Peter Kafka from All Things Digital has provided some details about the Twitter advertising service that were revealed to him by “people who have been briefed by the company’”.

According to the details available, ads on Twitter will be linked to the search service, so that only users who search for something on Twitter will see related ads. Other users will not see ads in their regular Twitter stream.

Ads will also be distributed by third party software and Twitter will share the revenue generated from these ads with the application developers.

Twitter ads will continue to use the standard Twitter format – 140 characters of text.

Initially, Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers, but will change to a self-serve model similar to Google AdWords in due time.

Kafka cautions that the ad platform is still in the testing stages and a date has not yet been set for its launch. It is expected to be within the first six months of this year.

It is not yet known how advertisers will buy ads and what sort of pricing models will be made available – whether the pricing will be based on a cost-per-click basis or in some other way.

If search is to be Twitter’s sole source of revenue, their search platform needs to be significantly redefined in order to make it more useful and effective. Twitter will also need to gather more data about their users in order to better target the ads.

In 2008, 45% of users thought that the opinion of their friends was trustworthy. Now, only 25% of them think so.

Other sources that have lost credibility in varying degrees are TV (lost 23 points), radio and newspapers (lost 20 points) and company spokespersons (lost 6 points). The employees of various companies who engage in discussions with consumers about their products have also lost credibility (lost 3 points).

Quite surprisingly, the CEOs of various companies, who are now coming forward to speak about their companies and products, are now gaining the trust of users (up from 17% to 26%).

Other sources showing an increase in consumer trust are government officials, analysts, NGO representatives and academic authorities.

Part of the reason for users losing faith in word-of-mouth advertising could be the greater awareness about spokespersons receiving compensation from the companies.

Richard Edelman, CEO and President of Edelman thinks this a sign of the changing times. People now need endorsements from several different sources before they start believing in a product.

Marketers who have started devoting a lot of time and money, to these social networks may now have to rethink and change their strategy before it is too late.

Currently, ’staying connected’ means having to check status messages, tweets, update streams etc. all of which can be pretty time consuming and at times confusing for users.

Google is making use of its experience in the field of organising information, to sort out the mess that users often find themselves in.

Google Buzz has been launched as a news service built into Gmail on PCs and mobiles. Buzz makes use of the users list of contacts, in their address book, and thus automatically lets users follow the people whom they email or chat with most often. The service integrates photos, videos and links that can be shared in real-time, either publicly or privately as per the users requirements.

Buzz, when first introduced a few days ago, did not give users a choice, thus inviting criticism regarding the lack of privacy, since users do not always want all their contacts to receive all their updates and vice versa. Google has now introduced an auto-suggest feature, instead of the earlier auto-follow feature.

Other services like Flickr and Twitter can also be accessed through Buzz.

While it seems like an interesting service, there are many who feel that Google Buzz will not really simplify the process of social networking. Moreover, the poor choice of name – Google Buzz sounds like a rip-off of Yahoo! Buzz – and the initial teething problems seem to have put people off the service already.

The fact that Buzz is integrated into Gmail, though, might make it win fans and users in the long run, simply because it’s already there , so long as Google continues to make improvements and doesn’t alienate any more users.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be providing Facebook users with a more detailed search experience. Facebook users will now have full access to several features that are available on Bing, instead of just a few links as they previously had.

This means that Facebook users will get better search results, with the use of the new tools now available to them.

Microsoft has a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which they had bought for $240 million about two years ago allowing search integration between Bing and Facebook in the U.S. This search integration will now be available to Facebook users all over the world.

So far, Bing has been providing display ads on Facebook, but it has been mutually decided that from now on, Facebook will provide their own display ads. They can better decide what ads will be best suited tot heir website. Microsoft will, however, continue to provide search ads to Facebook and Facebook search results will of course continue to be powered exclusively by Bing.

This has been a good time for Facebook, as they will not only earn more revenue through the display ads, but they are also completing six years of social networking. They now have about 400 million users, which is a landmark in itself, and the figure has almost doubled over the last year.

It is also expected that Facebook will set up its own full-fledged webmail product, and with more and more people spending so much time on Facebook, they could soon become the top news source on the Internet.

The survey was answered by 800 teenagers between 12 to 17 years of age and 2,253 young adults between 18 and 29 years of age. This is the section of the population that is a key indicator of future technology trends.

The study reveals that while blogging was a popular activity in 2006, with about 28% of the users indulging in it; in 2009, only 14% of teenagers and 15% of young adults were participating in blogs.

In the past, MySpace, which was then the most popular social network encouraged blogging, but Facebook which has now taken over the number one spot among social networks, advocates the use of short status updates. It has been found that in 2009, only 48% of young adults used MySpace, compared to 73% who used Facebook.

The study also reveals that Twitter has not yet caught the fancy of teenagers like Facebook has managed to do. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter and the vast majority (66%) of teenagers prefer text messaging.

That social networks are growing, in general, is obvious from the fact that in 2008, about 42% of those surveyed used more than one social network, while in 2009, 52% did so.

Among adults aged 30 or more, only about 40% used social networks in 2009, while blogging activity among them increased marginally from 7% to 11%.

The survey, which was conducted in Oct – Nov 2009by by Creston plc, found that 80% of the respondents felt that social media does not have any impact on their brands at the current moment.

Surprisingly, it was also found that so far, almost two-thirds of marketers surveyed had no plans to introduce social media into their marketing strategy.

Only 14% of those interviewed, agreed that social media has an important role to play in marketing at present, and affects their brand reputation. The same attitude to social media was also seen with respect to product development and gaining new customers.

