Web 2.0 Promotions

Even if you don’t watch David Letterman, you’ve seen his infamous Top Ten lists before.

A couple of nights ago, he took on Twitter addiction.

Enjoy!

(hat tip)

Apps is now one of those words that has taken on its own meaning in the American lexicon as most people who use it are referring to the apps for mobile devices. Why not since the market is growing at a serious rate because it makes having a handheld device much more interesting than just being a phone and a way to connect to the web.

A study suggests that the growth will be unprecedented in the very near future with bold predictions of billions of dollars being generated in the apps market. Mashable reports on the study which I will allow you to read about before I say anything further.

Lithuanian-based GetJar, an independent mobile phone application store with over 60,000 mobile applications for major mobile platforms such as Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, commissioned a study that predicts a huge surge in the number of mobile app downloads and the overall size of the mobile app market.

According to the study, created by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile app downloads should jump from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. By this time, the market will be worth 17.5 billion dollars, the study predicts, despite the expected lower price of mobile apps, which should drop from the current average of 2 dollars per app to 1.5 dollars in 2012.

I bet you can guess where I am going carrying my red flag. Yep, the source of the report is someone who has a vested interest in making the market look ginormous. Also, the information is somewhat appnostic (that’s just another cheap attempt to turn a phrase to describe an app agnostic) because this particular company from Lithuania (red flag number 2?) can’t do anything with Apple apps so they have a vested interest in pumping up the Android and others app market hopes as well.

The apps industry is going to grow. There is no need to commission anyone to make that prediction. It’s a no brainer. As to how big will it get? It’s anyone’s guess and the real intrigue as we move forward is the growing intensity of the battle for the platform of choice between the iPhone and Android devices.

Any predictions on who wins that one?

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Maybe I missed the point of the whole China/Google kerfluffle, but I could have sworn the reason Google was pulling out of China was because they didn’t want to obey China’s rules on censorship anymore. Apparently China has decided to conveniently ignore that fact as they remind Google to continue to obey China’s Internet rules, even if Google does decide to leave the country.

Riiight.

According to Reuters:

“On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law,” the spokesman, Yao Jian, told reporters in answer to a question about Google.

Google opened its Chinese search portal in 2006.

“We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations,” Yao told a regular news conference.

“Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues,” he said.

Yes, of course Google should continue to obey the law for remaining “issues” within the country (possibly its other services, if Google decides to only pull its search engine). However, although I’m not in favor of China’s censorship, I don’t think Google should wage a direct Internet war against the country.

China’s admonition seems a little like a parent expecting a child to keep the same curfew when they leave the house. Google is leaving precisely because they just can’t abide those rules anymore. They’re going to live their life the way they want to now.

Or, for another analogy that might hit home a bit more with the Chinese government, maybe this is more akin to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling China to investigate the hack attacks (to which China said Clinton damaged the countries’ relations, and basically she should mind her own business).

What do you think? Could China seriously expect to dictate to a company even if they won’t have any jurisdiction to do so?

Hang around any industry conference, forum or blog long enough and you’ll find someone lamenting our dependence on Google, or search engines altogether. It’s absolutely true that we as webmasters and marketers need to diversify our traffic strategies (you know what they say about eggs and baskets)—but are you willing to take the step to block all search engines from your site?

Hacker News was—at least for a little while. At news.ycombinator.com recently, the robots.txt file was changed to disallow all crawling from search engines, as theNextWeb reports. However, Paul G. at Hacker News quickly explained:

Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn’t tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now.

There’s nothing wrong with that (though you’d hope you wouldn’t forget that kind of thing!). Rather than the User-agent: * Disallow: / theNextWeb spotted, Hacker News’s robots.txt now only disallows all user agents to five selected paths.

Can you ban all search engines (on purpose and for the long term)? Sure—that’s what robots.txt is for (I’m looking at you, newspaper sites who claim Google’s stealing your bacon content). Some people do it just to keep search engines out; others do it to force themselves to develop other traffic streams. But if you do it, be sure to actually work on those other traffic streams, and to have a good on-site search capability.

What do you think? Would you ever block all search engines, for any reason?

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Twitter is not content to occupy those little moments you share together when the boss is not looking. It’s not willing to put up with being used merely as a channel to share what you ate for breakfast!

Nope, Twitter wants to be @anywhere and @everywhere.

OK, so officially it just wants to be @anywhere–the name of its new framework–but you’ll soon see Twitter’s real plans are to be everywhere on the web.

According to co-founder Biz Stone you’ll be able to…

…follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page.

Yay, more noise! Ahem, I mean, valuable content being distributed throughout the web.

While @anywhere is not live yet, Twitter has an impressive line-up of sites that have agreed to participate, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

How will @anywhere work? According to DigitalBeat, those annoying nifty hovercards that Twitter implemented on the web interface will be the carrier for the disease that will infect every web site in the world platform used for @anywhere.

Your 2-cents? Go!

