Facebook: New guide provides advice on how to make the most of the site

Facebook has launched a new page called Facebook for Business.

The how-to page guides businesses on how to best use the site’s pages, ads, deals, social plugins and sponsored stories.

The page was added to Facebook after Google not only asked businesses to wait for a more robust version of Google+ to be released, but kicked out some companies that set up accounts on their own.

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“I do think there’s some urgency there [for Facebook] to jump on it before Google gets its act together,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group. ” Facebook has a huge lead with consumers, so where can Google effectively compete with Google+ — businesses. If Facebook gets a jump [in the business market] now, that puts them in a leadership position.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the new how-to page focuses on helping small businesses make their way in the new social world.

“Facebook [for Business] allows small businesses to create rich social experiences, build lasting relationships and amplify the most powerful type of marketing – word of mouth,” said Carley Lake, a spokeswoman for Facebook. “We created Facebook.com/business to make it even easier for people to reach these objectives and grow.”

Businesses have been hot to create a presence on Google+ , which is nearly a month old. While Google+ has far fewer members than than the long-established Facebook network, the new site has shown a lot of momentum and has been garnering significant interest among both consumers and businesses.

Businesses like Ford Motor Company and Sesame Street found their way onto Google+ early on.

However, Google quickly asked them to refrain from using the site, acknowledging that the first iteration is geared for individuals, not for companies and organizations. A business focused site is in the design stage, Google added.

There has been so much interest in that business version that Google has picked up the development pace.

At first, Google said it expected to release a business version by the end of this year. Just days later, Google said it planned to soon pick a few companies to participate in a field trial of a business version of Google+.

And then last week, Google changed its stance once again by announcing plans to push out a business version for everyone to try in the next few months.

Kerravala said there’s a very good business case for companies to get involved with social networking, though none of the top sites have made it easy to do.

“I do think there’s a role for social networking with businesses,” he said. “I just think no one has really helped businesses figure that out.

“It looks like Facebook’s how-to page is almost a paint-by-numbers model for businesses. It’s a cool idea. It’s my sense that most businesses have no idea what to do with Facebook,” Kerravala added.

Original Source Computerworld US

There are geniuses and then there’s Google. Google seems to constantly do things, invent things and implement things that makes our life easier. I’m not talking about Google Wave here, I’m talking about tools like Gmail, analytics, YouTube…

A couple of days ago Google unveiled its latest advance: search results show up as you type. I love this!. I got the idea for this post from Jeff Jarvis (Author of What Would Google Do?) who tweeted  the results of a little experiment he started. The Buzz Machine blogger typed one letter into Google and see what turned up. So, I decided to do the entire alphabet.  I’m not sure how personalized or localized this is, but I certainly got local results when I went through the alphabet.  Let us know in comments if you get anything different (and where you’re located).

Here’s my list:

• A = Amazon
• B = Bank of America
• C = Craigslist
• D = DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles)
• E = eBay
• F = Facebook
• G = Gmail
• H = Hotmail
• I = Ikea
• J = Jet Blue
• K = KTLA (Local Channel 5)
• L = Lakers (No explanation needed)
• M = MySpace
• N = Netflix
• O = OC Fair (Orange County Fair)
• P = Pandora
• Q = Quotes
• R = Ralphs (Grocery Store)
• S = Skype
• T = Target
• U = USPS
• V = Verizon
• W = weather (with Walmart as second)
• X = Xbox
• Y = Yahoo
• Z = Zillow provides free real estate information)

Please add your results and comments below.

Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

This from Mashable:

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook (Facebook) application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

All of this sounds quite amazing – we’ll have to see if it lives up to the promises. As of now only a relative handful of people have been invited to take part in initial Wave testing, but I hear you can buy an invite on Ebay:

With Google releasing 100,000 invites to test the beta version of the much-hyped Wave, one enterprising blogger decided to capitalize on all the buzz surrounding the new messaging and collaboration tool by selling his invite on eBay.

Hagan Blount, a 30-year-old food blogger based in Baltimore, had been listening to the chatter about Wave and hatched the idea to auction his invite on eBay. “I figured there’s a whole lot of buzz. I wonder how many hits this would get?” he said.

Of course, Mr. Blount hadn’t yet received his invite, but he said that a software developer friend of his who did not wish to be identified had promised to procure one for him. Mr. Blount commenced the auction on Tuesday night, and by the time he had woken up at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day that Google would be releasing Wave invites, his auction had already received 12,000 hits.

If you want to learn more about Google Wave, check out the official Google Wave Page and Mashable.com.

How many times in an email, Facebook, Twitter or other sites have you seen a web address like this: www.govisitmysite.com and the damn thing isn’t clickable? A little annoying, right?

How many times have you copied and pasted the link?

My guess… very few. By adding these 7 simple characters, you unleash the mad, straight up power that is the INTERNET! You are leaving money, leads, customers, clients (and did I mention MONEY) on the table by not making your link clickable everywhere and anywhere you can!