Two-thirds of those surveyed also felt that their company’s board of directors did not understand social media, and 88% said the board chooses not to support social media mfarketing efforts.

While a third of the marketers felt that they should take the lead regarding social media, others were not clear about who should lead.

Surprisingly, though, 88% believe that it will have an effect on their business in future. 71% believe it will affect market share. 79% believe it will affect customer retention and acquisition and 70% believe it will last in the long run and is not just a passing fad.

Don Elgie, CEO of Creston plc said, “80% of UK’s online population are now using social media, and the concern is that many marketing professionals are ignoring the impact social media activity could have right now on both their business and their own careers.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

Twitter’s current policy classifies an account as inactive if it has not been updated or logged into in the last six months.

According to The Next Web, if this plan is put into action, all accounts that have been dormant for six months or more will automatically be considered inactive and their usernames will then be available to any other interested users. This could lead to a real rush to claim some catchy usernames for SEO purposes.

Users who wish to retain their Twitter accounts should make sure they update or log in to their accounts at least once in six months.

In the past, it was possible to access such inactive usernames by providing details of the inactive account to Twitter. Later, however, the service had been discontinued.

While a spokesperson from Twitter has admitted that Twitter is considering this move, no details regarding an exact date for this are available as yet.

The new service will enable third-party websites to integrate features of Twitter directly and easily into their own websites.

This description of the yet-to-be-launched service sounds suspiciously similar to Facebook Connect, which was launched in 2008 and has been responsible, to an extent, for the massive growth that Facebook has continued to enjoy in the last year and a half.

According to reports from Facebook, Facebook Connect has been integrated into 80,000 different websites, resulting in Facebook receiving 60 million users who connect to Facebook through these websites every month. In fact, for many of these websites, Facebook Connect is the only means for new users to create an account and then log into it.

Facebook Connect has a lot of widgets, through which Facebook features are brought directly to these sites.

Twitter too has a good few features offered to users via the Twitter API, which allows other sites to authenticate users and pull and publish data. The process of doing so, is however not as simple as that of Facebook Connect.

With the introduction of the new system, the process of integrating Twitter will become easier for webmasters, thereby spurring the growth of Twitter further.

Update: Facebook Mimics Twitter Right Back

In a comical twist of strategy, Facebook has just launched a feature very similar to Twitter’s retweets. Users can now “retweet” updates from their friends by clicking on a ‘Share’ link in their Facebook news feed.

The popular microblogging site which started out about two and a half years ago, was initially focused only on building up their popularity by offering a free micro-blogging service to their users. Recently they have changed focus and started paying attention to monetisation.

Twitter has put up job postings that indicate that the priority for the new recruits would be “cutting edge monetization projects”.

Of the 26 jobs on offer, 4 are specifically devoted to monetising the site. Another 2 jobs are aimed at “striking licensing deals” with other sites.

Twitter has now reached a stage where they have become extremely popular. They know that they must now become self-sufficient if they want to continue to grow. They currently have about 120 employees, who constitute the company’s second largest source of expenses.

In October last year, Twitter made licensing deals with Google and Microsoft, allowing their tweets to appear on the search engine results page. These deals earned them $25 million, helping them to post a small profit then, but further innovation is a must for continued growth.

Hollesley Bay prison, where Lynch was being held is an open, or minimum security prison. Moreover, Lynch was near the end of his sentence and was out on a day pass to help him integrate back into society. The act of escaping was not particularly daring.

What is really daring, however, is the fact that instead of trying to stay out of the limelight he has drawn a lot of media attention towards himself.

Lynch keeps posting recent pictures of himself, along with details about his meals or his plans for the day. He also makes rude comments about the police regularly on his Facebook Page.

During Christmas, he wrote about how he would take his “little princess” to a particular mall, so she could meet Santa Claus. Some time later, he added another update saying that he was already in that mall and was walking around with a big Winnie The Pooh in his hands. He later mentioned his plans to attend a New Year’s Eve party to be held in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

The police, on their part, have claimed to be working with Facebook to track down the IP address from which he operates and hope to catch him soon.

What seems really appalling however, is the fact that he has collected over 40,000 fans who regularly view his profile page and send him fan mail. People have even designed T-shirts and a song in his honour!

Some other Facebook users have been sending him hate mail, and trying to remind his fans that they are honouring a criminal. On his part, Craig Lynch has asked these “haters” to get off his back and to stop saying that he hit and robbed an old lady, as he claims to have done no such thing.

Facebook Page for Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch

For their part, Twitter has been talking about starting premium accounts for businesses that use Twitter, and they have recently rolled out a service called Contributors to help these businesses. So far, though, there has not been much in terms of visible monetisation.

However, it turns out that Twitter has already made a profit for the year 2009.

Bloomberg has revealed that according to some reliable but undisclosed sources, Twitter earned $25 million this year from the search deals they made with Google and Bing.

According to the terms of this deal, messages posted on Twitter will be included as part of the search results on both Google and Microsoft’s search engines whenever they are relevant.

Google is believed to have paid Twitter $15 million for this facility, while Microsoft has supposedly paid $10 million.

The major expenses Twitter incurs are from payments they make to telecommunication companies to distribute tweets to all their users, and employee salaries.

Twitter has cleverly managed to bring down the telecommunication costs because of their growing popularity, so now employee salaries are the largest expense they face. If they limit the number of personnel they employ, they will continue to be profitable.

The total of these expenses in 2009 was between $20 – 25 million, thus allowing Twitter to show a small profit in their account books for the year.

