is better – Google Instant saves a lot of time in the long term.

In Google Images you can drop images into the search box to give similar related results on search.

Google Insights for Search – You can find the most searched terms in a certain period in a specific location. Also you can analyse the evolution of a specific KW during a concrete period.

Ad Planner gives you insights about the audience that uses a specific website, so you can target your audience accurately.

Mobile On the Rise

The Smartphone and mobile markets are growing fast. Mobile is transforming the retail market. This is because user reviews have a huge impact on customer decisions and behaviour.

• It’s a good practice to set a mobile-only campaign, as it provides better click-through rates and easier tracking.
• Ads with phone numbers included get an average 6% to 8% higher CTR!
• Mobile is local – More than 1 in 3 searches in mobile are local.
• It is advisable that for mobile campaigns keywords should be shorter.
• Top spots matter more on mobiles than they do on desktops
• Another good practice is to set location extensions. One should also be mindful of the huge power of CTC and site links.
• The audience spends only 5% of their online time on Search. Display is growing a lot and will be growing even faster.

4 top tips for mobile advertising:

1. Prioritise re-marketing and keyword contextual advertising
2. Run both display and text format
3. Use exclusions to control efficiency
4. Frequency cap & ad scheduling

Tips and tricks for measurement:

The 3 Be’s

1. Be found
2. Be engaging
3. Be accountable

You definitely need to have goals to measure against.

Mobile sites / apps are a huge opportunity that most small businesses are losing.

1 second delay in page load causes a 7% loss of conversions, 11% fewer page views and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Improving Ad Campaign Performance

Page Speed Online – pagespeed.googlelabs.com – check there for audit & suggestions.

Real-time (Beta) – New on Analytics

Flow visualization – user path graph – New on Analytics

Tips and tricks for driving conversions:

• Enhanced CPC
• Conversions Optimizer
• Focus on optimising conversions
• Use automated rules

Knol, Google Wave, Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal (RE<C), Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline and Google Bookmarks Lists will be shut down permanently over the next three months.

The products didn’t quite take off as Google had hoped and are therefore being shut down, in Google’s own words, with the aim “to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience.”

A lot of the engineering resources at Google seem to be redirected towards making Plus a hit. A host of new features are seemingly added to the new social network each month. One of these new features is an advanced search option, allowing users to filter search results by author and to browse through the currently trending topics at that point in time.

Similar to Twitter, the trending topics on Google+ show users what are the most popular topics at the moment, and allow them to dive into conversations related tot hose topics.

Google+ search along with trending topics

Now, when a user carries out a search, the trending topics will be displayed in a column on the right side of the page. Users click on any of the trending topics to conduct a search for that topic, which again is very similar to the functionality in Twitter.

Users can also narrow down the search results by using the filters provided at the top of the page, to narrow the content by type – everything, Google+ posts, people and pages or Sparks – and the content source – everyone, circles or self. At present, these tools are available only after a search has been conducted. However, it has been reported by The Next Web that users are asking for the trends results to be added to the main page on Google+.

Another interesting feature that has been spotted recently is the integration of Google+ with Google Places. A number of local searches now show the listing accompanied by the profile image that has been pulled from Google+. When users click on this logo, they are taken to a Google search results page that lists the Google+ Page and provides the user the option to directly add that Page directly to their Circles.

Google+ profiles featured in Google Places search results

This is yet another service that the search giant has integrated with Google+. Even though the network has been criticized for its lack of activity, the developers seems to be determined to make it succeed by placing it in front of users of all other Google services till they eventually wear down and decide to use it!

Google will synchronise the music to a Google Music library in such a way that the playlist will remain the same on all devices, be it a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Each user will be able to store upto 20,000 songs for free, but they will have to be manually uploaded.

Music can also be purchased from a music store in the Android Market. Over 13 million tracks from the big music companies like Sony, EMI and Universal will be available to buy, in addition to tracks from several independent labels.

Google Music on an Android mobile

Individual artists who have the necessary permissions will also be able to upload their music and build their own artist page through the artist hub interface.

This service will obviously compete with Apple’s iTunes. The cost of each track on Google Music will be the same as that on iTunes, ranging between $0.69 and $1.29. However, the cloud computing service by Google will be free, whereas Apple charges $25 for it.

While Google may not generate a lot of revenue through this service, it will help them build customer loyalty to Android-based mobile phones. Once a user has purchased music from a particular service like Apple or Google, they are unlikely to switch to another device.

The service will provide some music for free everyday, and those tracks will be displayed in the music library. Amazon also offers free tracks daily, but the service is rather complicated.

Google Music has already been integrated into Google+ and that will make it more popular as it can now be shared with friends. Social aspects of Google Music could be the main driver of its success, as it could potentially out-shine popular services such as Spotify and Last.fm primarily due to its larger user base.

Reviews of the service are lukewarm. A lot of the criticism focuses on the fact that the service has been released 8 years later than iTunes. The service also requires users to upload each and every song they wish to store and can create problems when users upload old iTunes tracks that had DRM encryption.

The biggest plus points in favour of Google Music are the price – free! – and the true portability of the service – it can be played on any device, incuding iPhones and iPads.

Most industry experts, though, recognise the Google Music service for what it is – a suitable replacement for the iTunes eco-system for Android devices and a means to complete and tether the Android user experience.

Horowitz emphasized the use of Circles to easily segment audiences when communicating brand / product / corporate messages and the Hangout feature, which allows brands to host face-to-face video sessions with customers. Both of these are features that would appeal to large businesses.

The real power of Google+Pages, though, lies in their ability to influence search engine rankings for a brand or product name. This alone is reason enough for all business owners to want to ensure that they do have a presence on the otherwise placid network. This is also Google’s only ace in an otherwise extremely weak deck.

A number of bloggers have labelled the new feature a rush job or a Facebook / Twitter rip-off. What they overlook is the fact that unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ can integrate with a number of even more useful services, not least of which is Google Search and YouTube, to change the way brands can reach their target audience.

