What's Happened in Social Media Over the Year

From WebPro News

The Year in Social Media: 2009 

As we did last year, we have gone back through our archives and picked out some of the most noteworthy social media items we have covered since 2009 began. Now that 2009 is almost over, it was worth going back and seeing what all has happened. 

January 

In January, Twitter announced that it hired Kevin Thau as Director of Mobile Business Development, and that he would be working on a variety of different fronts as Twitter's "first official business development guru." LinkedIn introduced a new Polls feature, and launched a bookmarklet for IE. MySpace Music made dealswith Nettwerk Music Group, INgrooves, IRIS Distribution, and RoyaltyShare to bolster its catalog by hundreds of thousands of songs. YouTube expanded its e-commerce platform and started letting people delete their own comments. Digglaunched the "People who Dugg this also Dugg" feature. 

February 

In February, LinkedIn launched a set of HR Tools and launched a German version. MySpace launched a mobile redesign, and Digg updated its algorithm. Facebook introduced polling ads, changed its terms of service, made some design changesto profile pages for businesses, opened its corporate blog to comments, introduced the comments box widget, and launched the "like" button. Google introduced the Social Bar and launched Friend Connect integration with Blogger. 

March 

In March, Twitter brought its search box to most people's Twitter home page, andchanged the "replies" tab to the "@username" tab. Twitter also adjusted the title tags for member pages. Where they used to go "Twitter / username" they would now go "User's Real Name (username) on Twitter". Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanisoffered to buy a spot on Twitter's Suggested Users list. 

Facebook launched a redesign, started including updates from Pages in the news feed, changed pages to operate like profiles, and changed the status box to the publisher box. They launched the ability to let users chat within apps, added ad spots to Pages, relaunched Facebook Marketplace to be powered by online classified service Oodle, launched Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod Touch, launched some new ad targeting options, and enabled Page owners to let people sign up to become fans via text message. 

Google began implementing Portable Contacts, launched the Friend Connect API,blended user-generated content into search results on Google Maps, madeGoogle Reader more socialwith commenting, allowed forricher Gmail messages, andstarted its own Twitter accounts. 

YouTube changed the name of some video sections, LinkedIn did some redesigning of its own and enhanced Direct Ads, and MySpace was stamped on a credit card. 

April 

Google launched an event gadget for Google Friend Connect, the Digg-like "What's Popular" gadget, and the "Get Answers" gadget for Friend Connect. Google also gave profiles vanity URLS and started putting profiles into search results. 

Facebook made it easier to organize friends, opened its stream up to third-party developers, added electronic signatures for public pages, worked with the blind on accessibility, began making app recommendations, and readied its next steps in governance. 

Twitter started integrating search into its interface more, and CNN showed that you can buy/sell a Twitter account. Scientists created a brain-Twitter interface. 

StumbleUpon broke away from eBay and enhanced its "web stumbling." Digg launched the controversial DiggBar. Reddit launched a video site, AOL launched SocialThing, and Yahoo shifted its focus to social altogether. YouTube launched the beta version of YouTube RealTime. MySpace got some new management. 

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Merry Christmas!!!

I'm not a Christian, but i think that i don't have any problem with greeting you for the Christmas.
Merry X'mas to all the people in the world!!!
And also the next year will be a great year for all of you...

Google Now Has Its Own URL Shortener

From WebPro News

Google made a couple of announcements today that actually combined for perhaps a more interesting announcement than either of them as stand-alone news items.

First, Google has added a new share button to the Google Toolbar, which allows users to share any site on the web via their social network of choice. Second, Google announced that with Feedburner, you can now set your feeds up to post to Twitter. 

The thing that these two announcements have in common is that they both utilize a new URL shortener from Google. They tried to slip that in their quietly a couple of times, but then went ahead and made an announcement about the service itself. 

The shortening service is located at goo.gl, but it is not available for broad consumer use at this point. Google is just using it itself to compliment the aforementioned services. In other words, you can't just go to goo.gl and shorten a URL yourself. However, Google says that in time, it may offer such an option.

"We think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links," Google says. They also say the core goals of the Google URL Shortener are:

- Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
- Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
- Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google's standard privacy policy applies to goo.gl. The company says that it may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end use clicks. 

On a related note, Facebook also now has its own URL shortener. 

Facebook URL Shortener Makes Appearance

From WebPro News

Long URLs cut into character limits, are difficult to remember, and simply look awkward.  Quite a little industry has sprung up in response.  Only it looks like a major player is now entering the game, as a URL shortener created by Facebook has been sighted.

