SEO News
Twitter Refuses to Comment on MySpace
‘Google Friend Connect’ recently released along with Twitter. This marked a huge success for Google in terms of its struggle for supervision with regards to third party website’s ‘user logins’. According to the latest rumours, it was believed that Twitter would be joining forces with Facebook to combine Connect initially.
Twitter hastily rectified these beliefs by informing the relevant sources that they would shortly be combining Facebook Connect as well. As per a quote (in the form of a Tweet) by Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter:
“For the record: Twitter did not “choose Google, not Facebook.” We are working with both. We have more to do on the FB side before launch.”
Now the question remains as ‘where does MySpace fit in’? It seems that in the month of May, Twitter had decided to release Connect along with MySpace. However, Twitter has stayed quiet with regards to their MySpace decision. Twitter has not discussed MySpace in any way and has not even mentioned it on William’s Tweet.
MySpace has not said anything either. As per a brief statement from them:
“Twitter has been a valuable strategic partner in defining the MySpaceID program. We continue to work collaboratively with Twitter and will share more news on MySpaceID implementation specifics when we have it.”
Xoopit to Be a Part of Yahoo Application Platform
‘Xoopit’, a mail enhancement service that assists users in locating files, images and videos present in their inbox, will now get a big blessing in disguise, thanks to the launch of a new application platform by Yahoo Mail.
Earlier, only Gmail users had access to Xoopit, who had been practical enough to have a Firefox plug-in installed. Through the new application platform of Yahoo, Xoopit will have additional direct access to the 275 million monthly users worldwide that use webmail service. The company will not have to take control of Yahoo as was the case with Google. Instead, Xoopit will have its own space in the Yahoo Application gallery from where users will be able to easily install it.
This is a great opportunity for Xoopit to transform into an extensively used tool that users know they won’t be able to survive without rather than remaining a simple plug-in. Users can expect many other productivity tools to follow this path as the application platform is really focusing on some serious errands. Another example of this is WordPress.
Xoopit has said that Yahoo has been fully open to discuss options that developers may use in order to monetise its platform. The exact details of what Yahoo is planning to do are not yet available. Maybe Yahoo will now allow developers to put up ads in the purview of Yahoo mail, and perhaps offer to share the revenue it gets on its own ads in the future.
Answerpedia: A Yahoo Project that did not see the Light of Day
Yahoo Answers has now turned three years old. It has become the fifth most popular product launched by the search engine giant after the homepage, search, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Shopping.
‘Quantcast’ claims that it attracts roughly 24 million visitors from the US on a monthly basis. Yahoo has not tried anything dramatic with Yahoo answers apart from attempts to sell it. It still has a large amount of traffic; this is because it is able to answer virtually any question very quickly. But its growth seems to have become stagnant since last April. To top it all, Yahoo did not let a project, which could have improved Yahoo Answers, see the light of day. This project was tentatively called ‘Answerpedia’.
The plan was very straight forward; take some of the very best answers on Yahoo Answers and club them together as authoritative pages on a topic on their very own wiki. This could be edited and polished by the users as per their requirements. As opposed to Wikipedia, Answerpedia would have become a wiki containing experiential knowledge; not fact based information.
Like some of its other projects, Yahoo did not go beyond the early development stage as far as this project was concerned. Possibly, the new CEO may just revive Answerpedia.
Google is Out of the List of Most Trusted Companies
The worshippers of the search engine giant, Google, argued that the Google Corporation was one of the most trusted companies in surveys carried out by Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. But, based on an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, it is not so.
The report mentioned about Google no longer being in the list of 10 of the most trusted companies. Also, it has failed to make it in the top 20. Not surprising, many financial firms have taken a similar hit. Privacy concerns have risen and such surveys give a hint regarding what the consumers really want and whom they really trust.
So which new names have made it to the top 20? Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Verizon and FedEx were in it for the first time. While, American Express, eBay, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Nationwide and Charles Schwab, were able to retain their top 10 rankings. American Express holding the top spot for the fourth consecutive year. It is indeed intriguing why Yahoo managed to make it to the top 20 and Google could not.
The Ponemon Institute said that Google and Microsoft tend to suffer from the big brand syndrome. People are able to figure out that if a company is big and is into data collection, an issue might crop up. Facebook also made it to the top 20. Ponemon opined that the social networking website has been giving more options to users as to how their personal data should be shared.
MySpace Comes Out With ‘Top 8’s of 2008’
In a move similar to that of ‘Zeitgeist’ by Google and the ‘top searches’ list put together by Yahoo, MySpace has come out with a ‘Top 8’s of 2008’ list. The ‘Top 8’s of 2008’ list talks about the most famous and well known musicians, musical numbers, viewings, performers and even blogs on MySpace in the previous year. Here are some of the findings:
• Twilight seems to be the winner of choice by popular vote. Twilight is a vampire movie, which gained massive fame on a global level. It topped the list in the category of most overall viewings on the social website. It was also ranked number one in the section for movie trailers.
• Well known search terms are those, which have major entertainment value. (This comes as no surprise). This is distinctly different from the most famous searches carried out on Google and Yahoo, a lot of which were based on the Olympics and the election.
• ‘Top 8’s of 2008’ points out the musical numbers which have received the most fame on the extremely famous ‘MySpace music streaming’ service. This famous service has ‘streamed’ billions of musical numbers in just a couple of months, since its release.
• Strangely, just two of the most popularly looked for artists on ‘MySpace Music’ showed up in the first 8 in terms of streamed numbers.