The fact is that Yahoo! is not only big, but several of its properties are number one in their respective fields, while many others are at the number two position. Alex Linde, Yahoo! Director of Mobile Advertising, said during the OMMA Tablet Revolution Showcase at Internet Week New York 2011that “Yahoo! is the premier digital media company”.

Linde explained that Yahoo! reaches about 680 million users every month, which is about 50% of the online global population. They also reach about 187 million users in the U.S., which is almost 90% of PC users in the U.S.A.

Similarly, Yahoo! has a large clientele on sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and several other sites such as Flickr. Linde says, “We are the most trusted brand on the Web.”

According to the April 2011 comScore Media Metrix report, Yahoo! is the number one overall Web property and twelve of their properties are number one in their respective vertical sectors.

Yahoo! News Network, with 88 million users is far ahead of popular sites like CNN and MSNBC. Similarly, Yahoo! Finance is far ahead of Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and others. Yahoo! Sports is also far ahead of ESPN. Moreover, these Yahoo! properties have retained the number one position for the last several months.

In spite of this, Yahoo! seems to have lost the favoured position which it held, in the 1990’s.

Yahoo!’s Executive Vice President of the America’s region, Ross Levinsohn claims that this is just an evolution phase that the company is passing through. He describes it as “a generational thing. Not a Yahoo! thing.”

However, the company’s historical mis-steps have cost it in the long run, and even though it might continue to get visitors, it is unlikely to return to glory unless the management team at Yahoo! take some serious steps to bring the brand back into the limelight.

Yahoo! search trends reported that there was a spike of 100,000% on the topic of Osama Bin Laden, making him the most searched person of the day. Notably, about 20% of the searches were conducted by teenagers and a total of 25% of searches were by those below 24 years of age.

The commonly asked questions were about confirmation of his death as well as how he died and who killed him. Additionally, people also asked about his age, height, wife, children and his biography. People were also curious to know whether his name was spelled ‘Osama’ or ‘Usama’.

1 in 3 searches asking “how did Osama Bin Laden die” were from users aged between 13 – 17 years while 40% of searches asking “who killed Osama” were queried by users between 13 and 20 years of age.

This interest by youngsters is quite understandable, as most of them may have been too young to remember the events of 9/11 that took place almost 10 years ago. Even those who do remember would have lost track, unless they had been personally affected by it.

Twin Towers dominated the New York skyline before the Al Qaeda attack

Other common searches on the day were about Pakistan – maps, news, Islamabad, Abbottabad and the house in which Osama Bin Laden lived. People also carried out searches about the events of 9/11, Ground Zero, the Twin Towers and World Trade Centre in New York, all of which were iconic of the act of terrorism initiated by Bin Laden.

Google also reported a 1 million percent rise in searches for Osama BinLaden between 7.30 and 8.30 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday.

The paywall system was introduced a few weeks ago, and it was obviously expected that the number of readers visiting the site would diminish. A recent post by Robin Goad, the Research Director of Hitwise U.K. has confirmed this happened.

The study, which they conducted, shows that while The Times market share a few weeks prior to the introduction of the paywall was 4.29% it fell to as  low as 1.435% of all the News and Media – Print traffic, which means that it dropped to a third of their earlier market share.

While the drop in just a few weeks is indeed pretty steep, the market share in the next week, (week ended 17th July 2010) was 1.37%. This reading, though even lower that the previous one, indicates that the rate of fall has started to reduce, which is a good sign for the publisher.

A further indicator that The Times may soon see a recovery in their market share is the fact that visitors are spending between 21/2 to 3 minutes per visit on the site.

However, The Times has yet another hurdle to cross. They have provided an introductory offer of ₤1 for the first 30 days to their readers. It remains to be seen, if readers will continue to visit the site once that offer period is over, or if they will simply switch loyalties and move on to some other site, which offers its services for free.

The Financial Times, which has also started a paywall system, before The Times, has already received praise for the model which they have set up.

The Wall Street Journal has also started a paywall system, but their transition seems to have been less painful.

The probable reason for the different response between these publications, could be the fact that while The Times is a general information site, the other publications offer specialised services which may not be found so easily in other publications.

The newspaper, La Repubblica says that by the end of this year, Google will start a new system, which will require users to pay to access content that is behind a publisher paywall. According to the report, the new platform, called Newspass, is already being tested by Google with a closed group of publishers.

Publishers would be the major beneficiaries of this system, as they will receive the major part of the revenue generated. Google will handle the authentication, support and billing. Publishers will also be able to use a single system to publish their content on desktops, mobiles, tablet PCs and any other platforms.