I really thought this chart from Hitwise (via TechCrunch) was going to be a bigger deal than it actually is.

On the face of it, Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S:

However, Google doesn’t get the benefit of traffic to YouTube; and Yahoo is a mere third, because Yahoo Mail or Flickr aren’t credited towards its total.

Considering Facebook does video, images, messaging, it seems this chart has been carefully crafted to create headlines.

Yep, now you can have spam delivered in real time to your search results on Google or Twitter. This is just why we all clapped for joy when Bing and Google hooked up with Twitter for real time results, isn’t it?

Oh, no? Hm. I guess we’re not the only ones. Search Engine Roundtable noted a Webmaster World forum thread complaining about the spam in real time search results. In the SER poll, 78% (as of the time of this screenshot) felt the real time results in Google are either somewhat or very spammy:

However, this may just be their perceptions: it may be less that the results themselves are spam and more than they’re merely unwanted, and therefore we consider them spam (like commercial emails that we really did sign up for but really don’t want to get anymore—except we didn’t get the choice to sign up for this addition to the SERPs).

Twitter, meanwhile, is doing what it can about spam on its site. The “trust and safety” unit at the company now employs 22 people, making it the largest division at the company. But it’s not just the blatant tag spam and mock-celebrity accounts they’re looking at. According to Ad Age:

The dirty secret of Twitter’s war on spam? A significant amount of it emanates from clumsy marketers that just don’t know any better.

So what do they flag as spam? They have automatic filters to catch accounts that follow a large number of Tweeple, unfollow them all, and then add more followers. (Follower spam.) They also have recently set up technology to filter links and check for phishing attempts. The team also handles hacking attacks and copyright/brand claims.

But even legit accounts can devolve into spammy practices, like keyword-based autoreplies. The rule of thumb? “[E]ngage the people you are trying to sell stuff to. If you are creating a dialogue with people and not just touting things because you want to make a buck, you are going to have a network of people that value your input,” says the trust & safety unit director Del Harvey. She says they’re constantly working on algorithmic improvements to catch more spammers and reduce false positives—sound familiar?

What do you think? Is Twitter doing enough to reduce spam—including the spam that filters into Google search results? Do you think Google’s real time results are spammy—or just unwanted?

Today, Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab will interview Twitter CEO Evan Williams at SxSW. TechCrunch is poised to report—especially since they expect Twitter to unveil its advertising platform in the interview.

That’s not for certain, of course, but TC points to Twitter head of monetization Anamitra Banerji’s comment on Feb 27 that they’d have the platform ready “in a month or so.” (Two and a half weeks is apparently close enough.) They’ve put 2 and 2 together with GigaOM’s Matthew Ingram’s (Feb 23) report that Twitter is lining up major partners for a launch.

Twitter has long been excited over its coming ad offering. Back in November, founder Biz Stone insisted that “Everyone is going to love” their new advertising system. “It’s going to be amazing.”

A digital advertising format everyone will love? I’d certainly love to see that. Of course, I’m sure the guy who stands to make money off the ads thinks “everyone” will agree with him, since he loves the idea . On the other hand, however, Business Week speculated back in December that 2009 might have actually seen a profit for Twitter, with its deals with Bing and Google—so maybe Twitter will focus on getting this right instead of just getting the next buck (I’m looking at you, Facebook).

What do you think? Will Twitter unveil its long-awaited ad platform today? And if so, what will it look like?

Not since the year-long courtship between Yahoo and Microsoft have I wanted two sides to just DO IT ALREADY!

What am I talking about? China and Google.

For the love of my RSS stream, either pull out or make-up–this is getting old! The latest? Google is "99.9 percent" likely to shut down its Chinese search engine–and try to serve China from outside of the country.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is sending a message that it will in no way yield to the censorship demands of Google. In fact, it’s busy telling Google’s Chinese partners that they should start preparing for Googlegeddon–aka, life without Google.

Google has a widespread network of Chinese partners that have set up their Web sites to link to Google’s Chinese-language search engine. The government’s warning was a reminder to operators that they are responsible for any content on their sites, even if it is provided by a third party like Google. Those companies could switch to services that are more accommodating to the government, like Baidu, the search engine that holds the dominant share inside China.

I’ve used the analogy the unstoppable force against the immovable object before, but this battle takes it to a whole new level. Unfortunately, Google’s fighting this fight on its back foot. I don’t see China opening up a can of censorship worms, simply to accommodate an American search engine. Do you?

I don’t often jump into the world of SEO advice–there are plenty of excellent blogs that do that–but when Google’s Matt Cutts confirms that 301 redirects do, in fact, lose PageRank, well, that’s worth sharing.

Eric Enge gets the scoop–boy, is he gonna get a lot of backlinks from this–getting Matt Cutts to confirm something that I have suspected and cautioned clients for many years: 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay. Here’s the quote:

I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

So now you know. But, don’t stop there, read the rest of the interview, you may just learn some other propaganda SEO tips.

(via)