Microsoft and Facebook to oust Google Docs

Microsoft Office and Facebook partner the new friends

Well, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just shared a feature that could give Microsoft a big advantage over competitors. Microsoft and Facebook launched a site called Docs.com this morning, which is all about sharing your documents using Facebook in the cloud. He didn’t offer too many details, but said the document site will work closely with the social network. If you want to share a document on Facebook, you can do so using the connections you’ve already built on the social network.

Here are some quotes from the Microsoft post introducing the site (which is formatted, rather annoyingly, as an online Office doc, making it much harder to copy-and-paste):

Built on Microsoft Office 2010, the Docs app enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know. …

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Its website and not web site

When the AP Stylebook announced via Twitter that it was changing the style for "Web site" to "website," some users let out shouts of praise

The reactions aren't surprising, given how many people have asked the AP to change the style from two words to one word, arguing that "Web site" is an antiquated way of writing it.

"We decided to make the change because 'website' is increasingly common," said Sally Jacobsen, deputy managing editor for projects at the AP and one of three Stylebook editors. "We also had invited readers and users of the Stylebook to offer us some suggestions for a new social media guide that we're including in the 2010 Stylebook, and we got a very good response and a large number of people who favored 'website' as one word."

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Local Busniess Center becomes Google Places

The Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. The reason - Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.

Google is also adding some new features:-

• Show your service coverage or hide your address.
• Tag Ads added to Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. and to follow in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco
• Free business photo shoots service to enhace the profile.
• Customised QR codes from the Places dashboard.
• Running another batch of Favorite places.

To keep track of how your business listing is performing on Google, we offer a personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit your business. With the dashboard, you can see how your use of any of these new features affects interest in your business and make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with your customers.

As a SEO Consultant working for more than 6 years, I believe that this has more oppurtunities in the future.

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Facebook the new age marketing platform

Are Search Engines the only way of marketing? Think twice before answering.

Social Networking Platforms have given webmasters with more ways to try out their luck in Internet Marketing. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Twitter are just a few names. Specially, Twitter and Facebook have grown beyond expectations.

Here are some facts and figures:

Facebook is closing in on the 500 million monthly unique visitors mark. The social network saw 484 million unique visitors worldwide in March, 2010, according to comScore’s latest estimate. That number is up 64 percent from a year ago, and up 22 million from just February, 2010. In other words, it grew by about the size of Twitter.com’s entire U.S. audience in a single month. (ComScore puts Twitter’s worldwide audience at 79 million people).


Courtesy: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook-500-million-visitors-comscore/#ixzz0lpSw9jH5

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Easiest way to add a forum

Now adding a forum to your website is as easy as clicking a web link

If you are not so much a programming geek then this is your first chance to grab a forum and integrate into your website by just clicking a few links.

Tal.ki is a new forum product from Lefora. You can grab the embed link, put it on a website and you’ve added a forum. The best part is users don’t have to create accounts – they can sign in via a variety of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo or OpenID.

Check this site for more details http://tal.ki/

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Growth at Goole doesn't stop

Google : Q1 Financial Highlights 

Revenues : Google reported revenues of $6.77 billion in the first quarter of 2010, representing a 23% increase over first quarter 2009 revenues of $5.51 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting TAC.

Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.44 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2010. This represents a 20% increase over first quarter 2009 revenues of $3.69 billion.

Google Network Revenues - Google™s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.04 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2010. This represents a 24% increase from first quarter 2009 network revenues of $1.64 billion.

International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.58 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 53% in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 52% in the first quarter of 2009. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the fourth quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, our revenues in the first quarter of 2010 would have been $112 million higher. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the first quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, our revenues in the first quarter of 2010 would have been $242 million lower.

• Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $842 million, representing 13% of revenues in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 13% in the first quarter of 2009.

• In the first quarter of 2010, we recognized a benefit of $10 million to revenues through our foreign exchange risk management program, compared to $154 million in the first quarter of 2009.

Paid Clicks : Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 15% over the first quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 5% over the fourth quarter of 2009.

Cost-Per-Click : Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 7% over the first quarter of 2009 and decreased approximately 4% over the fourth quarter of 2009.

TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $1.71 billion in the first quarter of 2010, compared to TAC of $1.44 billion in the first quarter of 2009. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 26% in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 27% in the first quarter of 2009.

The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.45 billion in the first quarter of 2010. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $265 million in the first quarter of 2010.

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Are you there in twitter

Micro Blogging software Twitter is the buzz word around

Well surely, if you aren’t there yet then you are missing out on a chunck of data and information. At least the statistics suggest that.

Twitter Numbers and Stats Revealed: 19 Billion Searches Per Month [blogs.ft.com]


• 105,779,710 registered users.
• 300,000 new users per day.
• 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com
• 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US.
• 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.
• 100,000 registered apps
• 19,000,000,000 searches per month.

The choice is yours whether you want to check out who has what for their breakfast or want to check out on real information. The scope of Twitter is evolving faster than we can categorize. Real time reports and those entire sneak peaks into reports are making people going crazy about it.

Is it the perfect time for twitter to bring in contextual ad system?

Follow me on twitter @arnabseo

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Facebook and Twitter the next two big media’s of marketing

The New Age Internet Marketing

Facebook Update

Over the last few months there have been non-stop rumors about Facebook finally launching its location feature (an announcement may well come at f8). But a startup called Glympse has already beaten them to the punch (well, sort of). The service now allows you to share you location with Facebook friends via the News Feed, using a nifty widget that plots your position on a map and updates it in real-time.

Glympse, is a bit like Google Latitude in a way that it allows you to passively share your location with friends. But unlike Google Latitude, Glympse is for granting people temporary access to your location.

Twitter Update

Dealing With Google: Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, “Can we do to google what google has done to others?”

In a May 7 management meeting, Twitter’s search syndication strategy with Google is discussed, as is the desire of “every tech company” to gain access to “Hosebird,” an API Twitter is working on to deliver its full stream of Tweets to search partners and others. The attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”

But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense – with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great – better than the landing pages on Google.”

Courtesy: www.techcrunch.com

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