It is not currently known whether the deals with Google and Microsoft will provide a continuous stream of revenue or not. Moreover, if they intend to grow, Twitter will have to seriously continue to look for other ways to monetise their site.

While they want to keep it a free service for all ordinary users, they do want to monetise the businesses that have been effectively using Twitter as a convenient means of communication with their clients.

They have already mentioned offering specialised premium accounts to these businesses. Recently, Twitter has launched a new feature in beta. This feature is called ‘Contributors’.

This service will better allow businesses to manage several of their contributors through a single account. The username of the contributor will be attached to the byline of the tweet sent out by the business, thus making the interaction between the business and the client more personalized.

For instance, if Twitter co-founder Biz Stone were invited to tweet on behalf of Twitter, then the tweet from @Twitter would include his username @Biz, in the byline, to let users know the people in the organisation which they are dealing with.

This feature will be available on the Web as well as on APIs and it will further enhance existing Twitter business apps such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

Contributors is still in the developmental stages and hence it has not yet been made available to all. It is currently being tried out by a few businesses and will be rolled out to all others after it has been fine tuned.

This integration will allow users to access Friend Connect directly when they log in to their Twitter account. In other words, a user will have access to any of the over nine million sites using Google Friend Connect, through their Twitter accounts.

The Twitter profile of the user will be automatically linked to Friend Connect and it will be possible to tweet about the new site membership, without leaving the site. Users will now be able to hold discussions by posting comments on third-party sites and they will also be able to invite new friends to join the site / group through Twitter.

If a site is already linked to Friend Connect, users can now access it via their Google login as well as through Twitter.

This move will now make Friend Connect fairly similar to Facebook Connect, and it will also provide some competition to Yahoo!, which has recently announced integration with Facebook Connect.

Yahoo! users will be able to view the activities of their Facebook friends on Yahoo! and at the same time Yahoo! content will be accessible on Facebook.

This integration will make it possible for Yahoo! users (500 million across the globe) to keep in touch with all their friends and access their social activities from a single site.

Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Finance and Flickr will all be accessible directly through Facebook Connect and users will have the choice of updating their status messages either from Facebook itself or through any of the Yahoo! sites.

Due to this integration users will be able to add comments, share news with each other or access their friend’s news feeds by accessing Facebook through Yahoo!, thus giving a much larger audience to Yahoo!

For a while now, Yahoo! had been discussing the possibility of integrating their social features such as email, address book and messenger with each other, but as of now they have decided to simply outsource these services to Facebook. They have thus lost the opportunity to monetise their own social network.

What is more, the police who have to track down these criminals are not far behind. They too are making use of the same medium to communicate.

Only last week, the NY Daily News reported that a young boy who was shot in the leg was probably the target of a battle originated on Twitter by a gang called Original Young Gangsters.

Gangs exchanging threats on Twitter

Not only are gangsters planning their strategy on Twitter, they are also using the medium to bait their rivals by sending out challenging messages on Twitter.

The police, on the other hand, are using Twitter not only to communicate with each other but also to locate clues about these gangs and to try and prevent crimes before they occur.

New generation gangsters are very tech-savvy, just like any other youngsters, and like to make use of the latest technology available. They are well aware of the fact that their communications over Twitter can be seen by anybody, but that does not seem to deter most of them. On the contrary it seems to excite them more! While some protect their tweets a number of others keep their Twitter profiles open for the world (and the police) to read.

In fact, it has been learnt that in the U.S. and U.K. close to 1 million new users have signed up for the Last.fm service through Xbox LIVE during just the first week of introduction of the service.

1 million new users is definitely a huge number by any standards. According to sources, it is the largest growth spurt seen by Last.fm ever since the service was introduced way back in 2002. The total number of Xbox 360 users is in the range of 20 million, so an addition of 1 million in just 1 week, is all the more noteworthy.

It has also been reported that 120 million minutes of music have been accessed on Last.fm since the integration with Xbox 360 took place last week.

Xbox 360 can now claim to have avenues of entertainment, other than their gaming services.

Xbox LIVE Silver members have been given a free trial offer of 180 minutes free music streaming time, while Gold members have been given unlimited access. Another option that has been offered to users is an additional Last.fm subscription at $3/month for ad-free, uninterrupted music.

While the new service is interesting, it is not possible for users to listen to the music while gaming, though this might become possible in the future.

During a talk with the BBC, Biz Stone said that Twitter was looking at starting commercial accounts. He was, of course, quick to reassure users that “Twitter will always be free to everyone. But you will be able to pay for an added layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account – get some feedback, some analytics, become a better Twitterer.

It is expected that these commercial accounts will be introduced before the end of the current year.

Biz Stone also said that the firm was considering the possibility of licensing and syndicating their data. He feels that giving away their real-time data feed to search engines like Bing and Google would help those search engines provide a better search experience.

While Twitter showed a phenomenal growth curve from just 4.75 million users to 7 million between February 2008 and February 2009 (according to Nielsen Online), its growth has now slowed down, at least in North America.

Mr. Stone, however, countered this by saying that from an international and mobile perspective they continue to grow very fast.

He reminded users that Twitter had initially started out as messaging service, which was later extended to the Web. He expects most of their future growth to come from mobile.

In fact, an earlier report leaked from the company showed that they hope to have 1 billion users by 2013.

The introduction of paid accounts will not only bring about some direct monetisation, but will also generate more interest among businesses and marketers, thus helping further growth.

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.