Users will have a single login across all content sites served by Newspass. Sites will be able to give users the option to pay for long term subscriptions or to make micropayments to access just one article.

Google has neither confirmed nor denied the news. A spokesperson has said, “We’ve consistently said we’re talking with news publishers about ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building.”

What makes this development most interesting, though, is its timing. News of this initiative comes at a time when a number of major news publications, such as The New York Times and News Corp-owned The Times and The Sun have either started adopting a paywall for their online versions or intend to do so in the near future.

One does wonder how this system will affect the quality of search results, as it is reasonable to assume, that higher quality information is likely to be categorised as ‘paid content’, while the less interesting stories or second-hand news items from bloggers could be all that remains available for free.

Apart from referring to traditional news sources such as newspapers and television, people are now increasingly relying on blogs and social networks to receive news.

In fact, news is fast becoming a shared social experience. However, the type of news that is popular on these different sources varies widely.

The Pew Research Center has carried out a study on the top news stories carried by different sources and analysed the data collected. The study was carried out between 19 January 2009 and 15 January 2010 on blogs and YouTube and from 15 June 2009 to 15 January 2010 on Twitter.

The study not only found that the lead stories on social media channels varied widely from traditional news media, but it also varied substantially from one channel to another.

It was found that during the course of the study the top story on blogs, YouTube and Twitter coincided only once, during the Iranian Presidential elections held between June 15 2009, to June 19 2009.

Bloggers, in general, were found to be more interested in emotional stories or issues that related to individual or group rights or similar ideologies. Stories that could be personalised and shared attracted a lot of attention. Political news, however, tended to be both pro-liberal as well as pro-conservative.

On Twitter, there was a very different tendency – stories concerning technology, in general, and Twitter, in particular, gained more prominence. However, even here, the Iran elections were the most popular lead story and topped the charts for 7 weeks in a row.

In contrast, on YouTube, the news is usually shared through videos and often does not even contain any added comments. There is also a tendency to pay more attention to international news.

One common factor among all the social platforms studied, was that the stories did not stay on top of the charts for long.

Also it was not uncommon to find that the news stories on all these sources, differred considerably from the top stories on the traditional news channels.

Blogs are more likely to borrow information from the traditional media, but the reverse trend rarely occurs. Bloggers might face a tough time once their main sources, such as The New York Times and The Times go behind pay walls. It has already been announced that the New York Times will start charging for the use of some of their news content from January 2011.

According to the findings of the survey, a large number of Americans (92%) make use of various platforms to collect their daily news.

The most popular sources of daily news are local and national TV channels, followed in third place by the Internet. National and local newspapers and radio have not surprisingly fallen behind.

On an average day, almost 60% of Americans will access various online and offline sources of news.

Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and mobile technology, the new multi-platform media environment is now portable, personalised and participatory.

33% of mobile phone users access the news through their mobile phones, thus making it portable. 28% of Internet users access news on topics that interest them personally via news feeds on their homepage, while 37% of Internet users participate in the act of dissemination of news by posting it on sites like Facebook and Twitter, with or without their personal comments.

People are also using their social networks to filter and assess the news. They also exchange stories through email. 75% of online news receivers, do so via email or social networking and 52% of them share the news with others in the same manner.

Most online news consumers do not have a particular favourite news site, and access a variety of sites to collect their daily news.

While 55% of Americans say that it is easier to stay up-to-date about news and information than it was 5 years ago, 70% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by the number of news sources now available to them.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

Yahoo! now incorporates information from tweets, photos and videos posted on Twitter. They have revamped the Yahoo! News Shortcut result, that shows at the top of the organic results for queries on breaking news topics, into a horizontal tabbed form, which links to three or four news categories.

The first tab in the new Yahoo! News Shortcut result shows news sites with snippets from articles. The next tabs link to photos and / or to videos and the last one to Twitter.

Searches on certain popular news stories currently bring up the Twitter tab, which then takes users to the Twitter search results page for that query. Screenshots provided by Yahoo!, though, show the Twitter tab loading with a couple of selected tweets and associated videos.

According to Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf on Yahoo! Search blog, “Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Although both Google and Bing have already started incorporating Twitter feeds into their search results, Yahoo! claims that they are the first to integrate Twitter with news, which actually makes a lot of sense since Twitter is growing into a rather popular source of breaking news round the world.

They are hopeful that this will make Yahoo! News the first choice of users looking for current information on any breaking news stories. Yahoo! will also run a separate algorithm to filter out any irrelevant information that is present on Twitter.

Yahoo!’s Larry Cornett said that they were very pleased with user reactions they saw during initial user testing of this feature.

