Copy, Writing

Addicted to Caffeine

The live launch of Caffeine, Google's new new web indexing system has been announced. 

So what does this mean for the owners of web content and SEO copywriters? Not much. The game is the same, it just got much faster. There will just be more competition for those ever valuable top 10 spots though.

Users searching for breaking news or live events, however, will get much more relevant links towards the top of their Google search. Mike Cutts, the Google guru who made the announcement, said, "Fundamentally the change is as soon as a document gets crawled, boom, it gets indexed. This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time."

As for social media: when asked if "you could now, for example, look at Facebook’s open social graph or whatever it’s called, see all the Likes for a particular page and associate those Likes with that page," Cutts replied, "If that page were public, then you could." Which, if I'm hearing things correctly is Google saying, "Thanks for all the data Facebook, this is going to really help with our indexing."

Xbox TV

We'll have to wait till E3 to know for sure, but rumor has it Hulu is coming to Xbox Live. There are a couple of interesting implications that come to mind:

• Xbox is a social media machine — already having full integration into Twitter and Facebook — adding a Like button and/or @anywhere tag to the opening and closing credits of episodes should be a no-brainer.
• There's a real possibility to have Hulu parties (much like Xbox's current Netflix party feature). You could watch the season finale of Lost with all of your friends without ever leaving your house.
• Microsoft will probably find out that subscription fees don't work — anyone who can hook up an Xbox to their TV can hook up a computer to their TV and stream Hulu for free. This would mean commercial integration into Hulu shows, which could lead to some really groundbreaking commercials. I'm thinking a game/commercial hybrid. These people already have an Xbox controler in their hands, why not take advantage of that?

Open Face

Openbook lets you tap into a ridiculous amount of Facebook updates and profiles. With a simple search function (and some funny suggested searches) takes everything you don't want people to know, yet post on Facebook, and collects it into one spot. If nothing else, it shows that a lot of people don't know how to change their Facebook privacy settings.

Big Time Social

Define your ROI, have a business objective, empower your employees and personalize your brand. This is the advice of some pretty heavy hitters in the social media world: Virgin America, Comcast and Cisco.

They also hand out some advice and insight on how social media will probably change your company internally.

4 Milllllion Users

Elliot Schrage, the current VP of public policy at Facebook and former Google exec, was recently grilled by NYT readers. One their main concerns was privacy. In response Schrage says:

It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That’s not acceptable or sustainable. But it’s certainly fixable.

It sounds like Schrage might be bringing some of the "Don't be evil." mentality to Facebook. Either that or he sees the writing on the wall.

 

Tweet Populi

Are tweets (and other social media posts) the voice of the people?

I'm not going to jump into the beehive that is arguing the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of a tool like Healthcare NTI, which is billed as "the first social media tracking tool to monitor public opinions on healthcare." But I will be interested to see if social media tracking tools are sold to and used by politicians. Will their knowledge of their constituency be based on Facebook posts?

Face v. Head

Recently, Facebook has been eating all of Google's ice cream. And Google knows it. So their on the hunt for a new Head of Social.

The job description shows that Google is well aware of this position.

From the recruiting letter:

This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google’s view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

As they say, knowing is half the battle.

Farming Out Facebook

Zynga, makers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and other popular Facebook games, will soon be leaving Facebook (at least according to rumor). The  dispute is over money — specifically, what percent of their profits Zynga should have to give Facebook for building on their platform.

The leak states:

"Pincus [Zynga CEO] announced at a 5pm meeting yesterday at Zynga that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live. The Zynga Live initiative was a social gaming network. Facebook and Zynga has been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst. In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga’s feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga in the process threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks."

The question is, will devoted FarmVille players follow Zynga off of Facebook to keep their crops alive?

The Queen of Apples

Wireless reading devices (and smart phones to a lesser extent) are changing where, when and how we read. They're also starting to change some fundamental things that have been updated since movable type was invented. Like how we read and what we expect a book to do and be - Alice for the iPad takes it to the next level.

The Brits

Facebook is the UK's version of an "I voted" sticker.

I have a few British friends, we all call them the Brits. I say that not to brag (because as we all know having British friends is nothing to brag about - love you guys), but to point out that I saw "John has voted in the election" in my news feed today. So I did a little digging to find out what was going on across the pond.

Here's the scoop:

[British] Facebook users over the age of 18 were greeted on Thursday morning with an "I've voted" button at the top of their page.

A Facebook spokeswoman said this was acting as a "convenient reminder" to head to the polling booths, and around 100,000 people were clicking the button every hour.

She said: "As the numbers rise from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, people will know that they have been a part of the first British social media election.