Facebook to Make Listings Public via Search Engines
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Changes to the social networking site will make the names and profiles of its members available to nonmembers.
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Plugging a hole that has existed since launch earlier this year, real estate valuation site Zillow is going to start allowing local realtors to post listings for free. I would expect this to be quite popular given Zillow&#8217;s profile and the fact that it&#8217;s free advertising for agents. Zillow sees this as a way to [...]
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Like rival lovers, Google and Microsoft are intensely courting Facebook as the social-networking upstart picks petals off a flower -- &quot;she loves me, she loves me not&quot; -- and tries to decide which of the two will be allowed to buy a minority stake in the company, according to press reports.The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post reported Wednesday that Facebook will likely make a decision within a day or two, and that the chosen company will also get a deal to provide ads for the social network&#39;s sites outside of the U.S.Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all declined to comment when contacted by IDG News Service.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has skyrocketed during the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to about 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. More than half of its active members return to the site daily.As such, it is perceived as an attractive vehicle for online advertising, although some industry experts question how effective social-networking sites are for advertisers.In a social-networking site, particularly one as restricted as Facebook, people mostly visit the pages of their acquaintances, to see their latest comments, photos, and videos.For Facebook, MySpace, and other social sites like YouTube and Flickr, it&#39;s still unclear whether enough advertisers will feel comfortable running their ads on pages with potentially objectionable material whose creation is largely unregulated and created by millions of individuals.Facebook will likely share ideas for revving up its advertising business on Nov. 6, when it holds an event in New York to which it has invited what it calls &quot;its closest advertisers.&quot;&quot;As part of [the event], Facebook executives will discuss new approaches for advertising online,&quot; a Facebook spokeswoman said. &quot;We are not sharing any further details.&quot;In addition to the advertising questions, Facebook, MySpace, and others are in the crosshairs of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad because sexual predators use social-networking sites to stalk and victimize people, in particular minors.Still, Facebook is the Internet company with the loudest buzz now, and the anonymous sources for the Journal and the Post articles suggest that the price of the minority stake in play gives Facebook a total valuation of between $10 billion and $15 billion.Both newspapers reported that in addition to Google or Microsoft, other investors might be involved in the acquisition of the ownership stake.The Journal first reported Google&#39;s and Microsoft&#39;s pursuit of the Facebook investment a month ago.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;
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Facebook wants to make its members' profiles portable, get a handle on software developers, launch ad platform.
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If you use shared or public computers, you have a new privacy risk to consider: Google Desktop Search. Announced last week and currently available in a beta version, Google Desktop Search allows you to scour
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Company reps keep the flaw secret Facebook users who type sensitive information into a site feature known as Notes may be interested in knowing that it is currently experiencing a bug that allows documents designated as private to be read anyway.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Web 2.0 has come to search engine optimization. Or rather, search engine optimizers have discovered Web 2.0. That's according to experts who spoke on Monday at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle. "We all go to Google and Yahoo and MSN and Ask.com and make them work for us, that's our job," said Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, an SEO (search engine optimization) consulting company. "Our job is now extended into this new realm." Fishkin and others said that they're carefully using social networking sites to improve traffic to their customers' sites and build their brands. By attracting more traffic and links, sites can improve their search rankings. Some of the social networking sites Fishkin likes to use are YouTube, Wikipedia, Yelp, MySpace, Flickr, and Technorati. Other sites, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, TechCrunch, and Reddit, can also be used to boost brands and awareness through viral marketing, he said. "Social media marketing is about going out to Web 2.0-style sites and approaching them with the mentality of 'I'm going to contribute to this community,'" Fishkin said. That's an important distinction because marketers that use Web 2.0 sites in ways that counter the community's accepted use can run into trouble. "If you break these rules, users get nasty," said Neil Patel, author of the Pronet Advertising blog andÂ CTO at ACS, a search engine optimization company. "They'll keep pestering you and really ruin your life." For instance, a company that submits lots of its own content, creates multiple accounts in order to vote repeatedly, adds biased content, and asks friends for votes will run afoul of most communities, he said. But Patel also had advice for how marketers make the sites work for them. For instance, he recommends working hard to grow your "friends" list. If a marketer submits content and a lot of people vote on it, that marketer should add those people to their friends list. "Or, if you vote on stories and others vote on the same, they probably have similar interests" and could also be added as friends, he said. Also, becoming a top user on one site can translate onto others. Patel is well known on Digg, and when he goes onto Netscape, people there recognize him and then "show me love," he said. MySpace can also be a good outlet to build a brand and improve a company's online presence, said Cindy Krum, senior SEO analyst at Blue Moon Works. Companies can have MySpace profiles for different brands or products or even for specific people at the company who may be well known. Videos, coupons for free stuff, games, and podcasts are all good content for attracting people to MySpace pages, she said. "It's especially powerful because [social networking sites] allow users to publicly affiliate themselves with a brand in a way that is highly visible to their peer set," she said. While some companies may think that their target customer doesn't fit with the demographic of people using many of these social networking sites, the experts say participating in the sites is still worth it. "It's a jump-off point," said Todd Malicoat, an Internet marketing consultant at Stuntdubl, an SEO consulting company. "It may not be my audience at Digg, but if they like what I have to say, it will get to Techmeme, and then I'll get in front of the demographic I really want to go after." They all agreed that social networking sites can really improve a company's online reputation, but only if used carefully. Patel's ultimate words of wisdom: "Do what is ethical, don't jeopardize your brand, think long term."