Google Trends already shows users which topics are among the 100 most popular searches on a given day. Google has now incorporated this feature in Google Search, so that users do not need to visit another page to find out what the trending topics of the moment are.

Now, when a user Google’s a particular topic which is among the top 100 in popularity, Google will display a graph at the bottom of the search page to indicate the rate of rise of that topic and other details about it.

Google highlights trending topics within organic SERPs

Google Trends’ Hot Trends feature has also been pruned from its existing top 100 topics to only 40. However, when any of the top 100 topics are searched for it will show up on the homepage.

This move will brings Google a bit closer to imitating Twitter’s popular topics and real-time search functionality. It also allows users to not only know what are the most popular topics at the moment, but will also provide them with additional information about those topics. These Hot Trends will be updated every hour to show how the scenario is changing.

The Hot Topic being searched will not only get a number to indicate its rank in the popularity list but will also be classified with terms such as ‘On Fire’ and Volcanic’ etcetera.

This feature is officially launched only in the U.S. and Japan, but can be seen by some users in the UK at present.

If one is left wondering as to how a new homepage will help to entice more users, let us clarify by saying that it is not just a new colour scheme or design that they have changed. The change in focus of the network is now clearly evident through this new homepage.

The old homepage introduced the site as a ‘service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?”

The new homepage, on the other hand, invites users to “share and discover what’s happening right now anywhere in the world”.

The logo and tagline and now followed by a search box and a list of trending topics, clearly pointing users towards popular discussion topics. The trending topics and their associated search results are displayed in real time.

Emphasis has been removed from the community messaging aspect of Twitter and instead placed on the news delivery and discussion aspect, which is what has put Twitter in the spotlight repeatedly in the past year.

Trends shown at any given time are divided into popular topics at the time, on that particular day or during that week. Twitter pulls some of the popular discussion topics from What The Trend.

Now it looks as though Twitter is all set to kill several birds with one stone…

They hope to be able to expand their user base by involving even those people who are not interested in idle chit-chat with friends, or those who have nothing to say for themselves but who would like to know what is going on in the world.

They will also now have the opportunity to monetize their site by introducing relevant ads alongside the search results and the trending topic details.

Their search results will be in real time, so they will be one up on search giant Google on that score.

The rumors began after eBay CEO, John Donahue, said that Skype was a great stand-alone business, indicating that though the VoIP service is doing well, (its fourth quarter revenue increased by 26% over the third quarter, and it has over 405 million users worldwide with 30 million users being added every quarter) it was still not integrated into their core business, 4 years after they bought it for an astounding $2.6 billion.

eBay, on the other hand, is not doing too well during the current economic crisis. Their net profits fell to $367 million in the last quarter of 2008, compared to $531 million during the same period in 2007.

Jack Murphy an analyst for investment bank William Blair says “It’s important that eBay has opened the door to a buyer by talking about Skype as a stand-alone business. It would be best for eBay to get whatever cash they could for it and focus on their struggling core market business.”

According to Jim Friedland, senior Internet equity analyst at Cowen and Company, the highest offer eBay can expect for Skype is $1.6 billion.

According to industry sources companies such as Google, Yahoo!, AT&T and Verizon could all be potential buyers as they can easily integrate the VoIP service with their core business.

It is especially believed by some that buying Skype could be the logical next step for Google, as it already has various communication facilities such as Gmail, Google Chat and the Android mobile platform. Owning Skype could enable Google to offer a cheap VoIP-based mobile solution.

There are others who feel that Microsoft may be more likely to buy Skype as they are looking to increase their user base to boost search.

eBay, however, has neither confirmed nor denied any of the rumors.

Rumors about the launch of GDrive have been appearing periodically since March 2006.

Blogger Brian Ussery found an official description of the GDrive within the code for Google Pack – the software utility download from the search engine. The description says:

GDrive Category = Online file backup and storage
GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents
GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, any time and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or mobile phone.

All user information could potentially be stored on Google’s server itself, rather than on a hard drive. This has led a lot of speculators to start talking about the demise of the PC, which seems highly unlikely, considering the fact that online storage solutions have existed long before the rumours of GDrive and none of them have caused any users to stop using a PC!

Google has already started promoting this product of theirs by telling people about the possible benefits of what they call “cloud computing”. They are doing so through their various services such as Google Mail, Google Apps and Picasa Web Albums. GDrive will also enable users to make use of all these services at the same time.

This free service is bound to attract a lot of companies as they are already on the look out for means of cutting operational costs due to the economic recession.

According to one technology news website, the GDrive could “cause a paradigm shift in how we use computers and bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop”. Luckily, though, Microsoft Live Office already allows users to process and store data online.