Orange U.K. users will now be able to send picture messages to each other, in addition to the usual text messages, through 86444 – the Twitter SMS number. Orange has created a new sub domain, called Snapshot, for this purpose:

Snapshot by Orange

Users who don’t currently use Twitter with Text Messaging will, have to first send the message saying ‘START’ to 86444. The same number is currently also used to tweet via SMS from the Vodafone and O2 networks and will be used for MMS tweeting as well.

Once the service has started, users will be able to click a photo on their mobile phone and then send it via MMS to 86444. The pictures will appear on the Orange Snapshot site and will be tweeted with a link to the image on the user’s Twitter stream.

Snapshot is similar in concept to Twitpic, one of the most popular photo-sharing applications associated with Twitter. The only advantage that Orange has is that their users will be able to send MMS tweets to the standard Twitter mobile number directly from their handsets.

Users will not be required to pay any additional fees to Twitter, for this service. Only the usual messaging charges of the service provider will apply.

As part of the deal between Twitter and Orange, Twitter will also be part of the Social Life service, along with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This is a service provided by Orange that allows mobile users to access all these social networks with a single log-in.

While Orange, Vodafone and O2 are now quite tuned in to Twitter, T-Mobile and 3 are yet to follow suit.

Realtime search service OneRiot, which is in talks with Yahoo! to provide them with realtime search, is also tying up with mobile search engine, Taptu, to deliver realtime search services to mobile Internet users. Taptu will make use of OneRiot’s API to provide these realtime search results.

OneRiot has already started developing additional APIs that will be able to provide relevant ads on mobile handsets, thus monetising the service. The service collects realtime results from various sources such as Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Taptu has added a new feature on it homepage, which is essentially a search engine interface compatible with mobile browsers. The homepage has a search box with options to search the Web, Images and now, ‘Buzz’, which is where the realtime search results will be provided.

Buzz search is currently available on all iPhone, iPod Touch, G1 (Android), Blackberry Storm 1, Nokia N97 and 5800 handsets. All other devices still show the old search interface, which provides the option of ‘All’, images, video and music searches.

Until now, mobile users could access realtime search results by searching for trending topics on Twitter. However, this new service will certainly be more direct and efficient.

Mobile users with compatible handsets can test the service at:

www.taptu.com

The study was carried out across 2,948 professionals in North America and Canada.

The main aims of the study were to find the top social media resources used for business info, which departments drive the most corporate social media initiatives, the top business social media initiatives, how well companies can actually measure their success and rating of the top social media sites for business use.

The results provide an insight into how businesses use the social media at work.

It was found that webinars and podcasts are the most popular social media resources for business professionals and were used by 69% of the participants of the survey.

Ratings and reviews of business products and services were used by 62% of business social media users, as were company profiles on social media sites.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site for business owners too. 83% of business to consumer (B2C) businesses maintain one or more profiles on Facebook, while only 45% do so on Twitter. Business to business (B2B) companies, on the other hand, have profiles on both sites in more or less equal proportion – 77% on Facebook and 73% on Twitter.

Participants using social media in their day-to-day jobs visit company or brand profiles on social sites 62% of the time and 55% of them search for business information on the social sites.

Consultants and marketing communications professionals in small and micro companies use social media for business information most often, while, surprisingly, IT professionals do so the least.

The average company is planning, developing or running 7 different social media initiatives. 71% of these companies and 65% of staff have less than 2 years experience in social media business.

Since building brand awareness and reputation and reputation are top priorities, it does not seem like a very good idea for businesses to restrict employee access to social networks, which is reportedly the case with almost 90% of companies.

Graphing Twitters Decline on Compete.com

The graph above, taken from Compete.com shows a clear decline in the total number of visits over the last three months and a slight decline in the number of unique visitors to the site in the last month.

As far as the subject of Twitter competing with Facebook is concerned, quite contrary to the general expectation that Twitter may soon overtake Facebook, Twitter is actually way behind Facebook in the race, and seems to be losing ground, as can be seen in the graph below:

Comparing Twitter’s Decline to Facebook ’s rise, based on Alexa traffic ranks

While neither Compete.com nor Alexa.com’s numbers areprecise, they do give a very good general idea of trends, and in both cases, the trend for Twitter over the last month has been downward.

On October 24th Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer studied the number of U.S. Internet visits to both Twitter and Facebook. He found that while Facebook accounts for 6.1% of the market share, Twitter has only 0.14%.

Tancer also says that “At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus, referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per Twitter account is 1”.

The final admission that Twitter is not doing too well at present comes from none other than its CEO, Evan Williams, who told CNN, “It’s grown a little bit slower lately, but we have some things in the works that we think will change that.”

We can only wait and watch to see if that actually happens.

IT service company, Morse, recently conducted a study to find out the amount of time employees spend on various social networks when they should have been working instead.

The survey was conducted across 1,460 office workers. The results of the survey are quite appalling at first glance to say the least. They have come to the conclusion that employees spend 40 minutes every week on social networks, when they should have been concentrating on more official matters. The financial cost to their employers is estimated to be about $2.25 billion a year.

Another study claims that Facebook alone costs ₤130m a day in the U.K. and 233 million hours are lost every month due to this, while a study in the U.S. found that just web surfing costs U.S. $63 billion per year.

While these figures are indeed serious, and employers would be justified in trying to look for ways to cut their losses, it is not possible to plug the holes completely.

Employers would do well to remember that employees are bound to take some breaks from time to time. In fact, 40 minutes a week is less than 10 minutes a day for a typical 5-day working week. It is also possible that a short break may refresh an employee and inspire him or her to work better and be even more productive than usual, which is beneficial to the employer.