As with any major change to the search results pages, this update has been rolled out after extensive tests. Google has been running tests on this project for some time now, and has come to a final decision in this regard.

Ads at the bottom of the SERPs

The decision to include ads at the bottom of the search results pages has been based on the fact that they find the performance of ads at the bottom of the page to be better than the performance of ads that run alongside the search results.

This improved performance is probably due to the fact that users scan a search results page from the top downwards and not from side to side. Hence, when they reach the bottom of the page, they automatically see the ads displayed at the bottom. On the other hand, it is very likely that they might miss the ads that happen to be on the side of the results page, partly because they are not directly in the page scan path and partly due to acquired “banner blindness”.

Organic results at the bottom of the page have been known to typically have higher clickthrough rates than ads in the second-last position. These results will now more than likely get fewer clicks, with such traffic instead flowing to the ads at the bottom of the page.

When ads are displayed at the bottom of the page, it increases the potential advertising space, making it possible to place more ads on page one, rather than when the ads are placed only above and alongside the search results. This too could have a major bearing on the overall performance of ad campaigns, as many users may scan only the first page of results.

Reports from Asian technology blog, Penn Olson state that for the past 5 days, Gmail services are being affected on Android handsets. The Android Market has also been intermittently inaccessible during the same period.

While the Gmail website is working as normal in China, both the Gmail app for Android and the Android Market have completely stopped working in the country. The website Blocked In China confirms that the Android Market is inaccessible on both Android devices and via the wired Web.

Android Market shows as “Blocked” in China

Gmail was the battleground where Google’s exit from China was decided. It comes as no surprise, then, that the service should also be blocked on mobile phones. What is surprising is the fact that it took Chinese authorities so long to make this decision.

Google Plus, on the other hand, was blocked hardly a week after it was launched in China, and remains that way since.

If the sequence of events repeat themselves, Google might find itself exiting the Chinese Mobile market as well, which could be yet another major blow to the company’s East Asian operations.

The store is known as ‘Chromezone’ and is actually a mini-store within a popular electronics retail store. It is a 285 square foot outlet, based inside the PC World store on Tottenham Court Road in Central London.

Chromezone store in London. Image courtesy of T3

Quite surprisingly, the opening of the store was a rather quiet affair. In complete contrast to the hugely publicised opening of the first Apple store.

The store will sell Google’s Chromebook laptops and a few accessories, such as headphones. It will be operational for a short duration of time only; until just after Christmas.

Google plans to open more stores shortly. The next one is scheduled to open on the 7th of October in Essex. Other stores will also be opened worldwide in the run up to Christmas.

This is Google’s first attempt at opening a store. Arvind Desikan, head of consumer marketing at Google UK, said “We found anecdotally that when people tried the device and played with it, that made a huge difference to their understanding of what the Chromebook is all about. People will be able to go in and have a play with the devices. We want to see whether people understand what this device is all about and monitor their reaction when they try it out.”

While Google may never go down the route of Apple and open dedicated stores to sell hardware, this is definitely an interesting new direction for the company. Perhaps they’ve learnt a lesson or two from their previous failed attempts to sell the Nexus One online and have decided that old-fashioned retail might yet be the best way to sell new hardware.

All industry analysts knew that Facebook would announce something big  during the f8 conference held today in San Francisco. They also knew that many of these changes would be reacting to the growing popularity of Google Plus. What exactly these announcements have now been revealed.

In the last few days, Facebook already introduced some changes, such as the new subscribe button, revamped Friend Lists, a new News Feed format and a real-time news ticker. As usual, the new design has been met with resistance from a number of users.

However, these changes are minor in contrast to what has now been announced.

Most significant of all, is the change to the News Feed, which is now split into “Top Stories”, “Recent Stories” and a “Ticker”. Profiles are also evolving and turning into Timelines, or what Zuckerberg calls “the story of your life”.

An introduction to Timeline

Facebook Timeline with cover, stories and apps sections

When a user shares a post normally, it goes into their news feed. When that user adds activity on third party websites or apps through the Facebook Open Graph, it will go into Ticker, and into Timeline, but not into the news feed normally. The Open Graph and Ticker make a stream of everything users are experiencing and expressing through Facebook.

This is the first time the social network has enabled sharing “lightweight” activities, such as listening to a song, watching a movie, reading a book, or even cooking a meal.

Facebook news ticker expands stories when moused-over

Developers will be elated at the attention once again being given to apps, especially via the Ticker as well as in a dedicated section of the Timeline.

Google+ recently announced updates to improve their popularity. The new Facebook design and features are very clearly aimed at incorporating the better parts of Google+ and improving on them by adding a whole lot of embedded capabilities.

New features include larger images, embedded video, music streaming – this expectation arose after an employee of Facebook tweeted about it. He said, “The ‘Listen with your friend’ feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening. LIVE”. The post has since been deleted.

The search giant has been running trials of this app on Sprint phones and they are now ready to roll out the app to all Sprint Nexus S 4G phones with an over-the-air update.

So far, they have only tested the app with Citi, MasterCard, and First Data. However, now they are ready to add other partners including Visa, American Express and Discover, to this service. It is not yet known when these cards will become functional on Wallet, as technical details are being worked out.

Once users download the wallet app to their phone, they can use it to make payments through NFC technology instead of having to carry several credit cards.

This service is still in its infancy, as it works only on one Sprint phone, and is compatible with only a limited number of credit cards. Also, the number of terminals compatible with this technology is a very small percentage of the total number of terminals in use.

Google aims to be able to let users use this app for all credit cards, and is also working to make the feature compatible with several other handsets. They also hope to increase the number of terminals compatible with this technology in the near future.

While Google Wallet is compatible on the Sprint network, the other popular networks, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, are working with several credit card companies to create their own digital wallet too.

www.google.com/flights/

This new service has been launched in conjunction with ITA Software, which was acquired by Google in April 2011. It took Google nine months to finalise the deal with ITA, because of in-depth legal scrutiny of the deal as a result of objections from numerous other websites.

