Microsoft is planning to make available software that connects the Windows OS to services delivered over the Internet this week. This concept, often referred to as cloud computing, is part of Microsoft’s initiative that will connect the OS with online services. There was talk about cloud computing as something that may be the founding block of the new web (Web 3.0?), as Eric Schmidt said here. This move on Microsoft’s part may in fact put Microsoft back in the game. Microsoft cannot compete directly with its search engine, but with service and OS integration they will be able to keep their hundreds of millions of customers close and away from competitors such as Google or SalesForce.com, both of which offer plenty of software solutions online otherwise offered on desktop computers by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s desktop monopoly has been threatened for a long time by hundreds of companies who offer online services that require nothing more than Internet access and web browsers, while all data is stored on servers. As the industry is moving more towards the “on-demand model”, Microsoft is just in time with this change. Look forward to seeing Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and Windows Live OneCare Family Safety, as well as Windows Live Writer for blogging, with SkyDrive and FolderShare to join the list very soon as additional services for data storage. As Bill Gates put it “When you think storage, think Windows Live”. Microsoft aims to separate user data and applications from devices on which they are used. Windows Live Service will be available at Live.com soon, so stay tuned!

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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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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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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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After having taken offline the only tool on Live.com, the link operator, in March this year, Live is back with a promising announcement. They’re putting together Webmaster Portal, a special place for webmasters where there will be tools and information about Live SEO. Initially, here’s what we’ll get:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

The tools are expected to be available publicly this late Fall, but you can sign-up for the beta program right now if you want to dive in right away.

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Microsoft announced it will release Content Ads within its AdCenter to users in the US. Microsoft Content Ads is a system that allows you to place content targeted ads on the Microsoft network. The Microsoft network includes many sites such as MSN Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows Marketplace. Microsoft says they will include other properties in the MSN network over time. Users will be able to control the price for the ads as well as where they will appear on the network.

This may be a very interesting development, since now Microsoft will be offering something Google has done for several years with AsSense. This move puts Microsoft in the ballpark with Google, which may in turn produce positive developments. The two will have to compete for user attention which in the end will benefit the end users.

Read in more detail on AdCenter Blog.

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Ok, so Yahoo Search decided to try and make our lives a little easier by offering a way to tell Yahoo Search that dynamic parameters in the URL (the ?’s and &’s and this=that) can be ignored on request.

Today comes a new wave for search engines with the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer. The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

Hm, nice. But it gets even more interesting. You can actually give the dynamic URL parameter you want Yahoo to crawl your page(s) with. For example, leave the parameter “?show=full” in the URLs to be crawled.

• Login to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search.
• Add to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
• For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a ‘Dynamic URLs’ tab.
• On this tab you can enter parameters you want us to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
• Once you enter the parameter, we’ll show you the # of URLs we estimate will be affected.
• After you confirm the action, we’ll modify our crawler such that every time we see a URL from your site with that parameter, we’ll automatically rewrite it within our system as per your instruction.

Next Yahoo shows us why this may be useful for webmasters:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

See in more detail on Yahoo Search Blog.

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Google Maps has announced a new development. You can now embed a Google Map into a web page in 3 easy steps, similar to the way you embed YouTube videos.

Adding a map to your website or blog is now as easy as embedding a YouTube video. No programming skills are required, and there’s no need to sign up for a Maps API key. All it takes is three simple steps…

1. go to Google Maps and pull up the map
2. click link to this page and copy the appropriate generated embed code
3. paste the code into your page’s HTML code…

… and that’s it!

For example, I wish I was here:

View Larger Map

Yep, the SES San Jose.

In more detail on the new Google Map feature.

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Yahoo has created abundance of mobile content. Just check out mobile.yahoo.com, and you’ll get the picture. The latest addition to Yahoo’s mobile portfolio is Actionality, a mobile game ad company. Basically, Actionality puts ads into mobile games and applications as they are being downloaded from the web to a mobile phone. Having recently announced its expansion of mobile ad services with the inclusion of Vodafone, Yahoo has made an even clearer move towards the mobile ad direction with the acquisition of Actionality. Whether the mobile advertising is yet profitable remains to be seen. Results have shown that so far mobile ad usage has increased but with very questionable results. The whole platform is still in its infancy so it may just be to early to judge on it yet.

Mobile advertising is certainly a platform that will experience growth, especially with significant improvements in the mobile phone industry. With the ever increasing demand for smart phones on the market, and growing advancements in that area (just look at the number of new smart phones that come out every couple of weeks and advancements in software platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile) mobile advertising will surely gain a lot of momentum.

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Microsoft Corporation has acquired aQuantive Inc (for $6 billion). This is a move that Microsoft hopes will provide the industry with a world-class advertising platform on all devices and media, creating the best experience for everyone - users, advertisers and publishers.

Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group (APS), created by Microsoft, will be responsible for building Microsoft’s monetization engine to serve the advertisers and publishers. The APS will assume responsibility for building and marketing efforts on all ad platforms - Atlas, DRIVEpm, MSNDR and Microsoft AdCenter, as well as on emerging media types such as in-game ads and mobile ads, the two advertising platforms that seem to be gaining much attention over the past months.

Today we take a significant step forward in our ability to capture share of the $40 billion online ad opportunity and the larger $600 billion ad market, which is rapidly shifting to the world of online and IP-served platforms, including TV and gaming…

The addition of aQuantive’s technologies and people to the Microsoft portfolio is a core, strategic investment and step forward in our plans to become one of the top two online advertising platforms in the industry.

aQuantive was founded in 1997, and has soon risen to be a leader in digital marketing services. This acquisition by Microsoft is a move that just may put the big M in line with its two main competitors, Google and Yahoo. Google is already far ahead from the two, but with recent efforts from Microsoft regarding search technology improvements and redesigns, and now a creation of what may prove to be a very powerful ad delivery platform, Microsoft just may be able to get back into the advertising space and gain significant improvements. These improvements just may be what it takes for Microsoft to get back into the game.

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