One major obstacle which Google will however have to deal with, is that of user privacy. The proponents of privacy are already saying that it is dangerous to store all personal data on the Web, rather than on a hard drive, as it can be easily accessed by service provider, especially in a situation where the government may ask for user details, and Google’s track record on privacy has not been very clean.

The co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, has said that they make a lot of effort to protect user privacy. As of now Google has refused to comment on when they plan to release GDrive.

A recent story run on TechCrunch says that according to trusted but anonymous sources, AOL is planning to sell Bebo as its performance has been far below expectations.

Both AOL and Bebo have denied this, saying “there is no truth to this rumor”.

According to sources, when AOL bought Bebo last March, Bebo was marketed as a clever startup that was able to win over ad agencies and clients by presenting itself very well. Ad agencies convinced their clients that they must get on to Bebo, which was growing more popular by the day in the relatively new social network market.

When AOL saw this, they obviously felt that it would be a wise move to buy Bebo, and accordingly they did so on March 13 2008 for $850 million.

Time, however, proved that Bebo did not perform as well as expected. While Bebo is popular in the U.K. with 10.5 million users, its worldwide user base is just 22.6 million.

Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity is the biggest factor contributing to Bebo’s failure. That, and the fact that singular social networks are no longer as popular as they were, due to the growing popularity of the open social platforms is partly responsible for this. The current economic climate makes the performance of the company look even poorer. While Facebook is believed to have earned $250 million last year, and MySpace much more than that, Bebo has managed only $20 million.

A spokesperson at Bebo, however, rubbishes the rumors of a possible sell off by AOL, saying that Bebo has launched a new tool, Social Inbox, just last month. It is doing very well and will allow users to read emails from various sites and also access other social services like Twitter and Flickr. It will also integrate AOL’s instant messaging service. AOL is also reportedly planning further expansion with Bebo.

Only time will tell whether the rumors turn out to be true or not.

In the last few days there have been some stories doing the rounds that this deal would be revived in a round about manner. It was suggested that Microsoft would lend money to some executives and investment bankers, who would then buy out Yahoo! at the price of about $13 per share, which is just a little over the current market price, and then sell it back to Microsoft. Sources at both the companies have rubbished these stories for now.

Acquisition rumours may have been fuelled by a comment by Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said, “now is a good time for the software company to buy.”

However, in an interview with the Fox Business Network last week, Steve Ballmer told Brian Sullivan that the attempt to acquire Yahoo! was “a thing of the past”. He made it very clear that the deal would not be revived, while still keeping his options open about a partnership in any other form.

During the unveiling of the next Windows operating system, Windows 7, Steve Ballmer also admitted that the current financial crisis had affected the IT industry adversely, and it was realistic to expect that fewer people would be buying technology at the moment. While he sidestepped questions about the possibility of layoffs at Microsoft, he did acknowledge that it was important to conserve cash resources and be prudent about expenditure.

In the meantime, Yahoo! has just named Carol Bartz, who was the chairman of Autodesk, as its new CEO. This announcement has once again raised speculations that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal may go through under her leadership.

Currently, Digg has 70 members on the payrolls, and they hope to expand to 150 over the next year or so.

They are reported to have about 16 million worldwide unique monthly visitors and 58 million page views according to Comscore.

Quantacast on the other reports about 22.6 million unique monthly visitors.

However since Digg does not have any editorials, the main job at this site is to moderate the content being posted by users and to concentrate on community affairs. It is believed that the site can be run efficiently, with much below half the present number of employees.

So then, why the plans to expand at a time when the financial position is so poor? In fact if they reduce the staff significantly they can turn the losses into profits.

This point leads us to wonder, if Digg is secretly up to something.

Unnamed sources, associated with the company have said that development and operations engineers are working on a product, which would be similar to Google AdWords, but would allow Digg to insert relevant ads into their news stream.

Users will be able to vote on these ads, thus “ranking” them. Ads which get a higher ranking, will be placed on a higher level, and will be charged a lower rate per click.

If this product is a success, it could definitely help to generate profits. For now Digg has refused to confirm or deny the story.

Twitter users in and around the area started sending eye-witness accounts of the events on a minute by minute basis. Almost 70 – 80 tweets were posted within 5 seconds, and since Twitter has over 6 million users the news was spread really fast.

In fact, even some of the major Television and radio stations such as BBC and CNN used information sent through Twitter and photos posted on Flickr by ordinary citizens who were present at the spot, such as the ones shown above and below here:

Users not only sent out details about the terrorist attack, but also messages asking people to donate blood at the major hospitals, along with the contact numbers to help out in the crisis. Some people also used the site to reassure their near and dear ones about their safety.