Thus it may seem advisable to overlook such lapses as long as they remain within reasonable limits.

Qi Lu said that Microsoft was in talks with Twitter to introduce real time search on Bing.

The new features due to be Launched have been labeled ‘Bing Wave 2’.

He also provided a demo of what the new search results would look like. Apparently the new service will incorporate the best features of both Bing and Twitter.

Microsoft will now have access to all of Twitter’s public feeds, and so, when a user conducts a Twitter search on Bing, they will not only see the most recent tweets and top links, but they will also have the various search features of Bing. The most recent tweets of Twitter will be constantly updated in real-time on Bing. The results will also have a retweet button, so it will be very easy for users to forward the tweets if they wish to.

Although the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, Qi Lu did admit that this would be a non-exclusive deal, thus fuelling the rumors that Twitter is in talks with Google for a similar deal.

Bing will be able to use Twitter content and will keep track of the number of followers to each tweet, in order to determine the quality and ranking of each tweet. Spam will of course be filtered. Tags will be used to identify the trending topics and Bing will also provide the shortened URL as well as the final URL of the topic.

There has been speculation about similar deals between Bing and Facebook but nothing
has been confirmed on that score as yet.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

In order to enable social sharing of Bing search queries, Microsoft introduced a feature called ‘Bing and Ping’ last month. The service has now been launched in limited beta, with  a handful of users who signed up for the test on Facebook.

Henceforth, whenever one of the beta testers is signed in and searches for something on Bing (U.S. only) and feels that this information would be of interest to their friends, all they need to do is click one of the links to share it with their friends.

Microsoft Bing and Ping

Users can share via Facebook or Twitter or they can email the search result and a link to the SERP. Surprisingly, they have not included the Windows Live service for this sharing.

The service can be used to share things like news reports, recommendations, local movie times and flight status at present. Microsoft has only just started Beta testing this service, and is looking for feedback from users in order to fine tune and expand the service.

Interestingly, Microsoft made quite a blunder while sending out their invites to users for this service. They listed all the email addresses of people who had signed up for the service in the ‘To:’ field, thereby disclosing everyone’s addresses to all the recipients. They tried to set things right soon after, though, by sending an apology letter admitting the error.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

LinkedIn is now going a step further to endear itself to its identified niche market segment by helping corporations recruit appropriate people for various positions. Until now, human resources personnel had to bookmark the portfolios of candidates who seemed to be appropriate or interesting for a particular post, and then save these for reference at a later date when required.

Now LinkedIn has started a new service for their Premium users, called ‘Profile Organizer’. As the name suggests, the service will allow users who pay for advanced features on LinkedIn to bookmark and save the profiles that they find interesting.

Not only can users bookmark interesting profiles, but they can also create files to categorise their contacts. This way, users can have different folders for personnel in different departments, such as manufacturing, sales, marketing etcetera for easy reference at a later date.

These folders can be categorised under different headings such as occupation and location. The details stored in the folders are not accessible to others, so users can make their own notes about each applicant. Details such as the hobbies and interests of a candidate, as also the details of any interaction with them can be stored here.

The service will be available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30 day trial period. Business members will be allowed an upper limit of five folders, while Business Pro and Pro members can create up to 25 folders. Users can test this new service on:

LinkedIn.com/organizer

The new service being provided will be called Nielsen BrandLift.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook says, “Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effective data”.

BrandLift will make use of opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage. The poll will help marketers to understand the opinion users have of a particular brand and thus the likelihood of purchase intent.

According to John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen’s online division, Facebook has now become a vital link between consumers and brands, and with this partnership Nielsen will be able to add tot heir knowledge of media measurement. He further says, “we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”

This survey will help marketers to receive better market data and it will be made available to them sooner which is a great plus point for them.

Facebook will take care to see that individual users are not flooded with too many polls at once. Also no personal identification will be gathered through this poll, thus maintaining user privacy, which should please users.

The survey will consist of two questions put forward to consumers in standard ad positions. The survey will help advertisers to measure brand awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration.

The service has already been used by a few brands such as Proctor & Gambol, and Sony Pictures on a trial basis. They have reported encouraging findings.

The service will be made available to all marketers in due course.

This new feature is a toolbar, which has been christened Sidewiki. With this new toolbar, it will now be possible for all users ranging from an ordinary layperson to an authority on the subject concerned, to put in their own insights to every article on the net. This will help other users to get more information on the given subject.

To further improve the quality of the service, Google has used an algorithm that will allow the most high quality, relevant and appropriate comments to appear at the top of the comments column, and the other comments will come lower down, instead of letting just the latest comments come at the top as is seen with blogs.

Google will also incorporate entries from other relevant posts, blogs and other sources, if they happen to be about the same page that the user has accessed.

This may be Google’s way of staying ahead of the competition, Yahoo1 in particular, which has just launched a new search update feature.

Currently, Google Sidewiki is available on Internet Explorer and also on Mozilla Firefox, and Google is working to make this service available on their own browser, Google Chrome.

Those who wish to use Google Sidewiki can start doing so by going to ‘google.com/sidewiki’, from where they can download the sidewiki toolbar and then add their own comments to the web pages they use by clicking on ‘Write an entry’ after logging into their Google Account. The comments previously entered by others will be displayed in the right hand side column.

Mixx has launched a new site, called TweetMixx, which aims to help users to sort and categorise all types of content, including stories, videos and photos, thus making it easy for users to decide which tweets they want to see and which ones they would likely skip, thus saving valuable time.