NEWS FLASH —–> No one is going to take the time to copy and paste your link, EVER! (almost)

Err on the side of good business – use the http:// and your link  becomes live: http://www.govisitmysite.com (this is an example only). Don’t leave prospective clients, customers and/or cash hanging on Facebook, Twitter and even in your email.

The other bonus is that you get those important backlinks to your site – without the http:// all you get is some text on another site…

Here’s a little experiment for you. Pay attention to all the non-working links you see, just on Facebook (especially on the person’s profile and their own link) and report back here. I would love and appreciate the feedback. If you found this post helpful, Please leave a comment!

Thanks and happy linking, Facebooking and Twittering…

To learn more about this great Google feature click here.

In it’s ongoing legal battle Viacom over copyright, a judge has ordered that Google must do the unthinkable…

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

This according to an article in Wired Magazine.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”

The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

So let’s just breathe and see what happens…

There is a great article in the new Fast Company Magazine all about the do it yourself social network “”Ning”.

The article begins by letting us in on a little secret:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Yeah we all remember that little game, “I’ll give you $1 Million today or one single penny and double everyday for a month, which would you rather have?

Me? I’ll take the “Viral expansion loop” – but I want to call it the “Viral Spiral”.

This article goes on to explain how the viral loops (spirals) work as an accelerant for internet businesses – take Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr as good examples.

So where does Ning fit in?

Well they use this concept on steroids! What they’ve got going is a “double viral loop”.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.

You can read the rest of the article here

Did you know that Blogger has its own channel on YouTube? I LOVE IT! The folks at Google, who own both Blogger and YouTube, have saved me the trouble of building my own Blogger tutorials. Talk about Good luck!

If you haven’t heard this from me before, Google is so loaded with great, free resources: From Gmail, to Webmaster tools, to Google analytics, to add words, and now these great blogger tutorials.

Blogger is such a great tool. Here’s how you work it. Create a blogger blog, making sure that you name the blog using the keywords you are targeting. Add a handful of relevant ARTICLES ( blog posts). Make sure that you use your keywords in the body of all the posts on this blog. Using the keyword method of linking, link that keywords or key phrases to the relevant page on your site. Not only are you getting “backlinks” you are getting back links from a site with relevant content using relevant keywords leading to a page with more relevant content.

What a great strategy to use.

As a little primer, here is a tutorial explaining how to set up your first Blogger blog.

What are you waiting for, get your blogger blog today. Here’s the link to the blogger tutorials.

Google’s commitment to “green” means that the company sources carpet and sofas made without PVC, paints without volatile organic compounds, and cafeteria food from local growers. It’s not surprising, then, that they would roll out the largest commercial solar deployment in the US—a 1.6MW installation that covers most of the buildings at Google’s campus and extends even to shaded parking spaces. At the ETech conference in San Diego this week, Google’s Anthony Ravitz explained how Google did it, and why.

The move to solar made sense for Google, and not just “hippie Gaia-loving” sense. Ravitz said that Google will earn its investment back in 7.5 years, after which it will continue to enjoy inexpensive power for decades. With the company sprawled across a large campus of many low buildings, roof space was easily available. Solar also has the unique property of pumping out more energy when power is the most expensive—peak afternoon hours. When air conditioners across California kick into action on sunny days, Google generates the most power.

On November 28th, 2007, news comes out that Google is going into the green energy business.  Google has been pouring investment money into this sector. Besides investing in solar, wind and geothermal companies, Google will create its own research and development group “to look very aggressively at what we think are some promising technological pathways,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.

Google said that it’ll spend “tens of millions” to research clean-energy alternatives to coal-fired power plants and “hundreds of millions” to cut the costs of this power.

The goal is to produce 1 gigawatt of power from clean power sources – enough to light up a city the size of San Francisco – at a cost that’s the same as if the energy came from low-cost, high-polluting coal.

How soon? “Within years, not decades,” Google co-founder Larry Page wrote in a Web post.

Not much to do with marketing on the web, but good for the earth, don’t you think?

MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.

This according to Tech Crunch

Facebook is publicly saying they have not officially talked to Google about OpenSocial. Although sources say that that Facebook and Google have been talking about OpenSocial…including today. So pleading ignorance won’t last as a strategy for dealing with the OpenSocial movement.

You gotta love it. . . intrigue running rampant. Personally, I think it’s so cool that Google is developing this platform! Remember my previous post and my theory about Google’s bid attempt (?) for that coveted piece of Facebook. . .

I’m gonna have to learn how to build apps!

Just ran across this great blog: Tech Crunch and a great article written by Michael Arrington

Today there is a story about a developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” who evidently hacked into the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote.

At this stage I think it is pretty good to discover vulnerability in these apps. Better now than later!

I really like the idea of OpenSocial. I think the cross platform ability of these apps to perform is a pretty nifty idea. This gets me thinking. . . Google didn’t conceive of this idea after losing a bid against Microsoft to acquire a bit of Facebook, methinks. . . Maybe they just forced up the price increasing the (pre) value of Maka Maka. . .

Ah. . . I deviate. . . Oh yes, OpenSocial hackers. . .

Read the story from Tech Crunch here