Flickr and Twitter were not the only sites used. A new entry was created on Wikipedia, which local users added details to, as they occurred. Somebody else actually pinpointed the location of the buildings where the mayhem in progress on Google Maps.

While the BBC, CNN and every major newspaper has dedicated a lot of space to the events still unfolding in Mumbai, people increasingly seem to turn to user-generated content on sites like Twitter to get the “real”, unfiltered information as it happens.

Important Note: Please remember that these same tools of communication can be used by the terrorists to keep in touch and convey the latest information to each other. Also if citizens post too many details about the rescue operations in progress, the terrorists can benefit from this information, and change their positions or tactics if necessary. Users must therefore exercise caution regarding the information they send out.

Twicco.jp

Previously, Twitter had used Japan as a test market when they first attempted to display ads among user Tweets. What is surprising is that even though Twitter is an American company with a predominantly English-speaking audience, it chooses Japan for its trial runs.

Svetlana at Profy speculates that this preference for experimenting in Japan may have something to do with the fact that in Japan, Twitter is run as part of a joint venture between Twitter and Digital Garage. It is possible that their partners may wish to try out new things, which Twitter does not wish to use elsewhere. The launch was discovered by Loic Le Meur.

Twicco allows a user to create and follow various groups. Following groups is just like tracking companies or events on Twitter.

While Twicco is a separate site and service by itself at present, it is entirely possible that Twitter may integrate it into the mainstream offering at some stage. Feedback received from Japanese users will likely be used to decide the future of this service, i.e. based on the response received in Japan, Twitter may decide whether or not to introduce this facility worldwide.

Ads from Doubleclick are already integrated into Twicco on the right-hand side of the page, rather than between user tweets. User names still link back to the original user profiles on Twitter.

A recent report, from the 304^th Military Intelligence Battalion of the U.S. Army Intelligence, raises the possibility that the popular instant messaging service, Twitter, could be used as a tool by terrorists, as also some other Internet technologies such as Global Positioning System Maps, and voice-changing software.

Noah Shachtman the author of this report has written a chapter titled, “Potential For Terrorist Use Of Twitter”.

It is mentioned here that users of Twitter send out tweets or instant messages to other twitter users, and during the earthquake which occurred in Los Angeles in the month of July, the news reached Twitter users much sooner than it reached those who rely only on traditional forms of news broadcast such as newspapers and television.

This same service Twitter was also used to provide information about police movements, by activists of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.

It is further written that Twitter is already being used by several human rights groups, communists, socialists, religious communities and anarchists to propagate their respective causes and ideologies. The report also includes the term “Hacktivists”, which refers to computer hackers with a political or religious motivation.

The report says “Extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use, by hacktivists and activists for surveillance. This could theoretically be combined with surveillance.”

It is also mentioned that extremists can use Twitter in conjunction with other services such as cell phone pictures or videos, Google Maps etc. to carry out their underhand activities.

Global Positioning system and voice changing software are some other features which could help terrorists to set up their travel plans, mount surveillance etc. These uses are reportedly already being discussed in certain pro Al-Qaeda forums etc.

But as the saying goes ‘there are two sides to every coin.’ While it is entirely possible that these latest Internet technologies can be misused by the wrong people, it is far easier and possible to put these services to good use, such as disseminating information during emergencies, or as a counter-terrorism tool by emergency response teams.

The new Blog Search homepage is very similar to Techmeme and Memeorandum. Top stories relating to a wide variety of currently popular issues ranging from politics to business and technology to entertainment are grouped together and then categorised into one of the 12 categories:

• Top Stories
• Politics
• US
• World
• Business
• Technology
• Video Games
• Science
• Entertainment
• Movies
• Television
• Sports

Memetrackers usually get breaking news stories and emerging trends on blogs much before other major sources such as newspapers, television or radio. Most memetrackers automatically monitor several news sources at the same time, identifying, pooling and analysing different blog posts and then grouping them together, thus allowing users to vote for or read about topics that are of interest to them.

Google’s new technology may help Google News identify interesting stories that run across several websites. However, it is not clear whether Google Blog Search is more efficient and informative than other memetrackers. That will ultimately depend on the frequency with which updates are conducted and the sources they will be tracking.

While Google is believed to have a wider network than other memetrackers, spam posts have already managed to enter their homepage, which is obviously not a good sign. The search giant will have to work hard if they wish to overtake the already established leader in the business, Techmeme. Last year the New York Times tried to do so, but didn’t quite succeed.

The reason for this change is purely financial.

When Twitter receives a message from a user, they forward the message to several other users, for which they have to pay the mobile operators. As the popularity of Twitter increases, so does the cost to send these updates via SMS. So far, Twitter bore the cost, instead of passing it on to the users.