Now that almost everybody from VIPs to celebrities and the guy next door are joining Twitter, the site is getting pretty crowded with tweets. Following many people and finding interesting users can be extremely confusing, since tweets are not tagged. It is difficult and very time consuming for users to determine which of the tweets they will find relevant and significant.

The new service from Mixx will allow users to easily find the content that they are interested in, instead of having to sort through thousands of tweets. Users type in keywords they are interested in and TweetMixx provides the most relevant recent tweets.

TweetMixx also provides a shortcut to just the links tweeted by a user’s friends, ignoring all the “pointless babble“.

Shortened URLs are also automatically unpacked and presented as useful links with explanatory titles and descriptions, which can be very handy when trying to decide whether clicking on a link such as http://bit.ly/xpp5L.

Users can send tweets, save pages and check incoming links from their friends on a single dashboard page instead of having to jump from one page to another. When a user receives new tweets, a message at the top of the TweetMixx page says so. To use TweetMixx, users can log in to their Twitter account through OAuth.

While the benefits of TweetMixx for Twitter users have been discussed at length on the service announcement on the Mixx Blog, almost nothing has been said about how the service integrates with Mixx.

TweetMixx Spams Mixx

A bot called TwitterSubmitter on Mixx automatically adds all tweeted stories that get pulled by TweetMixx onto Mixx. When these tweets are listed with further information regarding the links, TweetMixx also provides a count of the number of times the same link has been retweeted and a link saying “Details on Mixx”.

Clicking on the details link brings users to a page on Mixx that shows the very same article, as if a real user had submitted it. However, since the link has actually been submitted by a bot, it hardly ever gets any votes and ends up languishing like spam on the site.

Mixx obviously has the right intentions in mind. They should have thought of a better way to integrate the service and provide more informative content on Mixx, rather than just spamming their own site with every inane tweet possible!

TweetMixx enabling spam on Mixx

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.

In January 2009, Facebook Mobile had a respectable 20 million users, which it had amassed since its launch about three years ago, in 2006. Now, they have suddenly accumulated 65 million users, as reported on The Facebook Blog.

This growth does not look likely to slow down, either, as Facebook has recently introduced Facebook Connect on mobiles.

Logging in on various websites, which is never easy on a mobile handset, will now be made much easier for Facebook users, just as it is on their computers.

Facebook Mobile was first launched as a very basic mobile service in the English language only, with basic features like status updates and photo uploads. The service is now available in more than 60 different languages and has features such as Facebook SMS and several others incorporated in it.

Facebook mobile has two portals – m.facebook.com, which can be used on any handset and x.facebook.com, which is to be used on touch-screen handsets such as the iPhone, Android G1 and Palm.

Stopping link juice from flowing out from Digg to dubious sites became a necessity, in some ways, due to the spread of spammy material on the site.

The nofollow attribute will be added to all external links, comments, user profiles and story pages whose popularity happens to be below a particular threshold limit set by Digg.

Digg submissions that cross the required threshold will automatically have the nofollow attribute removed from the link pointing to the articles.

This way, spam-based content on the site should be reduced, while still allowing good quality content to benefit the content owners with search engine friendly links to the publisher’s site.

A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar.

SEO professionals are mostly in agreement with Digg on this new system, though. It allows the site to give credit where credit is due and not penalise everyone, like Twitter is doing, because of problems created by spammers.

Google uses a similar policy on Knol: Authors who regularly contribute and are thus well-known and trusted get their links freed of nofollow, while those who are new, need to gain the trust required before the nofollow attribute is removed from their links.

Digg’s Nofollow Criteria

Digg has not officially specified, however, what the threshold of reliability is.

As of now, all profile links are nofollowed, even for extremely popular and trusted Digg users, all newly submitted links are also nofollowed, even if they have been submitted by power users and all sponsored links are nofollowed – which was probably done to keep Google happy.

The only links that have nofollow removed from them at present are those that make it to the homepage, category popular pages or sub category popular pages.

Even the most dugg upcoming or ‘Hot In’ category / sub-category stories have the nofollow attribute on them.

The criteria for getting rel=”nofollow” removed from a link, at present, seems to be simply making it reach the ‘Popular’ list, which is the homepage or the individual category / sub-category main pages.

Even at present, various platform developers have been making some advances in this matter, with the help of the very basic APIs available to them. The currently available geolocation based projects are made with the use of the location details filled in by users on their profiles. However, this is not a very reliable and effective way to judge immediate location as users often tweet from multiple locations without updating their location each time.

Twitter will allow users to add in their latitude and longitude if they wish to do so with each tweet. The service will be strictly opt-in, with the default set to ‘off’.

Tweet-level geotagging will be treated differently than the location data entered manually by the user in their profile. Location data in the profile will continue to be used to give a general idea to visitors about where a user is normally based.

Udates to the API will be made available a couple of weeks before launch, to allow third-party app developers to incorporate this new feature. Documentation for the geolocation function in the API is already available.

Location data will be passed in the following format (code):
curl -d “lat=37.780467&long=-122.396762&status=I have arrived” -u user:pass

The W3C geolocation API will be used on m.twitter.com for the launch of the mobile service.

Users who decide to disclose their location will have to opt in on the Twitter website itself, and the location data won’t be stored indefinitely. Third-party applications will not be given the ability to enable / disable the feature via the API in order to avoid rogue apps turning on the feature without a user’s consent.

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, says, “if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet by tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

Placing this choice squarely in the hands of the user is a smart move to avoid the usual problems regarding user privacy and security.

