This is a new concept being developed by Yahoo! with the idea of creating a social network for college students looking to get connected with alumni at companies they might be interesting in working at after graduation. The new concept, which has been seen as something that will change the game, is currently being researched in order to get opinions from college students about the new concept, and possibly new directions of development.

The concept makes it easier to network with peers with similar interests for professional involvement, but also for finding out about companies that may be of interest for a future career. Kickstart is almost like a successful hybrid between LinkedIn and Facebook. If it proves to be successful, and everything is pointing in that direction, than Yahoo! indeed may change the game in professional networking.

See in more detail here.

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Data storage through spin direction change

The ability of an atom to record data due to its magnetism anisotropy (different value in different directions for the same characteristic in a substance, this time magnetism) is nothing new. IBM has already done significant research on this years back, but the new development is that IBM published two new papers in Science Weekly. These papers explain the possibilities of data storage and stable transistor behavior of molecules (something also not so new, but previous attempts didn’t preserve the functionality for long - unstable behavior).

To sum it up, if you cause the atom to spin in different directions you can store a lot of data on it (a cluster of atoms could hold as much as a 1000 trillion bits of data!), which means that millions of videos on, say YouTube, can be stored on a device the size of an iPod. On the other hand, IBM made a working experiment achieving stability with Naphthalocyanine molecules that react to change states between something we’d call “on” and “off” (0 or 1). This means the molecules would act as transistors and would enable data processing through logic gates (0 = block current, 1 = pass current).

Read in more detail at IBM Press Room.

Actual electron microscope image of Naphthalocyanine molecule in action




Computer simulation of Naphthalocyanine molecule

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Search results but with additional scrutiny from users who determine the search results’ position on the SERP by voting is what Sproose.com brings to those who use it for searching the Internet. There is web search, video search and popular tags. Users who sign-up get to vote and comment on results, and share their voting history with others on the network. Results the user thinks are bad or irrelevant can be removed from own lists, but also from the entire index if enough such requests by different users are made.

Webmasters and developers can embedd RSS feeds from Sproose on their websites, add a Sproose it up! button to enable visitors to add their page to Sproose, as well as add their site to the Sproose index if for some reason their site isn’t already there. There are sponsored results on SERPs which are direct links to advertisers’ sites. To get your site in the sponsored results I suppose you have to contact them by email on the page they call Partnerships, although there is no info on prices and terms, so I’m guessing this is still something that is at the very beginning of development.

If you’re used to using “normal” search engines, but decided the results need the extra human touch of refinement, Sproose just may be the place for you. Some called it a Google/Digg hybrid, but let’s just say this is an example where search meets social networking. The idea is good, whether it will indeed produce a better search experience than search engines remains to be seen as the number of users rises to levels that will produce balanced voting results. This doesn’t mean this kind of system is immune to manipulation. If it involves humans, it’s manipulative - how manipulative remains to be seen.

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Facebook has introduced its own friends app called FriendLists. This is the first time Facebook has released an application that directly competes with a third-party application. Slide, one of the two top owners of Facebook apps, already has the number one application, with about 13 million users (about a third of total number of Facebook users). With the introduction of FriendLists, Facebook may be aiming to take away a major part of the total number of users, which are now targeted by major Facebook app developers such as Slide or Rock You, and reserve those users for home grown applications.

Justing Smith, over at Inside Facebook did a very interesting analysis of the new developments on Facebook.

To sum it up Justin points out the following:

• this could dramatically simplify privacy controls
• this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application

With this move Facebook may be saying it’s not intending to leave application development completely open to other developers. There may be significant developments planned by Facebook, and it’s almost certain application owners and developers such as Slide and Rock You may hinder those plans with a steady rise in the number of users using their applications.

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I mentioned Plaxo a couple of weeks ago, when they released Pulse. They promised to release at least some new feed functionality when the site comes out of beta (end of summer).
Well, Plaxo delivered on the promise by introducing Online Identity Consolidator as part of the Open Social Graph effort, which in short makes it pretty easy to consolidate all the web locations (sources) of personal information. The idea is to put all your profiles scattered around the internet on sites and social networks in one place. Friends can now keep in touch with you across multiple services, without you having to tell each new site what other online tools you are already using. By adding “rel=me” to the link tag you are effectively telling the bot that the link destinations contains information about you. This makes it easy for Online Identity Consolidator to retrieve such links and recognize them as personal information links.