In countries like USA, Canada, and India, Twitter has reached a cost-effective understanding with local operators. Hence, the services will continue unhindered in these countries.

However, they have not been able to reach such an understanding in other places, as yet. While it is not financially practical to continue the SMS update service themselves, Twitter does not wish to burden users by passing on the costs to them either. Instead, they have decided to discontinue the service altogether.

Users can still access their updates through other methods such as Twitter Mobile (m.twitter.com), TwitterMail and TwitterBerry.

SMS is not the first service to be stopped by Twitter. The immensely popular micro-blogging platform also discontinued their instant messenger link not too long ago. It looks as though they will have to find ways of monetization soon or they could be heading downhill.

Discussions with mobile operators in several countries in Asia, Europe and North and South America are, however, apparently underway to further expand the Twitter SMS network across the globe so that users can send and receive long distance updates at reasonable rates.

The Recommendation Engine is a suggestion tool that shows users new content on the site that they may be interested in. The Digg technicians found that it was not an easy task for users to find stories that would be of importance to them, as the ‘Upcoming’ section of Digg now receives an input of over 16,000 new articles on a daily basis.
Through the services of the Recommendation Engine, Digg recommends articles that a particular user may be interested in, based on records of the user’s past Digging activity. In other words, the type of stories that a person has been inclined to Digg in the past are more likely to be shown.

Users are categorised into groups of “Diggers like you”. This enables users to find other like-minded Diggers and then send stories to one another. The list of ‘Diggers like you’ is visible in the right hand column on the page, along with a compatibility rating.

Now that this trial has been going on for a month, Digg has released some stats about the trial, which are very encouraging. They find that Digging activity has gone up by about 40 percent since the launch of the Recommendation Engine.

The Recommendation Engine generates about 54 million recommendations at any given time, with each user receiving nearly 200 recommendations, from an average of 34 people in that group of ‘Diggers like you’.

Digg reports that interaction between friends has also gone up, by nearly 24 percent, and the comments received on the site have gone up by 11 percent.

Based on feedback received by Digg, they will be making some further improvements in the format by including more stories in the Recommendation Engine widget, on the homepage, lengthening the time frame of the Digging window from its current setting of 30 days and making changes in the back-end algorithm to make better recommendations to users.

Time and again the site has been the first to report some world event or breaking news. The latest example of this quick reporting is the earthquake which occurred around Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.

The first update from Twitter followed only seconds after the event occurred. By the time the first official news of the earthquake emerged, about 4 minutes later, there were already thousands of Twitter updates.

Most news agencies that get their information from the Associated Press or similar news wire services, received their first feed about 9 minutes after the incident, by which time Twitter users had started twittering the information to their contacts from wherever they happened to be at that point in time.

It is only fair to mention, as pointed out by Zoli Erdos, that the news agencies have the added responsibility of verifying the facts of an event before reporting them, and they also have to give in-depth reports, all of which takes time, while Twitter does not carry that burden on its shoulders.

Twitter says that it is the real-time aspect of sending and receiving their updates, whether they are related to world events, or personal notes between friends or professionals, or any other form of communication, that is their motivating factor.

To illustrate their point, Twitter even put up a graph displaying the timeline of when news of the California earthquake was delivered on various channels:

The two firms were in an advanced stage of negotiations, and the price being quoted was in the range of $200 million.

Google was looking into the technical and financial aspects of Digg. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains that usually, by this stage the buyer knows pretty well what they are getting into, but since there is no firm commitment even at the term sheet stage, it is always possible to walk out for any reason.

No official reason has been given for calling off the deal at this late stage of discussions, but one undisclosed source says that it was due to some technical glitch, that the deal did not materialize, while another source reports that there were differences of perspective and ideology between the two companies, that led to the break down of talks.

It is possible, according to Arnold Zafra at Search Engine Journal, that Google just realised that this deal may not really help them to generate more revenue, which would obviously be their bottom line.

Whatever the reason may be, it looks as though Digg has been ditched at the last minute, yet again, and this might make it difficult for them to find a new buyer, as most companies would wonder what the problem was. Digg are supposedly looking to Allen & Co. to help them get some new financing for now.

In what seems like more than just a coincidence, Google started testing a Digg-like voting system for its own organic search results just last week. One might almost wonder – even though it obviously would not be the case – could Google have just freely borrowed ideas from Digg and then walked away once they got what they needed?

According to the study, of the 500 people surveyed, 57% were found to use CNN, for news-related searches while 53% used Google. They were followed by MSNBC with 41%, Yahoo with 40% and MSN.com with 31%.