Ryan Spoon first wrote about links built around the characters "FB.me" this weekend.  Since, then, more and more examples have been found, and although Facebook has yet to announce anything official, there's no reason to believe that FB.me won't go live for everyone at some point.

This could spell doom for entities like Bit.ly, Is.gd, and Ow.ly.  FB.me works as a standard shortener, but with the backing of Facebook, it's likely to prove more reliable, and will also have a marketing/name recognition head start.

Then it's got one extra trick: as Saad Kamal noted, "[I]f your Profile URL is say - http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks, now you can even write it as http://fb.me/starbucks and it will still go to the exact same page."

Of course, Facebook isn't guaranteed victory in the URL shortener field.  Aside from the existing competition, it's possible that Google (or Goo.gl, if you like) will act as a rival.

Facebook Tests "Many" New Design Changes

From WebPro News

Reports and screenshots have surfaced indicating possible further design changes to the Facebook home page. These changes would include an altered header with drop-down menus for things like chat, messages, and notifications (Via SAI). 

There would also be greater emphasis placed on the search box. It would be moved further to the left, and more into the center of the page. Such emphasis on search would make sense, as Facebook has greater real-time search functionality these days than what it once had (particularly since its acquisition of FriendFeed).

Screenshot from French publication PCInpact.com (they have several more).

Let's not get too carried away though. These changes are only tests at this point, and may or may not ever see the light of day for Facebook users at the mainstream level. 

A Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews, "We are continually experimenting with new designs on the site that are meant to simplify and improve the user experience. These are just a couple of the many changes we're testing."

Whenever Facebook makes design changes, there is usually some amount of backlash from users. That doesn't stop them from continuing to make tweaks, however. In the end, users are likely to get used to or accept the changes either way. I don't think the world is ready to abandon Facebook for the next big thing just yet. 

Yahoo Releases Top Searches Of 2009

From WebPro News

Yahoo has released its top 10 overall searches for 2009, based on billions of queries over the past year.

Michael Jackson garnered the most searches of 2009, after his death in June of a drug overdose. Jackson bumped Britney Spears from the top position where she had dominated for the past four years.  Spears still made it into the top 10 landing in the fifth spot on the year.

"We saw consumers escape to the Web hoping to pursue news and their guilty pleasures: vampires, political implosions, how to moonwalk - you name it, people went online to find it," said Vera Chan, a Yahoo! Search trend analyst. 

"And with economic uncertainty looming, people looked for ways to find stability by searching the Web for new jobs, unemployment benefits, and ways to save through old-fashioned coupon hunting."

Here are the Top 10 Overall Searches for 2009 according to Yahoo:

1.    Michael Jackson 
2.    Twilight 
3.    WWE 
4.    Megan Fox 
5.    Britney Spears 
6.    Naruto 
7.    American Idol 
8.    Kim Kardashian 
9.    NASCAR 
10.  Runescape

For comparison you can checkout Bing's most popular trending topics of 2009 here.

New Film Website Offers 12,000 Clips From Major Studios

From WebPro News

Clip sharing site Movieclips.com has launched in beta with a catalogue of more than 12,000 two-minute streaming clips.

Movieclips has struck licensing deals with six major Hollywood studios including 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. The clips are available for free on an ad-supported network that links to third-party sites where users can rent or purchase full length films.

Movieclips features a video player that can be embedded in social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and shared on blogs, Twitter and other personal websites.

Users can search the site based on dialogue, mood or actor as well as browse by subject such as best kiss, tearjerkers, birthdays, holidays, awkward moments, scariest bad guy and best fight scenes.

"Our goal was to build a place where we could easily find, watch, and share all the best movie scenes," said Co-Founder and CEO Zach James.

"Our content partners are incredible. They made it possible for us to build the greatest collection of licensed movie clips online today. It's pretty cool to be able to send a clip from Sixteen Candles to my sister on her birthday or a Wayne's World 'Party on!' clip to my friends on a Friday night."

YouTube Gets Faster With "Feather" Beta

from WebPro News

YouTube's supposed to be fun and easy to use; people want to visit the site and, in short order, view all sorts of interesting clips.  Making things load more quickly is a solid goal, then, and Google's pursuing it with the launch of a new project called "Feather."

The official explanation states, "The 'Feather' project is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible.  It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser."

By Alex Chitu's count, Feather's quite effective, too, taking that total from the neighborhood of 400 KB (391 KB, to be exact) to 52 KB.  And it'll probably be a rare person who can't live without search suggestions, the option to make a comment, and the couple of other things it cuts.

Perhaps the one issue would-be users should watch out for is the fact that Feather doesn't yet work for all videos.

Otherwise, this development counts as a very nice step forward in Google's march to make the Web faster.