October 1st, 2007 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
What do you get when you mix a search engine and one of the world’s leading digital advertising platforms with mobile social networking and rumours of a new mobile phone network, or phone, or software for a phone (aka the “gPhoneâ€)? Who knows? Watch this space.
So, what’s this all about? Google has entered into an agreement to acquire, or acquire parts of, Zingku a mobile social networking service. Zingku’s services include:
- a way to store and fetch photos taken from your mobile phone, and then share with friends via SMS, IM and plain ol’ web.
- invite friends to a gig, party, library session etc via SMS, IM and email.
- instant polls: “What movie shall we see? 1) Superbad 2) Underdog?
- fetch postings from any blog or RSS to a mobile phone via SMS.
There are already obvious crossovers with a number of existing Google properties: Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, Mobile Search… It will be interesting to see how this develops.
September 21st, 2007 Posted by: phil Comments (1)
One of the key features that attracted many of the millions who recently flocked to online social networking site Facebook was privacy. People were often free and easy with their personal information, comforted in the knowledge that they had a reasonable level of control over that information and who could see it.
However, Facebook sees a great opportunity for growth by allowing user profiles to be indexed and searchable in Google, Yahoo etc.
“We wanted to give people who had never come to Facebook, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to discover their friends who are on Facebook.â€
The information on the profiles will be less than what a user logged in to Facebook would see, and users also have an opportunity to opt-out.
There are a few key points to this story
Users: As a user of these sites, never put up any information about yourself, your interests or your weekend shenanigans that you wouldn’t want to be seen by a prospective employer, your colleagues, a potential lover or your mother.
Most Facebook users are unphased by this new feature – it’s a great way to get and stay connected with friends.
Advertisers: Expect further growth in page impressions and user numbers
Search: Due to the high inbound link popularity of these sites, expect Facebook to dominate the top rankings for vanity searches. Even though the profiles will be pretty light on content, it will be a dedicated page to a single topic – a name – and as such will be highly relevant for a search for that name. Apply these same principles to optimising your own executive profiles – 1 page per person, rather than jamming a page with 5-10 people’s details.
September 17th, 2007 Posted by: Andy Comments (0)
Google has added a new feature that allows you to view and search your web history. It will save you a lot of time by reducing your search area when you are tring to find a page you visited in the past. It also gives you a breakdown of your trends in your web activity.
See for yourself
September 5th, 2007 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Google has recently introduced “universal search” results which now features results from their previously separate search silos, ie images, video, books, maps, news etc.
Search Engine Land has a great article looking at this in detail.
In case you haven’t come across it yet, here are some nice examples that bring together results from the various search results:
- Steve Jobs (video, images, news)
- Melbourne (map, images, related searches)
Read more
August 1st, 2007 Posted by: Andy Comments (0)
A social campaign against AIDS that protected peoples erotic search engine results. If a user searched for ’sex’, ‘anal’, ‘oral’, ‘porn’ or ‘fuck’ all these words on the results page are packed in small condoms. Nice!
View work
May 3rd, 2007 Posted by: kristy Comments (0)
Google Australia has recently launched My Maps, a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search and we are big fans of it.
It allows any level of user to create their own maps by using a simple drag and drop interface to do the following:
• Mark locations on a map from a library of icons
• Draw lines and shapes to highlight paths and areas
• Add text, photos, or You Tube/Google Videos to a map
• Add HTML for further personalisation
• View your maps in Google Earth
• Store maps you have created or viewed when you sign into your Google Account.
Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results.
To give you a better idea of what My Maps is all about, here is an example of how you can create your own map by adding images from your Flickr account and video from YouTube.
Melbourne’s labyrinth of laneways
The ability to include video, and therefore audio, combined with path overlays lends itself to visually cool content.
What you can do with My Maps is endless…