Flight Search by Google is a lot faster than similar services provided by any other website so far. The results appear almost instantaneously compared to the typical 5-10 second wait experienced by users on most other travel sites that scour a large database of partner deals.

Instant results on Google Flight Search

Users can browse costs to fly to different destinations without having to perform a dozen searches. Prices and travel times in this flight search facility can be viewed on a graph for easy comparison, and a slider allows users to filter down the search results by price and flight duration.

Flight search results filtered on a graph

Google believes that most flights are chosen based on cost as well as travel time. Thus, they said, “We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.”

This service is not based on any paid relationships so far. Since it is the airlines that decide how their flights are to be marketed, the booking links will point to the airline websites only.

As of now, this feature is available only for selected destinations within the U.S. There are plans to expand the service in the near future.

The study, incidentally, was conducted to show the importance of clean drinking water. While drinking water was ranked third, above Facebook, the results were not quite what one would expect.

Facebook was ranked fifth in the list. Clean and flushing toilets were ranked ninth!

Similarly, an Internet connection was ranked at number two, just after sunshine, which of course most Britishers are known to be quite starved of.

Ironically, another survey conducted earlier this year found that nearly 50% of men accessed the Internet on their mobile while in the toilet.

Technological advances and social networks have been given predominance over other requirements such as washing machines, showers, fresh fruit and vegetables, pain killers and even shoes. However, to give them more importance than food, clothing and the basic sanitary facility of flushing toilets, seems rather extreme.

The study polled 3,000 British residents, many of whom could possibly have been young adults, who tend to dramatise the importance of trivial things and have never had to live without the ‘comforts’ of clean toilets being available to them.

The top 10 items in the list were as follows.

1. Sunshine
2. Internet connection
3. Clean drinking water
4. Fridge
5. Facebook
6. NHS
7. Cooker
8. Email
9. Flushing toilet
10. Mobile phone / smartphone

In fact, 4 out of the 10 most important things the respondents said they couldn’t live without are completely unrelated to the sustenance of life. Even more ridiculous is the fact that 15 out of the 50 “essentials” were items such as eBay, iPods and Twitter, which didn’t even exist 20 years ago!

Are the British public really such a nation of airheads or was this just another survey with a poorly chosen sample showing “stats” that are far from reality?

Among the projects that will be affected by this decision are Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki and Subscribed Links.

Aardvark is a question and answer social search site. Notebook was used to clip and save URL, text, and images. Fast Flip was a tool to enable fast news browsing and sharing. Sidewiki was an early social search effort that allowed users to read and comment on any website. Subscribed Links allowed users to customise search results.

The common theme with all these services was that they were attempts at socialising search.

Now that Google has introduced a new social network in the form of Google Plus and it is actually turning out to be more successful than any of the previous attempts, they will shut down all of these social sites and focus on strengthening Google +1.

Additionally, Google’s shutting down or gradually discontinuing a number of other services, some of which were quite popular. These include Google Ddesktop and several APIs, plugins and gadgets it supports, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security and Image Labeler. Components and features from many of these services are already visible in newer Google offerings and will continue to be used in other Google services.

The changes were initiated by Larry Page to improve overall efficiency. Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research has reportedly said, “We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential, but by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.”

Obviously, Google must think they can get more out of Hulu than the other companies – they wouldn’t want to buy yet another video hosting site and then struggle to monetise it, would they?

It has been reported by the Financial Times that Amazon, Yahoo! and Dish Network have offered between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to Hulu in exchange for ownership of the free video site, its subscription service and the rights to exclusive content for at least two years.

The details of what Google is willing to offer Hulu are not yet available. It is also not known whether or not Google has already made an offer to Hulu.

It is quite possible that Google is looking for access to more content and video scene search technology from Hulu, and the deal would then have to be for a longer period of time. It’s equally possible that Google just doesn’t want anyone else to compete with YouTube’s newly formed movie and TV show streaming business.

An executive of Hulu, involved with the deal-making process has said, “Normally we would have thrown people out if they’d said that.” In spite of such strong statements, Hulu is still talking to Google, so it is quite obvious that the offer being made by Google is probably too good to let go.

While the money involved seems to be big, there is still the possibility that Google and YouTube could eventually swallow Hulu, and that may deter Hulu from agreeing to a deal with Google.

It is also quite possible that Hulu’s parent companies, News Corp and Disney, may decide not to sell the company to anybody at all.

Data from analytics provider, StatCounter’s global stats shows that Chrome currently occupies the number two spot among web browsers in India.

The first place is held by Firefox, which currently has a market share of 32.97% after displacing Internet Explorer from the top spot just last month. Google Chrome is second, with 31.75% and is closely followed by Internet Explorer, which has been losing popularity steadily over the past twelve months and currently has only 31.33% market share.

The success of Chrome in the Indian market could be attributed to various factors including advertising on television, which is the most popular form of advertisement in India and the need for faster browsers to compensate for slower Internet speeds in the region. The browser also gets promoted through various other Google services.

When Chrome was launched internationally, in 2008, it secured 10% market share in India, but that went up to 22% within a year, thanks to its technical excellence as well as rapid release cycle.

Last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in the U.K. to occupy second place, with a market share of 22.12% compared to 21.65% for Firefox. Similarly, Chrome has also overtaken IE during the month of July in three countries of South America – Argentina, Chili and Uruguay.

Google’s social network Google Plus, which was launched just a couple of months ago, is also doing well in India, especially when compared to the rest of Asia. 

In India, Google+ had 0.4% market share in mid-July, after it was released but has tapered down to 0.2% since then, according to data from Experian/Hitwise. In Singapore, the social network had 0.8% share a week after its release and grew to 1.2% less than two months later. Google+ has not, however, fared too well in Hong Kong, where it had only 0.074%. This could be largely due to the pre-dominance of local social networks in China and the East Asian region.