Further analysis of the study reveal, that one third of the participants said they could find a relevant news video, to their query, at the first attempt, most of the time, while another one third said, they could find the most up-to-date news most of the time, at the first attempt itself.

36% of the participants said, they were Very Likely, to watch a news video, which was listed on a search results page, while they were searching for a news story.

35% of them said they were Very Likely to watch a news video, embedded in a news article.

33% of the respondents felt that they would like to watch more videos in search results, while 20% disagreed with this view, and 47% were neutral.

It was also found that, 51% of people watch video news for under 1 hour a week, while 49% watch video news for over 1 hour a week, and only about 25% watch video news for over 3 hours a week.

79% of users use Search to know the local news. Of these 42% use the local station name as a query, 31% use the city name and 17% use the zip code of the area.

However it was found that TV still beats the Internet as a primary source of news.

Two thirds of the participants in this study were aged between 35 and 64 years, and more than one third of these had an income of over $100,000 per year.

Live News Search originally served as a plain search service that focused on news stories. The Live News Search homepage contained no more than a search box and a short list of popular current news searches. However, since the growth in popularity of Google News as a news portal, Microsoft has decided to expand the capabilities of their News Search site.

News stories will now get categorised into ten sub-topics in the USA. These are: Top Stories, World, U.S., Local, Business, Politics, Entertainment, Sports, SciTech and Health. The updated version is not currently available to UK users.

Several new features have been added to the News search service to satisfy customer needs and to improve the overall user experience. Some of the highlights are:

1. Aggregated news
   Users can now browse through the latest headlines in a manner similar to that on Google News. Breaking news is placed prominently so that users are always informed of the latest developments. Stories will be grouped according to categories.
2. Localisation
   Local news will be presented across all states in the U.S.A. When the update is rolled out in Europe, the local news feature will provide information specific to individual countries.
3. Multimedia
   Various forms of multimedia including video and images will be accessible through smart-motion thumbnails, so that visitors can read the headlines and watch video footage at the same time.

In effect, the news search page will now contain local, national and international news along with multimedia all at once. For those interested in further details, they can either click ‘more on this story’ or query a topic in the search box. The news search results can also be filtered according to the user’s location and by source.

Suggestions on related topics will also be offered. Articles will be grouped by date. Related videos will be directly available. Further innovations such as the inclusion of blogs are in the planning stages. RSS support is also planned in the near future.

Coverage will also be improved drastically, as Live News will now be powered with information from over 2,000 sources as against only about a 100 in the past.

Live News Search

http://news.ask.com/news

Stories on BigNews will be graded by a ‘BigFactor’, which is based on various indicators such as how recently the event occurred, availability of photographs, the impact created by it, the number of links generated, etc. Unlike Digg though, viewer’s votes will not be allowed to directly affect the story’s rankings.

BigNews will provide top stories to Digg. In return, the top 5 Digg stories and 5 Digg articles that have not garnered any votes yet will be featured at the bottom of the BigNews page. A Blogviews section placed on the right, alongside the main stories, will highlight the latest posts and topics being discussed from popular sites like TechCrunch, CNN, USA Today and The Hollywood Gossip.

Every story on BigNews will include a BigFactor counter and a “Track” button on the upper right hand corner. Passing the mouse over the counter reveals information about the various factors contributing to the score. Clicking on the “Track” button opens a drop down list of popular news aggregators where the story can be followed, including Google, Yahoo! and even regular RSS. The story snippet also cites sources from which the story has been collected.

Ask have implemented this new sub-domain keeping in mind the true spirit of Universal Search. On the homepage visitors can view top news stories, blogs, videos, images and even Digg stories. In contrast, most of the other news aggregator sites stick to one or two result formats, usually text and images.

According to Ask.com, BigNews is a site for people who like to see different viewpoints to their story. For starters BigNews is reported to have more than 10,000 sources. Prominent among them are, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and MSNBC. BigNews has not yet released details on how other publishers can get add their news content. It is expected that such features will be made available shortly.

At present applications can publish alerts to the news feed whenever a user profile gets updated, whether this is done by the user themselves or due to a third-party action via an application on the user’s profile. For example, if a user receives a virtual gift from a friend, the application can publish this to the news feed, even though the user has not done anything themselves.

In a month’s time, passive events, or third party reporting of an act will not be allowed to be published to the news feed. This is because Facebook wants to reserve its most valuable feature, which gets the most user eyeballs, to maintain the highest standards and only publish stories that are relevant to user activity, rather than publishing poorly masked promotional activity from third-party providers.

Technical details about the change in policy can be found on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook expects all developers to discontinue usage of the old, passive format of reporting, at the earliest. They may contact their users or use other means to enforce the necessary changes if they think it appropriate to do so.