The geolocation service will enable users to follow tweets sent out by people from their neighbourhood or city in addition to tweets from the users they normally follow. This facility would be especially useful, when information needs to be spread urgently, such as in times of crises.

Search results will most likely also reflect location awareness in the near future, once more users opt in to use this feature. This could make Twitter even more useful and much more relevant than Google for real time, on-the-spot searches.

No official date has yet been announced for the launch of this service, though, given the amount of information and developer support available indicates that it should be just a matter of weeks.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

Co-founder Biz Stone announced during an interview with Venturebeat, that Twitter is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts, which will help businesses to increase their profit margins.

To start with, they are likely to begin a service which will provide businesses with detailed analytics, thus allowing them to find out exactly how they are performing on Twitter. Later on they will also develop some business oriented API’s.

Although an exact date has not yet been set for the unveiling of these services, they should begin within the course of this year.

A guide released recently by Twitter, gives guidelines to businesses on how they can use Twitter to find more clients, and pass on good deals etc. In short Twitter is trying to show businesses how they can benefit commercially through Twitter.

They will also be offering ‘certified accounts’ for businesses. This service is already available to a few people.

The new API’s from Twitter will not interfere with or directly compete with existing third party applications.

Biz Stone also says that acquiring other firms is also a definite possibility although they are only two years old.

In spite of all these moves towards monetization, Biz Stone has clarified that Twitter will continue to remain free for individual users.

According to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of TweetMeme, they have served 1.6 billion impressions of their retweet buttons in the last month, and are seeing an average 20% growth from one week to the next.

One of the reasons for the popularity of TweetMeme could be their reliability and innovativeness. The features they currently offer include one-click retweets, RSS and email buttons, a range of plugins and 11 URL shortening services. The retweet functionality comes with basic analytics showing who retweeted and linked to a particular story. This functionality is planned to be expanded in a soon to be launched service that will allow their users to judge the performance of a story.

Among those who currently subscribe to TweetMeme are Mashable, PerezHilton and Techcrunch.

1.6 billion impressions, however, means that the buttons are only viewed 1.6 billion times a month, not actually clicked. The number of clicks on a retweet button are substantially lower.

Halstead informed TechCrunch that the actual number of clicks on the retweet buttons was estimated to be in the region of 6 million a month, which amounts to a click-through rate of just 0.375%.

Retweets have become so popular due to the fact that it is much easier to retweet an article than to actually type out a new tweet or a comment.

Blog owners and publishers use retweet buttons partly to show-off the number of times their article has been mentioned by others, but also to prompt more readers to discuss the post on Twitter.

This second reason, though, seems questionable, given the low click-through rate on these buttons. If, in fact, the retweet button gets clicks from only 3 out of 1,000 viewers on average, it could hurt small blog owners more than help them as it would only serve to highlight the low number of retweets.

Through FriendFeed, it is possible for users to share all sorts of social media updates, such as those on Facebook, Twitter and blogs from one site itself. It will now be easier for Facebook users to access updates from other platforms. Users won’t need different applications or APIs to access updates, as they had to do earlier.

Facebook has already started rolling out FriendFeed features to users and it should be available to all Facebook users within the next few days. Then, users will be able to see live activity feeds from all their friends who allow their updates to be publicly accessed.

Facebook has been trying to compete with Twitter as far as real-time indexing of search results is concerned, but have not yet been very effective there. FriendFeed has already incorporated this feature in their site, so it is now readily available to Facebook users.

Now Facebook can use this feature to serve ads for various brands while giving its 250 million users access to a very vast amount of data.

Many have argued that Facebook probably bought a much better deal than Twitter, as the latter is currently riding high on a surge of popularity and would probably command much more than its true worth from any prospective buyer – possibly the reason why merger talks failed back in March.

Twitter-esque feeds and functionality are already available on Facebook and their new iPhone app. They need not acquire Twitter to mimic that functionality. Facebook’s user base is also much larger – 250 million and counting!

The speed with which Facebook has rolled out the real-time search functionality, though, indicates that rather than combat Twitter’s micro-blogging dominance, their main objective is dominance of the real-time search space, which could then turn into yet another giant’s battleground, this time between Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

The study was conducted over a period of two weeks, between Monday and Friday and during the hours from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. 200 English tweets were randomly collected on each of the 10 working days, resulting in a total of 2,000 Tweets.

The tweets received were then analysed and divided into 6 categories. These were – news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass along value.

Spam and self promotional were expected to be the most common tweets. However, this was not the case. Of the 2,000 tweets the distribution among categories was as follows:

Considering the fact that Twitter has recently changed their home page, changing their tagline from “What are you doing now?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”, it is quite surprising that news based tweets ranked last in the group. It probably means that the new direction that twitter plans to take has not yet really caught on.

Also, one expected the self promotional category to be more frequently used, but that is not so either.

While there are those who would be too happy to run down Twitter because the vast majority of tweets are pointless babble, Twitter loyalists would be quick to point out that the ability to post some useless statements and comments about oneself, were the whole purpose of Twitter when it was first started.

Users will have a considerable say in what kind of ads they want to see. Just as they can vote up or down any articles, videos etc. on the site, they will be able to do the same with the ads. The ads will however be clearly marked as sponsored content.

Thus, the more popular an ad is, the more it will be voted up, while the less popular an ad is the more that ad will be ‘buried’ or voted down. Accordingly advertisers will be charged at a higher rate for the less popular ads, and will be charged at lower rates for the more popular ads. This way, eventually, the advertisers would decide to discontinue the unpopular ads, as they will not work out to be cost effective.