The most notable change to have occurred is the fact that people now start conducting movie searches much earlier than in the past. It has been found that on an average, people now start movie searches about five weeks prior to its release. Only a couple of years ago, these searches were conducted just prior to the release of the movie.

Google search results for the last Harry Potter film

Another major change that has been found is the fact that people now search for movies much more than they used to do in the past.

Selina Rennie, who works with the team at Google that carried out this study team says, “Movie-goers searched 1.75 times more per film in 2010 than in 2008. Additionally, searches for film trailers were up by more than 50% in 2010 versus the previous year.”

The increased availability of digital content as well as the growing availability of Internet-connected devices has led to these changes in the way movie searches are conducted.

Big box office hits (grossing more than $100 million) seem to draw disproportionately more searches than mid-tier films (grossing $50 – $100 million). Queries per moviegoer are higher for mid-tier films, indicating a lot of consumer interest but low engagement from the industry, which implies a lot of potential for growth.

YouTube searches and related video referrals are a very important source of video views. Yet, the surprisingly low number of studios advertising on YouTube search as against those advertising on Google search shows yet another opportunity for growth.

It would be highly expedient of studios to be ready with an interesting trailer the moment the audience shows an inclination to see the movie or gather any information about it.

Home entertainment is also an evolving branch of this industry and studios are now contemplating the creation of a new “premium VOD” that would allow users to rent movies within 30 to 60 days of the release of the film.

By using the new +1 Button users can now share links to pages on Google Plus. In other words, if a visitor to a site wants to start a conversation about some content they like, it becomes very easy to do so.

Another improvement released with the new version of the button is the launch of +Snippets. Publishers can customise the name, image and description that appear when content is being shared.

Lastly, Google have added inline annotations, which improve engagement when users see a recommendation from a friend regarding a particular piece of content.

Google +Snippets showing when a user shares a +1

In order to start customising the snippets that show up when users share content on Google Plus, publishers need to add the correct schema.org attributes to the Meta data present on the page. The name, image and description have to be added to the code either in the HTML page body or head.

Inline annotations include the name and profile photo of the persons who have +1′ed the page. When the next user sees the name or image of a person he / she knows he / she is more likely to pay special attention to the content on that page.

Publishers must update the +1 button in order to ensure that all these changes are incorporated onto their site.

The new features are being gradually rolled out. In order to test these new features, users can join Google+ Platform Preview group.

Internet-enabled TV from Google are expected to be available in the UK within the next six months. The Google TV products allow users to switch between the Internet and television channels seamlessly on the same screen. Users will not be required to change any cables to change from the Internet to TV or vice-versa.

Surfing the Web on Google TV

Users will be able to use their smartphone as a remote control. A special YouTube channel in high definition will also be available to them. Other services such as the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, Channel 4 On Demand and all of the IPTV services will also be accessible directly on the main TV screen.

According to the Telegraph, this facility will be available to users only through the special set-top box. It is possible that manufacturers will start selling TV sets with the functionality built in soon after, if initial demand for the product is high. However, if the success of the product in the USA is an indicator, we might need to wait a while before we see Google integrated TV sets being manufactured for the UK market.

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is expected to make a formal announcement about the launch during this year’s MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

One of the problems expected with this service, though, is that the amount of bandwidth required for such facilities is very high.

YouTube’s parent company, Google, has been fighting a court case with several music publishers and TV / Movie companies regarding the use of pirated and copyrighted content on YouTube since 2007. Viacom had also filed a class action suit at the same time.

In 2007, the courts ruled in favour of Google, stating that YouTube was protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The litigants had filed an appeal against the verdict at the time.

The parties concerned have now arrived at an understanding whereby Google will pay royalties to the music company concerned for the use of their content on YouTube.

Financial details of the agreement have not been revealed.

A post on the YouTube blog says, “We already have deals in place with a number of music publishers in the U.S. and around the world, and today’s deal offers more choice for rights holders in how they manage use of their songs.”

The blog further states that “When these publishers allow YouTube to run ads alongside user-generated videos that incorporate their compositions, the publishers and the songwriters they represent can make money.”

While the deal has been signed only with publishers, it is also expected to benefit songwriters, recording artists and record labels. This will be possible thanks to Google’s Content ID technology, which allows recognition of songs and other music.

How exactly Google will monetise the content sufficiently to pay for every instance of copyright infringement is not clear. However, the relatively recent success of YouTube’s monetisation efforts obviously will play a big part in this.

As the name suggests, this new feature will show users additional content ‘related’ to the topic they are reading about, even as they read about it.

With the help of Google Related users will be able to view other content relative to that topic — like videos, product reviews, or other mentions of the product across the web.

Users will be able to see the related content n a thin bar at the bottom of the screen. Hovering the mouse over the bar will cause it to expand, enabling the user to view the content directly in the browser window without having to open a new tab or window. If users come across some information of interest to them they can use the built in +1 button.
This feature will make it very easy for users to find contextual content. Google Related is a step in the right direction for optimising websites and hence will be of use to marketers.

Motorola Mobility will however be run as a separate business by Google. It will function as a licensee of Android and the Android OS will continue to remain an open source.

Motorola had been one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, and by 2008 had eventually made Android its sole operating system for all their smartphone devices.

While the handset manufacturing division of Motorola has not been doing too well for some time, it could be their vast collection of patents that attracted Google to buy the company.

Motorola has already got 17,000 patents, while another 7,500 patents are pending.

Google on the other hand is on the lookout for patents in order to compete with Microsoft, RIM and others.

A note on the Google Blog said, “Motorola’s total commitment to Android in mobile devices is one of many reasons that there is a natural fit between our two companies.

Google CEO Larry Page and Google’s senior VP of mobile Andy Rubin have both confirmed that the primary reason for buying over Motorola mobility is to get hold of their patents to strengthen Android.

Andy Rubin has also stated that the deal would in no way be a disadvantage to Google’s over 50 other partners.