There are simple instructions on how to implement the necessary changes in order for this to work, but you can see them in more detail on Plaxo. Oh, and BTW the source code is in Python.

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Neil Patel, over at Search Engine Land, wrote a very useful article called Which Social Media Sites Should You Target? To sum it up Neil gives 5 steps to take when selecting the right social media sites for promotion and advertising. He says only the first 3 are actually necessary, but the last 2 are in my opinion quite necessary as well. Here are the steps in a simple list:

• list keywords associated with own website
• visit social media sites (find list) and do searches using afore mentioned keywords
• narrow selection of sites choosing those with plenty of search results
• check what the competition is doing on a particular social media site
• look for comments and check what’s being said about your site/company

And there you go. Sounds simple to the point of saying “I knew that”, but when it’s put in an organized form like this, it gives us a new perspective towards the bigger picture.

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On August 23, at SES San Jose, the Web Analytics Association announced a major development by publishing standard definitions for 26 “foundational web analytics metrics”. These metrics cover the areas of visits, content and conversion. The new publication is a result of collaboration between WAA members, vendors, agencies, practitioners and thought leaders. The new definitions will provide consistency of most widely used terms in the growing web analytics industry.

This document follows WAA’s previous release in 2006, which put focus on the three most important metrics in all analytics software and analytics tools - unique visitors, visits and sessions, and page views. These terms were later agreed upon, so WAA decided to expand its focus onto the many other core metrics that rely on these three initial definitions.

The market for analytics tools is booming and, with increased interest from all areas of online marketing, these standards benefit both the users and practitioners and will only accelerate the advancement of the analytics industry.

Read the entire press release on WAA.

The new definitions are available for download as PDF file.

The Web Analytics Association is a not-for-profit professional organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of web analytics through education, advocacy, standards, research and technology.

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Google released its own Facebook application, and yes it has everything to do with search. The application lets users use Google Search in a new way. All queries are added to a mini-feed so your web history is shared with other Facebook users. On a spearate page, the application showcases popular searches found by Facebook users. The application has been created using the Google AJAX Search API, the only search API Google left in business.

Well, great! I went to try it out, and here is what I got…

If you can’t see, it says:

Errors while loading page from application

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Google are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

Well, too bad, since now I can’t see how the application behaves on real searches. I’ll have to come back to this in a couple of days time. Hopefully both Google and Facebook will get this sorted out. Interestingly enough, Google sites Yahoo for having failed with MyRank, a search algorithm Yahoo! tried to introduce in MyWeb 2.0, which takes into account the effect of social networking on search results. You can see all this in more detail here.

Apart from this being a useful search tool on Facebook, can this be something more than that? With a potential of over thirty million users, Facebook represents a great platform for experimenting with user behavior. As of yet, there is very little known (public) data on typical Facebook user behavior (what they search for, how they consume content, ad content in particular). If Google’s app gains momentum, Google will eventually end up with very useful information about Facebook user search behavior. Then come paid search ads, and let’s not forget Facebook has been very successfully ported to the mobile platform, and Google is already waist deep in mobile advertising. Hm, interesting…

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This was expected - a tool for developing Facebook applications. Dapper, an Israeli company, will launch private beta of Facebook Appmaker, which makes it a lot easier to create an application for Facebook. Dapper, which already released a module development tool for NetVibes in easly 2006, is bringing what looks like another succesful tool to the public. The Facebook AppMaker relies on XML data manipulation. This data is taken from various sources - websites, feeds, Google Gadgets, etc. Users create the so called “Dapps” in form of XML which can then be changed in a number of ways.

The Facebook AppMaker then lets these Dapps be tranfsformed into fully functional Facebook applications, which include possibilities like remote search and retrieval, login, multi-page applications. Naturally, users have to have a Facebook Developer account before successfully using the Facebook AppMaker.

See in more detail on TechCrunch.

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Google has added multi-language support, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA), to Webmaster Tools which will allow webmasters from non-English speaking regions to use all the functionality of Webmaster Tools in their own language. The added support, among other things, means webmasters will be able to list and track domain names that use characters other than the 26 letters from the English alphabet.

This might become useful for me, since I should now be able to list a domain name written in Cyrillic or Latin Serbian letters (example: Google = Гугл in Cyrillic Serbian). I haven’t given it a try yet, but I will soon.

Google is asking for feedback for the new changes, and suggestions for further improvements.

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