Ultimately, this is good news for users. It will not only improve their experience on Facebook, but also shows that Facebook has been listening to user feedback provided via the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘x’ rating icons alongside every news feed item.

Here are the top stories about Facebook this week:

1. Mon 22 Oct: Valleywag reports that Facebook has started rolling out its new advertising system that allows advertisers to target demographically as well as by keywords. The new system is rumoured to even deliver exact potential profiles that can be targeted by a given demographic selection.
2. Tue 23 Oct: Google News launch a Facebook app. Google claim the app is well received, but it doesn’t quite cut it, in our eyes. Elsewhere, Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo! said that they are not interested in acquiring Facebook. In his words, “Yahoo can’t be Facebook tomorrow, and we don’t want to be Facebook.”
3. Wed 24 Oct: Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft has acquired an equity stake of 1.6 per cent of Facebook for $240 Million, valuing the company at $15 Billion, which is 500 times its estimated 2007 earnings of $30 million.
4. Thu 25 Oct: Reuters reports that Facebook is seeking to raise another $260 million in financing from hedge funds and private equity investors, in addition to the funding received from Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal says that an announcement of further funding is just days away.
5. Fri 26 Oct: Financial Times reports further that Facebook is looking for additional investment in order to hire 400 new staff, buy more computers and invest in building a new advertising system.

The recent investments make Facebook the highest valuation of any private equity deal ever. Social networking has its detractors. But at present there’s little Facebook could do wrong. Some have even gone so far as to wonder whether social network marketing could be the next SEO.

http://apps.facebook.com/googlenews

Most Facebook apps are targeted at winning space on the user profile page. Visitors to a profile often pick up apps that they like and post them to their own profiles. The smartest way that most apps spread, though, is by prompting users to invite their friends at the time of installation.

Inviting friends to use the new app on one’s profile makes sense. Most apps require the user’s friends to interact by commenting, selecting values or posting photographs etc on the user’s profile. In order to interact with an app, the friends are often required to install the app themselves, which creates a great viral push for the app, and its associated brand.

Google News’ app takes a more docile approach. Once a user installs it, there’s a good chance he/she might never see it again. The problem is two-fold:

1. The app is designed as a stand-alone page
   Unlike most Facebook apps that go on the profile page, the Google News app is meant to be a stand-alone news page that features a user’s favourite news topics and top stories. This means that the app in itself cannot be placed on the profile page for everyone to look at. Only profile visitors who see the Google News icon snuck on the side in the list of apps might realise a user is subscribed to the app.
    
2. Sharing the app is not automatically prompted
   When a Facebook user installs Google News, the program does not automatically prompt the user to share the app with friends. In fact, the only prompt to share a story is located on the top right of each story in the “Share” link, which then gives the option to send the story to a friend or place it on the profile page.

Social networks just don’t seem to be Google’s forté. Orkut is nowhere near as successful as they’d like it to be. And now their official foray into Facebook has floundered at the very beginning. Perhaps a few more big acquisitions might solve that?

An official post on the Live Search Blog claims that Microsoft listened to feedback on the blog, analysed their search data and spoke to thousands of users in order to deliver a cutting edge search product. Their efforts were focused on reducing page load times, streamlining the look and feel, providing more high-interest content in the video, local, entertainment, shopping, and health verticals and relevance – improving the ranking algorithm, stop-word handling and auto-spell correction.

“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”

Comparing the new Live Search with Ask.com’s brilliant new interface immediately brings to light how far behind Microsoft actually are:

Searching for the artist ‘Madonna’ on Live Search produces a page with a feature similar to the Google / Yahoo! OneBox. Searches for entertainers bring back a Celebrity xRank, up to 4 images and quick links to view videos, news and other snippets of relevant information. Clicking on the xRank links brings users to the following page:

Video search is a bit more impressive. Users can actually preview the results within the same window by simply moving the mouse over the image.

Generic product searches deliver a page with images of four products with average user ratings, the product names and price ranges below each item. Searches for specific products or brands result in a page with details such as user reviews at a glance, average user ratings, a product image, description and price range and a link to buy it on MSN Shopping.

Microsoft is open to feedback on the design of their new search results pages. Alongside each new feature a pair of links allows users to vote on whether they found it useful or not. The bottom of the page includes a link to provide feedback and search results that include semantic variations of the query include an option to search with only the exact query string.

Individual enhancements on the new Live Search might be very well thought out, but the experience does not yet give the effect of seamlessness that Google’s Universal Search or Ask.com currently give their users. Live Search still needs to master the ability to provide users a variety of relevant results within the page, rather than just the OneBox.