Google will be paying $12.5 billion for this deal. The deal is subject to regulatory approval from various bodies in the US, the European Union and other jurisdictions, and the approval of Motorola Mobility’s stock holders.

The fact that these companies manufacture tablets and handsets for Google, means that Google is the actual target of Apple’s attacks, although indirectly.

Apple has files suits against the above firms for multiple patent infringements across multiple countries, pointing out “slavish copying” of design and “look and feel.”

The European court has recently ruled in favour of Apple. The court has banned the sale of Samsung’s latest Galaxy tablet in most of Europe. Apple has also filed similar suits in Australia.

While the lawsuits so far are only aimed at the handset manufacturers, Brian Marshall, an analyst with Gleacher & Co, said that Apple is really concerned with the software being used by these devices.

Since the Android software being used in these devices is similar to their iOS 5 they have decided to take action. Thus it is Google that will effectively bear the brunt of the lawsuits.

Though Apple is the market leader of smartphones, the free Android software on Google’s phones, could affect Apple eventually. The Android software is being activated on 550,000 devices daily.

If Apple can win some injunctions against this free software, consumers would be forced to pay for the use of the Android OS and this could make the Android OS less popular than it is.

At present Apple holds 75% of the market share for tablet devices. But this is expected to come down to 39% by 2015, while Android’s share will go up to 38%.

This war over patents had initially been kicked off by Google, when they sued Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies for the acquisition of 6,000 patents from Nortel.

Similarly, last October, Motorola sued Apple for violating 18 patents in its iOS-based devices,. Now Apple has sued Motorola for violating 6 of their patents.

“It’s clear that the tablet wars are going to be fought on many, many fronts,” Michael Gartenberg, technology analyst with Gartner.

Microsoft, Apple and Oracle have come together to buy old patents of Nortel. Having done that, they are now asking manufacturers to pay a fee of $15 for every Android system they wish to use on their mobile devices. This fee makes it more expensive for phone manufacturers to use the Android apps in their phones, compared to the Windows Phone 7.

Google’s official blog claims that the imposition of this “tax” for these dubious patents is a means of fighting Google through litigation rather than competing by developing their own patent-worthy technology.

The U.S. Department of Justice should ask Microsoft and its partners to license the said patents at a reasonable price as it does not approve of the acquisition of patents as an anti-competitive tool.

In the meantime, Microsoft has responded to this allegation, saying that Google had also been invited to bid jointly for these patents, but had refused.

Google, in turn, replied saying that joining the group would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners, thus making sure that they were unable to assert themselves against these patents. It would also mean that Google would end up paying for something that would actually hamper the growth of their platform.

Microsoft has further said that Google refused to join the other companies because it wanted to buy these mobile patents for itself, to assert against others. Clearly, the last word on this issue is yet to come, but in the meantime, it will be the end users who suffer as they will end up paying heavily for the use of the patents.

As the name suggests, Google News will provide highlights of news stories that the editors of various publications have selected as being the most newsworthy.

To begin with, this feature will only be available to users in the U.S. A new section in the right hand column of the Google News page will display content that editors have selected as being the most important or catchy.

Stories being highlighted may be of local, national or general interest. Some of the publications already involved with this feature are Reuters, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and Market Watch.

Publishers can decide what stories, videos or audios they wish to display in his section of the feature. Each publisher has to send that information to Google through a special RSS feed.

In order to keep this feature fresh, Google requires feeds from publishers to be updated at least once in 48 hours. A minimum of three articles is also required. Advertisements of any form are not allowed in this section. Only news content is admissible.

Users can navigate to stories of their interest using the side-to-side arrows provided next to the publisher’s logo. A slider at the bottom of the articles, allows users to select their particular source preference.

Google News has been experimenting with this feature since about a year. While this feature allows users to get the news they are interested in from sources they trust, the publisher also get a lot more traffic to their website, thus making it a win-win situation for all three parties involved.

Instant Pages will be available by default in the latest stable version of Google Chrome. This feature will help users to save precious time by loading the pages they are searching for faster than before. In fact, as the name of the service suggests, the page will open almost instantly.

When a person conducting a search clicks on the topmost result, if that result has been determined to be the most likely one to be clicked by the searcher, Google will ensure that the page will open almost immediately when clicked.

This will be possible through pre-rendering technology available in the latest version of Chrome.

Only when it is almost certain that a user will click on the first search result, will Instant Pages start to load that result even before the user clicks on it. In cases where the first result on the Google search results page is not an obvious choice, Google will conserve computing power and let the page load in its natural time as and when the user clicks on it.

Navigational queries and brand-related searches are likely to benefit from this speed improvement most of all, as they are the sort of queries where searchers tend to click on the topmost organic result.

This should give Chrome an edge over other browsers, as users are always impatient for their pages to open, and when they’re performing a navigational query, reducing the time to reach their destination could have a significant net positive impact as it would make the act of searching akin to or even faster than typing the website address directly into the URL / search bar on Chrome.

Google Hotel Finder

Hotels in Chicago via Google Hotel Finder

Google’s new service allows users to find hotel rooms available in a given area, along with the price and amenities of each hotel in that area.

Hotel Finder selects the most visited areas of major cities by default and shows hotels within these tourist hotspots. Users can also draw a shape on an interactive map around the area they wish to stay in.

The Hotel Finder service provides a comparative study of the price range of hotels in an area.

Details of each hotel in the area are provided when a user clicks on the listing, along with a collage of images and reviews from Google Places. Users can then shortlist the hotels they are interested in or book a room in the hotel they like via Travelocity, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com or the hotel itself.

Hotel Finder is currently in the pre-beta experimental stage and is available only for hotels in various American cities. The interface is very similar to other sites and uses sliding scales and quick option selectors to allow users to narrow their choice. The most popular feature of the service is likely to end up being the seamless integration with Google Maps, which makes selecting hotels in a particular region extremely simple.

It is estimated that London’s network of 250 underground stations and 18,000 bus stops is used by over 1 billion commuters every year.

