Gypsii is a social network for people who use mobile devices and the web. The core of the network is that all content is geo-location tagged. This means that if you produce content in form of pictures, text, video - it will not only be shared with others on the network, but also tied to the exact location where the content creation took place (country, city, street, club, bar, restaurant, etc). Your friends on the network will be able to get information about the exact time and place where the shared event happened. That’s not all - users can create points of interest (ex. restaurant with good food and low prices). Each user can find these points of interest and get distance from their present location to the point of interest. There are plenty more ways to use this network, for example for checking what another friend did today (where they went, and corresponding generated content if available), and their present location relative to your own (if they are close by). Friends can easily find each other and meet for coffee or lunch, or at a common point of interest (a sale at a fashion store). Their video does a good job of explaining features, so check it out.

Gypsii officially announced their services at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. It’s available in several languages for now - US English, UK English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The fact that geo-location is deeply integrated into the service, may represent a nice advertising opportunity for local services and vendors. Each advertised business could easily be added by the user as a point of interest.

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The government of Montenegro has just inked a deal with a couple of major registrars to allow them to offer .me domains for sale. A tender was introduced in late December, inviting all interested registrars to offer their proposals for becoming the .me registrars, and the .me advisory board have accepted GoDaddy and Allias as future partners. GoDaddy’s involvement with the new TLD was announced as a possibility in mid-January. They feel these two companies, both having a long-lasting reputation for being reliable in the domain business, will give consumers a good experience. GoDaddy certainly has a long record of successful domain selling and management, while Allias has been known for reliable infrastructure. According to the deal, the registrar is to deposit an initial 5 million euros withing 30 days from deal announcement, and banker guarantees towards a total of 8.5 million euros within 45 days, as revenue for the duration of the deal.

The new .me domain is very interesting from many aspects, but most of all for the various nice combination of domain names that can go with the TLD (kiss.me, find.me, get.me, call.me, see.me, meet.me, rate.me - just to give a few examples). Anyway, .me domains will be available for purchase in the latter part of 2008, so get warmed up. I am guessing there will be a long waiting line.

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Mozilla is busy developing the new mobile version of the Firefox browser. Doug Turner, Firefox mobile product manager, has just released another idea for the user interface for the new mobile FF, on his blog. Basically, the browser would have a hidden UI layer that would come up when a user touches one of the icons that translucently sits on the bottom of the screen. The whole idea is that the user would have the whole screen available for viewing the internet page, and use the UI extension only on demand. Here are two pictures which represent what the new mobile FF UI could look like:

  

Pretty good idea, although I am hoping the mobile FF will not inherit blocking glitches of its big brothers (open a few tabs and run a couple of AJAX intensive sites, and that’s it). The Mozilla Wiki already has an entry for the new mobile touchscreen browser interface from a while ago, although quite different than the one just presented.

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I just read a great post on Sugarrae.com, written by Rae Hoffman. The post is actually a Q&A session with eleven link development experts, include the author of the post. There are a lot questions covered, so prepare yourself for a lengthy read. The questions covered are:

1. What are the top 5 or 10 “open” link sources that you still use?
2. Are you afraid of talking about link building in public for fear that Matt might want to make you an example?
3. How much do you stress internal linking on your own or clients’ sites?
4. If you had 7 days to train a link developer, which concepts would you focus on each day as the most important concepts?
5. How will recent trends such as personalization and universal search affect the way SEO’s develop and execute link building strategies?
6. Reciprocal links work. Do you recommend it and how is it different today? If you don’t recommend, why not?
7. Do you think the search engines are currently taking steps to dampen the effects of bursty style link growth that is typical of viral content? Do you think they will in the future?
8. …how long do you think it will be before webmasters stop trusting Google advice in general? What will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? How polluted will the link graph get when webmasters realize Google has no real control over it? What links will still pass weight in that sort of free for all linking environment?
9. In Google’s algothrim updates for 2008, what changes do you expect in terms of how links come into play?
10. What in your opinion are the three top “footprints” you see SEO’s leave when developing links that would flag them as “unnatural” to you?
11. You have a brand new web site devoted to deep sea rescue equipment and education. You have one and only person who can work full time on link building for the next 90 days, then they will leave forever, and nobody will be able to do any link building work beyond that time. The site will continue to have new content added on a monthly basis forever. What advice would you give them?

The last one is a bit long, I couldn’t simply show the question because the introduction bit is quite important. By the way, my favorite part of the whole post. Question number 4 is also quite interesting.

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Microsoft announced its intention to buy Yahoo! for 44.6 billion dollars on February 1st. This means the share price Microsoft offered for Yahoo! is 31 dollars per share, a value lower than in the past weeks and months. Yahoo’s declining value, and recent moves towards cutting down on work force, are all part of something many see as a crisis. In that sense Microsoft’s offer is timely and balanced. There have been many speculations already about what a merger between the two companies might produce as a result. Both companies have worked on improving and developing their search presence in the past months, and both have succeeded in areas related to search, but none has achieved any significant increase in search scape share against Google. This post tried to compare the two companies’ online efforts and determine which was a “winner” in each area. It seems Microsoft would have a lot to gain by simply integrating Yahoo! but also a lot of area where a merger would actually produce something competitive unlike each company’s independent effort. One such area would be local maps where Yahoo’s interface would be a great improvement on Microsoft’s features. Perhaps this press release by Microsoft sums up their goal best:

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

Interesting to say, Microsoft would have probably bought Facebook, if it was available for sale, although they chose to ensure an ad platform instead, by purchasing a Facebook share. Personally, I think the merger would bring improvements for those who use the two companies’ services and a more solid search alternative to Google, but there are opinions that Microsoft is again heading for monopoly issues again. Google hasn’t said anything yet about Yahoo!, probably because their ownership of it would probably be regarded as search scape monopoly … or would it?

Yahoo! is still thinking about Microsoft’s offer, but there are rumors others may be interested in Yahoo! as well - they’ve certainly got the cash.

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