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Internet search giant Google, quiet since going public in August, introduced a feature Wednesday that lets users search through pages of books online. Google is taking aim at online retailer Amazon.com, which offers similar technology on its e-commerce site.
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Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. is trying to become a bigger player in the Internet's crowded search engine market with a local business directory that supplements address and phone number listings with a photographic tour covering 10 major U.S. cities.
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I&#8217;ve heard the warnings at conferences and especially in the Social Media Optimization field that spamming or multiple submissions to Digg and other social news sites could lead to the banning of that URL from future Digg listings. Seems that such a horrible fate was brought about on SearchBliss.com although they say that they were not [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is joining Ask.com in offering Web surfers a way to use its search engines anonymously, and the two companies are now calling on the search and online advertising industry to develop a common set of privacy practices. By year's end, Microsoft will give users a way to search anonymously on its Microsoft Windows Live Web sites, and it will also implement a new data retention policy that after 18 months will scrub all search query data of any information that could be used to identify the searcher. "We think that we as an industry ought to take a look at ways to further enhance privacy protections," said Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen. "We're really trying to make sure that people always have the ability to have a trusted experience." These steps areÂ similar to those taken by Ask.comÂ last week and are part of an effort to create industry consensus on privacy practices, Cullen said. When visitors use Microsoft's Windows Live search engine, Microsoft stores the search queries along with some information on the person doing the searching in order to provide them with targeted advertising. Like all the major search providers, Microsoft doesn't associate names or e-mail addresses with this data, but it does keep IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and some other identifying information, such as the zip codes of Windows Live users. Privacy advocates are concerned that this data could be misused. "Search terms are often about drugs, they're about sex and they're about rock and roll," said Peter Swire, a law professor with Ohio State University who was the White House's Chief Counselor for Privacy under the Clinton administration. "There are a lot of people who are feeling that they're doing a private exploration and wouldn't want their search terms as part of their permanent record." Last year, AOLÂ researchers inadvertently illustrated how this data could be misused when theyÂ posted data on about 650,000 searchesÂ made on the company's Web site. New York Times reporters were able to track down one of the searchers based on the information in the database. Ask.com and Microsoft's announcements put pressure on Google to improve its privacy practices, Swire said. Google retains part of the IP address associated with searches and has not promised to provide anonymous searching, he explained. It is becoming even more important for companies to safeguard consumers' privacy as the online advertising and search industries consolidate, Swire said. Both Microsoft and Google have made major moves in this space over the past few months with their plannedÂ acquisitions of aQuantiveÂ andÂ DoubleClick. More pressure is coming from the European Union, which has placed limits on the amount of time search companies can retain this type of data and isÂ reviewing Google's DoubleClick acquisition. Microsoft and Ask.com will invite privacy advocates and Internet search and advertising companies such as Google, AOL, and Yahoo to come together and more clearly explain how the industry will handle privacy. "The first step is, we'll be in contact with all the other players in this space and talk about what a summit might look like," said Cullen. "We're very happy to host it, if that's the answer ... both Microsoft and Ask.com think that this is the time to make this happen." The two companies expect to report on the results of this outreach by September. That's right around the time that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to host a workshop discussing these same issues, Swire said. "Now we're getting public debate and corporate debate on best practices. And the FTC will be trying to push that this fall." Â
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. is setting up a distribution network for social networking applications, adding a new twist in the Internet search leader's brewing rivalry with rapidly maturing startup Facebook Inc.
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Social-networking site to unveil a set of developer tools for potentially converting existing Facebook applications.
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Facebook is on the block and bidders can't flunk out this time.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is joining Ask.com in offering Web surfers a way to use its search engines anonymously, and the two companies are now calling on the search and online advertising industry to develop a common set of privacy practices.
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After losing its Facebook bid to Microsoft, Google will on Thursday introduce OpenSocial, development tools for numerous sites.