Now, when a commuters and tourists wants to get from one point to another, they can plan their journey by visiting Google Maps and then clicking ‘Get Directions’ in the left-hand panel.

Selecting the train icon shows public transport directions. Users can enter a departure location and a destination as they would for driving and walking directions. These can be either in the form of street addresses or names of popular places, businesses or restaurants. Once that is done, clicking the ‘Get directions’ button will bring the desired results.

Google Maps with public transport directions for London

Users will receive instructions about several different options they can use for the trip. On Google Maps for Mobile, the suggestions will be based on the user’s current location by default.

While Underground and bus routes are integrated perfectly into the system, the recently extended London overground train network is not incorporated into Google Maps. As a result, some journeys that would take just 15 minutes on the train are shown as a 45-minute route via the Underground network.

Kentish Town to City Thameslink requires 30 additional minutes on Google Maps

Those using Android devices will get directions with Transit Navigation (Beta) in Google Maps. This new feature, which was launched earlier this month, will also show alerts when it’s time to alight or transfer from one bus or overground train to another.

Public transport directions are available for all Underground, bus, tram and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) lines. More services will be included as soon as information is available.

London has one of the best public transport systems in the world. Locals rely on the Transport For London official governmetn site when planning their journey. However, tourists often aren’t aware of this service. It will now be even easier for commuters, especially for tourists to use this public transport as detailed directions will be available to them at a click.

It had been decided as a matter of policy that the newly launched social network Google Plus would only allow accounts of people who used their real name in the account.

When Google put this policy into action, they unwittingly ended up deleting the accounts of some genuine users as well.

Among them were Limor Fried – AKA Lady Ada, and A.V. Flox, and even an ex-employee of Google Kirrily ‘Skud’ Robert.

The account holders whose accounts were deleted received a message saying, “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.”

This move on the part of Google has been criticised by several people as it can at best be termed as arbitrary.

Finally Google has responded to the controversy that has thus been created.

On Monday, Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz wrote, We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing,”

The policy is explained in section 13 of the company’s User Content and Conduct Policy. It says, “To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.”

Some of the erroneously deleted accounts have since been restored.

Google will henceforth implement some changes in the way this policy is used. The changes are as follows:

• Google will give users more warning and the chance to comply with the common name policy
• The company is improving the signup process
• Lastly, the search giant is exploring better ways to support nicknames, maiden names and pseudonyms.

A blog post on the RKGBlog contained a screenshot of ads being displayed within the organic search results.

The ads have been placed along with the organic (unpaid) listing results. The word “Ad” is placed on the right hand side of the sponsored result. However, it is not very prominent and can easily be missed.

Image courtesy RKG: Bing displaying ads within organic search engine results

In the past, Yahoo! and a handful of second-tier search engines had tried a service called “paid inclusion”, whereby ads were included in the search results, but there were no ranking factors. Yahoo! withdrew the service in 2009, due to its controversial nature.

Popular blogger Danny Sullivan had also voiced disapproval of Google using paid inclusion in their search results.

Currently, Google does include ads within their organic search results, but they are highlighted in a different colour above the organic results, differentiating them from the organic results and making the fact that they’re ads more obvious than the marking that Bing is using.

This format is currently in the testing stage and is shown only to a few users. A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

If Microsoft does choose to go forward and roll this format out worldwide, it could have serious ramifications. For one, click-through rates on Bing ads are likely to rise. If Google feels the pressure and chooses to do something similar, AdWords advertisers could benefit greatly while the value of SEO could fall.

Collaborative tools for scientific research are already available in the cloud. Some of them are Academia.edu, Mendeley and Questia.

The home page explains that Wingu will provide “more connective ways to get to the next decision point”. In simple words, this means that Wingu will offer researchers, analysts and scientists a method to collaborate and share easily online thereby enabling them to collectively reach a conclusions. Additionally, the service provides ways to use the cloud-stored data, through the “enterprise-grade cloud platform dubbed Elements.”

Wingu offers four main selling points:

1. Managing cross-discipline teams on a common platform to share data and ideas
2. Analysing data to drive decision-making with analytical workflows and discovery tools
3. Sharing information to connect researchers across silos and geographical divides for better collaboration
4. Protecting intellectual property via data back ups and leading systems and security experts.

Biotech and the Cloud

Job postings on the site indicate that Wingu might be more than just a regular cloud-based collaboration service. One of the positions they are recruiting for is a BioInformatics & Engineering specialist. Could this be simply tied in to the last point mentioned above – data security – or does Google have some much bigger plans?

What seems surprising about Google investing in this project, is also the fact that the investment was done very quietly. The move has even been described as “stealthy”.

Of course, it is possible that this was done quietly only because Google did not see a need to make a hue and cry over this acquisition. On the other hand, it could also be to maintain some privacy and prevent competitors from finding out too much about the project or launching similar projects of their own.

While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.

In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.

However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.

This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.

A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.

In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.

Google had purchased the domain name and trademark Photovine about a month ago. At that time, people were left wondering why Google was interested in a photo sharing site, when they already have Picassa.

Now that it is known that Photovine will function as a photo-sharing app for smartphones, the purchase makes sense.

Photovine will be different from other photo-sharing sites. It will allow users with common interests to connect with each other. The FAQ describes Photovine thus:
“A vine is like a constantly growing family of photos connected through a common caption created by you, your friends, and people all over the world.”

Some examples of vines could be: “What Weekends Are Made Of”, “Secret Stuffed Animal”, “Party People”, or, “Love of My Life”.

As people add photographs to vines, they tell their own stories about the moments, images, and ideas that define our lives in a way that’s social, creative, and fun.

Photovine is run by Slide, which Google had bought over in August 2010 for $182 million.

The concept of collecting a chain of photos that are related to each other through a common caption is quite similar to the new version of Twitter search, where photo and video content are attached through hashtags.

It is not immediately known whether or not Google will eventually integrate Photovine into their new social network Google Plus. At present, Photovine is an invitation only service, and those interested can ask for an invite on www.photovine.com.