Through this service, Digg is making sure that their audiences get to see ads that they are interested in, and advertisers will try their best to produce ads which users will like.

There is, of course, a slight possibility that users may decide that they do not want to see ads on Digg, and therefore start ‘burying’ all ads.

Digg will initially roll out the ads gradually to a few users, and based on their feedback, make appropriate changes in the service. Over the course of the next few months the facility will be made available to all users.

Social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group conducted a study of the world’s top 100 brands, with regards to their interaction with consumers through the social media sites and their level of revenue generation.

The results, which were revealed recently, show that companies with the highest level of presence on the social media registered an impressive 18% growth in revenue in the last year, while companies with poor or no presence on social media sites registered a drop of 6% revenue in the same time period.

A lot more than just social media presence contributed to the above rises and falls in revenue, but social media awareness definitely did play a role in the overall fortunes of the companies involved.

The top engaged brands were as follows:

1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. EBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Intel and Yahoo! (tied)

The only brands that added links in their email marketing messages to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace were Pepsi, Sony, The Gap and Hewlett Packard.

Links to Facebook and Twitter in email marketing campaigns have increased drastically over the last couple of years.

In the same time period, the ratio of number of emails linking to Facebook and to Twitter has reversed.

In 2007, 215 campaigns were linked to Twitter and 729 campaigns were linked to Facebook.

In 2008 Twitter had 2,540 campaigns and Facebook had 12,650 campaigns.

However in 2009 Twitter has received 41,399 campaigns until June, while Facebook has received 41,052 campaigns during the same period.

Twitter had been trailing behind Facebook in January and February 2009. In March the two companies were running neck and neck. However since April, Twitter seems to have established a clear lead over Facebook.

It so happened that Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz from Minnesota, who were due to be united in holy matrimony, wanted to have an unusual wedding party.

They decided that the bride, the groom and all of their bridesmaids and best men should dance to the song ‘Forever’ by Chris Brown in the church. This unusual entrance was video taped and put up on YouTube, where it has become wildly popular.

So far, the “Forver wedding video” has been viewed by more than 12 million viewers, in just over a week, making it the most viewed and most discussed video on YouTube, globally.

Rather than pull the video, or sue Google for copyright infringement, Chris Brown’s record company allowed the music to be used and InVideo Ads were placed to make it possible for users to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.

A lot of users have responded positively to this offer, earning YouTube, Amazon and Apple a good amount of money.

The record company, Sony, and Chris Brown have also made a pretty penny, not to mention the badly needed positive publicity for Chris Brown that they have earned by not suing the couple for copyright infringement (a first for the music industry?).

Searches for ‘chris brown forever’ over the past 90 days

While all of these beneficiaries have the young couple to thank for the unexpected bounty, the couple has not made a penny out of their own video. They were invited to appear on the Today Show in New York, along with all their guests. They are also using all this publicity to drive donations to the Sheila Wellstone Institute for violence prevention.

Hopefully this incident will be an eye-opener for video sites and music owners and show them that they can make money by other means than prosecuting consumers for sharing and downloading music.

The Forever Wedding Video

However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.

As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.

Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.

This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.

Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.

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 results of a study conducted by WorkPlace Media, reveals that brands that are advertising on social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter are not yet receiving the kind of response they would like.

The survey, about the impact of social network sites on brands, was conducted in May 2009 among 753 Americans with access to the internet at work.

The findings reveal that 55% of office internet users have a social networking account. However only 435 of them access the account while at work, and 78% spend less than 30 minutes per day on the site, while 13% spend 30 minutes, 5% spend 1 hour and only 4% remain open all day long.

Unfortunately for the brands, 96% of respondents reported that the absence of a brand on the social media did not change their opinion about it, while only 12% said the presence of a brand helps to change their mind about it. 11% said they do not follow any brands on the social sites.

33% said they had received a recommendation for a brand on the social networks, but only 25% had recommended a brand on the social media and just18% acted on such a recommendation.

Most people still prefer the traditional word-of-mouth recommendation from friends or colleagues. 21% in person, and 12% on the phone, while only 4% each, use public and private social networking sites for recommendations.

89% of respondents had a Facebook account, 40% MySpace, 31% LinkedIn and 18% Twitter.

89% of respondents use the network only to stay in touch with friends and family, and 18% take product recommendations on social sites, of which 53% look up entertainment, 50% dining out, 23% groceries, 21% beauty care and cosmetics, 20% apparel and 15% each for electronics and pet care.

According to Terry Goins, Executive Vice President, WorkPlace Media, “it’s clear that the social media is just that, it’s social”.

Smart idea Facebook!

The study was conducted over a period of three months tracked 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs, and a total of 90 million articles in order to arrive at their conclusions.

Twitter’s speed of news propogation has led to a feeling among the public that the days of the traditional media might now be numbered, and may soon become useless.

The Cornell University study has revealed that most of the time it is old or traditional media, represented by professional journalists, that first notices and reports a story, which is then eventually filtered down and propogated via the Internet.

In fact, the study finds that the mainstream media usually reports a story 2.5 hours before it shows up on blogs, in most cases. The graph below illustrates the fact plainly.

Source: Research from Cornell University Department of CS

There are a few exceptions to the rule, of course, when a story is first reported on the net and later through the traditional media. That happens only about 3.5% of the time though, according to the findings of the study.

What actually causes the misconception, that the web is faster than the traditional media, could be the fact that news once received, spreads much faster through the Internet than it does through the traditional media.

Read the full Cornell University study (PDF 527 kB)