As of now, users of this social network are allowed to keep their profiles private if they desire to do so.

However, come 31st July and these private profiles will be deleted. This move is likely to upset users, who wish to keep their profiles private as they are allowed to do on Facebook.

A statement issued by Google explains the purpose behind this decision. It says, “The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.”

It should be a consolation to users to know, that the only data they are required to provide on the public profile includes the full name and gender of the user. The user will have the ability to delete or hide any other information from the profile.

Another point in defense of Google is the fact, that even with Facebook, the users name gender and profile picture of the user is freely available to all, even with private settings since the last year or so.

Mark Zuckerberg had then explained that “The site has actually never worked in a way that you sign up and the only people who can see you or your information were your friends. The reason for that is … if only the people who were already your friends on the site could see your information then it would be really difficult to connect with your actual friends and actually be able to have meaningful interactions with them.”

Hence, even though Google has decided to disallow private profiles, they are not actually affecting the user’s privacy any more than Facebook is already doing.

Data will only be shared with websites that have opted for anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics.

The time frame for data in the first newsletter report is from 1 November 2010 to 1 February 2011. The data is compared to the same period one year ago, i.e. the time frame between 1 November 2009 to 1 February 2010.

It has been found that websites have seen a reduction in the number of pages/visit as well as the amount of time spent during each visit and the bounce rate.

The pages/visit have gone down from 4.9 to 4.5 on average, while and the time spent per visit has gone down from 5.49 to 5.23. The good news is that on average, the bounce rate has reduced from 48.2% to 47.0%,

Bounce rates in various countries are found to be in reverse proportion to the time spent on site. While the bounce rate is highest in East Asian countries like China, Korea and Russia, the time spent on site is highest in Caribbean nations like the Bahamas, British Virgin Islands and Aruba.

Goal Conversion rates are surprisingly high in Italy and the Vatican City. The media conversion rate is around 1.1%, which is also the average in countries such as India, France and the U.K.

While traffic has increased slightly from direct sources as well as from search engines, the traffic from referral sources has reduced.

The use of operating systems such as Linux and Macintosh has gone up marginally, but the use of Windows has fallen from 89.9% to 84.8%.

Speculations have been running high since then in anticipation of what that ‘awesome’ new product could be.

Reuters initially suggested that this new product could be mobile or tablet related, as Zuckerberg had mentioned that the Seattle office has played a major role in the development of this product, and it is a known fact that their recently improved mobile site was developed in Seattle. If that is so, it could well be the launch of an iPad App.

It is also being speculated, that Facebook may now be ready to launch their new photo-sharing app for the iPhone.

Another possibility being considered is ‘Project Spartan’, which is an HTML-5 based competitor to Apple’s App store.

The official invites for the launch are now out, and contain two chat icons placed very conspicuously. This has now given rise tot eh idea, that the launch could have something to do with a new video chat service powered by Skype.

Facebook has been working on a desktop component of video chat, built on Skype. This service will integrate several features of Facebook and Skype.

If this is indeed the new product to be launched, it will help Facebook to tide over the recent launch of Google Plus, which has generated a lot of interest amongst users. It will also give Skype access to Facebook’s wide user base of over 750 million users.

The launch of such a service will also please Microsoft, which has recently bought over Skype.

For over a year, a number of stories were either leaked out or speculated upon, about Google launching a social network. Invariably, the leaks were followed by denials about it. But now, things are out in the open.

Google has finally bitten the bait, and their new social network Google Plus (or Google+) has just been launched.

Google+

While there is bound to be excitement to find out what exactly Google Plus is all about, it seems to be a combination of features that are already offered by a number of other networks.

“Real-life sharing, rethought for the web” is the tagline for the new network. Users will be required to create a profile containing a name and a photograph. They will then find five basic features. These are:

• Circles
• Sparks
• Hangouts
• Instant Uploads
• Huddle

Circles allows a user to divide contacts into different groups such as family, friends and work. This will allow them to decide what information they wish to share with a particular group of contacts, instead of having to share all information with all contacts. A similar feature is already available on Facebook in the form of Friend Lists.

Sparks is similar to Google reader, which allows users to get updated news feeds by subscribing to sources of news and information. It facilitates the spread of viral content similar to how Twitter and the Facebook News Feed do.

Hangouts allows users to hold video conversations with various contacts at the same time. This feature is also available on Tinychat. The overall premise of the feature, though, seems to be inclined more towards mimicking functionality found on Foursquare.

As the name suggests, Instant Uploads will upload the photos taken on a mobile phone automatically. This is also possible through iCloud, Microsoft Kin and other platforms. This feature, though, competes directly with Facebook and Flickr for photo-sharing.

Huddle will enable the user to have a group chat. This is also possible through Beluga, which Facebook acquired recently and is very similar to Google Wave, which got discontinued at the end of last year.

Only time will tell how popular Google+ will become and whether or not it will provide any real competition to Facebook, which is already extremely popular and quite unlikely to feel any real threat in the near future. The odds are against Google once again, but they have very successfully beaten the odds in the past and just might do so again.

Google allows advertisers and marketers of different products and services to show their ads on the various sites of the Google Display Network, the real challenge has been to reach specific sections of the audience that would be interested in that particular product.

In order to do so in the past, advertisers had to estimate that visitors to a particular website might be interested in particular subject and hence they would be interested in products or services dealing with that subject. For example, visitors to a gardening blog might be interested in buying gardening tools. However, this isn’t always an easy way to target consumers.

Now, when a user visits a particular type of page on a regular and frequent basis, the browser is associated with that interest category by means of a number. Google stores that number in the browser by means of a cookie.

In addition to the type of sites that the user has visited, Google will also consider inferred demographics to judge whether that user is likely to be a male or female, if they are likely to belong to a particular age group and other such relevant statistics. Google will then show ads based on the interest category as well as demographic profile associated with that particular browser.

Adding interest categories in an AdWords ad group

Google maintains that this service is in keeping with their privacy policy, as no personal information about the individual is used for this kind of targeted advertising. When users visit a site from a different computer or browser, they will not be shown interest-based ads, as Google will not know that this is the same user. However, one could argue that a user’s browsing history on their office or personal computer is pretty personal too, and that information is being used by Google in order to target their ads.

Ads will not be shown based on any sensitive information such as race, religion, sexual orientation, health, financial status etcetera. Users also have the right to decide whether or not they want to be shown these ads. Those who do not wish to use the service can opt out of it by clicking ‘Opt Out’ in the Ads Preferences Manager.

In order to achieve this, Google has added a new feature that will enable automatic mobile rendering of Google Sites for iOS 3.3+ and Android 2.2+ devices.

In order to use this feature, Google Site admins need to go to ‘general settings’ under More actions > Manage site and click on ‘Automatically adjust site to mobile phones’. Once this is done, the Google Site will automatically be adjusted when it is viewed via an iOS or Android 2.2 device.

When this new feature is activated:

• The header layout and top bar will be automatically aligned
• The width of the site will match the device
• Sidebars will be smartly handled and horizontal navigation and dropdown links will be available.

In order to preview the page from the computer as a mobile viewer, users can click on More actions > Preview as viewer (Mobile). Webmasters will even have the option to save some vertical space in the footer by hiding some of the links.

To further help publishers to find their sites even when they are on the go, Google has also added mobile versions of the site list, sites search, and browse sites categories.

Apple acquired a feature called ‘Siri’ from voice recognition software provider, Nuance, last year. Siri is personal assistance software, with the added benefit of voice control.

Siri will function like a mobile search engine, and will take oral instructions from the user, through voice recognition technology.

When a voice command is issued to the iPhone 5, it will reportedly go through services such as Yelp, OpenTable and others to provide the required information or service to the user.

While voice recognition services and voice activated search have been around for some time, Siri will be the first mobile search service that can do more than just deliver search results. That in itself, could give search giant Google sleepless nights – this innovation by Apple could mean a considerable setback to their business.

It is, of course, a known fact that so far, voice-recognition-based services have faced several problems, such as distortion caused due to background noise and inability to handle even slight changes in voice modulation. However, it is bound to be only a matter of time before such obstacles are overcome. If Google intends to keep their place in the mobile search market, it would be essential for them to start working on this matter at the earliest.

Google Advisor provides a comparison of various financial products available in the market. Until now, the service was restricted to the U.S. only. However, searches for the word ‘mortgage’ on Google U.K. have now started providing interesting results:

Google Comparison ad for ‘mortgage’

At the top of the paid search results is an ad by Google promoting their own mortgage comparison service. Comparison ads were introduced back in May 2009, but were limited to a few states in the U.S.A. When users click on a comparison ad, they are taken to a list of details from various lenders, and users can fill in specifics to view a list of the services matching their requirements.

Google comparison of UK mortgages

An interested user can then call one of the Google pay per call numbers to connect to a specific lender for further information, or the user can request a call back from the provider.

The good thing about this facility from Google is that the user’s personal information and phone number are protected from the financial advisors. Users are given an 03-number from which they are indirectly connected to the financial services provider.

In most cases, Google provides detailed results about the amount of interest that would accumulate in various accounts, thus helping the user to decide what kind of financial arrangement suits them best. However, as far as mortgage deals are concerned, they seem to have a very limited list on offer.

Other sites such as Bankrate, Money Supermarket, Wells Fargo and Quicken Loans offer similar but much more comprehensive services, so users are not likely to switch to Google’s comparison service immediately. However, the appearance of Comparison ads could signal the upcoming launch of Google Advisor, which could gradually turn into a significant source of competition for many of the currently popular financial service comparison sites.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

schema.org

This initiative will make it possible for publishers to put in structured markup on their web pages in order to help the search engines index their sites better and hence deliver better search results to users.

Schemas are essentially common sets of tags used to denote detailed data to be used to describe the publisher’s product.

Since Bing, Google and Yahoo! have initiated this protocol jointly, it will make it easier for the publisher to provide this data to the main search engines. In other words, Schema.org works as a one stop shop for webmasters to add in the most search engine friendly markup for data contained on their web pages.

Google had already introduced a similar service, called rich snippets, a couple of years ago. This service allowed users to receive non-textual information such as reviews, personal profiles, local business information or details about the product they were searching, in addition to the regular plain text snippet that accompanies each organic search listing.

Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo! have made a combined effort to improve their users’ search experience, it should pay rich dividends to all concerned – the user, the publisher and the search engine as well.

In the past, the major search engines had come together in 2006 to provide a common standard to webmasters for sitemaps.

The +1 button allows users to share stories and articles with their network of friends. In functionality, this is similar to the ‘Like’ button from Facebook and is a significant step towards the concept of social search by Google.

When a user clicks the +1 button the user’s network – as defined by the friends on their Google Account – will be notified about it.

Sites that are interested in making use of this new facility can set it up by visiting Google’s +1 button code generator page. The button can be set up in a choice of four sizes ranging from 15 pixels to 60 pixels. Users have the option to include a counter that can indicate the number of +1s a particular page has received. The feature is currently available in 44 languages.

Generate a +1 button for your site

Although it might be too early to judge, one cannot help wondering how successful this new service will be. As of now, not too many sites have jumped to add this function to their sites.

Some of the popular sites to have already included it are TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land – all search industry and tech veterans.

However, most of the really popular blogs and websites have not yet added this service. Sites such as Business Insider, Perez Hilton and TMZ have all chosen to wait and watch whether users will pick up on this new service or if it will flop like Google’s other ventures into the social space.

Sites such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Product Search and the Android Market are expected to add +1 shortly. These are Google-owned properties, though. Out of the top 10 most popular blogs, only 3 have added the +1 button conspicuously on their pages:

Success of the +1 button will be determined largely by the general public’s adoption of this feature. If Google’s history with social networking is anything to go by, few will be holding their breath for this one!