'Net Features : google, social

Google +1 Recommendation Feature

Administrator — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:51:00 GMT

Web users want more (and better, more relevant) information and Web workers obviously should want to show it to them.

Sounds like an opportunity to me!

Google must think the same way as it has released a new feature of the +1 button that dramatically improves content recommendation.

The new +1 button feature enables users to see recommendations for content on the website they are visiting when they hover over a +1 button.

What makes the enhancement so valuable is that in order to keep the recommendations more “relevant and on topic,” Google will only refer to pages on the same domain or subdomain where the +1 button appears.

The best part is that if the +1 button has already been integrated onto your website, the recommendations feature will work automatically – whether users are signed in Google+ or not.

The update is slated to go live for all users in the coming weeks, but a platform preview is available for developers.

Google Challenges Facebook for Mobile Developer Attention

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:35:00 GMT

Mobile application development platform Appcelerator recently teamed up with the International Data Corporation (IDC) to analyze the social mobile application landscape, and their results show that Google is poised to give Facebook a run for its mobile money.

After surveying nearly 2173 Appcelerator application developers across the globe, the surveyors found that most of them have a rapidly growing interest in social mobile. These developers also feel that Google will be the key to implementing their social strategies over the next year because of the company’s “broad range of assets,” including Android, Gmail, Google+ and YouTube, among many others.

Google’s various offerings make the company an important figure in the social mobile world because of their closely linked integration with one another; 39 percent of the developer’s questioned said these Google assets are actually more important to their upcoming social mobile development than Facebook’s social graph. Overall, though, developers reported that they don’t feel like they have the proper knowledge or tools to take full advantage of social in their application strategies.

“This translates into a big competitive opportunity for Google – and potential significant risk for Facebook – especially because developers perceive Google as innovating faster than Facebook,” says IDC’s VP of Mobile & Connected Consumer Platforms Scott Ellison.

Unfortunately, it’s not all great news for Google. The survey also reveals that Android is seeing waning interest from developers because of its continued fragmentation, effectively propelling iOS much further ahead in terms of developer attention.

Meanwhile, HTML5 appears to be moving to the center stage with both pure mobile browser apps and hybrid apps, making it a new challenger to the long dominant native apps that have pretty much always ruled the mobile development arena.

Google+ Updates: Real-Time Search, Hashtags and YouTube

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, Google released a video featuring its Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, announcing that Google+ is going to be getting big updates in both real-time search and hashtag support.

The company's social network, which thus far hasn't exactly found mainstream success, will now feature search results that update instantly (the service just got its own search capabilities last month) and hashtags that are clickable. These clickable tags will then take users to search results for the terms.

"We're trying to make it easier to follow and contribute to live events on Google+," says Gundotra, "Including breaking news, sporting events and many others."

When it comes to search, relevance and punctuality are what drive this new update; now that Google has a unique pool of crowd-created information, it can produce real-time results. In fact, G+ posts have already started being integrated into Web search results. (Maybe that's bad timing after employee Steve Yegge's harsh critique of the social network on Google+ yesterday.)

In other G+ news, Google has made it possible for users to link their YouTube accounts with their Google+ profiles. Now videos shared with you on the social network will be added directly to your YouTube homepage.

Linking the two profiles is a matter of going to the "Sharing" tab in your YouTube account settings; there will be a link prompting you to "manage all your Google connected accounts" and from there you can join the two.

This isn't the first time that Google has incorporated G+ into one of their many other services (or even with YouTube, which has already had Hangouts integration), but it is probably the biggest merger since Plus accounts were linked to Google Docs.

Find Real-Time Data in Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:45:00 GMT

Google is launching a real-time data feature in its Analytics offering.

With Google Analytics Real-Time, users will have the ability to see active visitors on the sites they measure, providing very powerful insights into the social media response they are generating. Google's instant statistics, for example, could indicate how well an individual tweet performed in relation to its ability to drive site traffic or conversions. Another suggestion is to use the Real-Time reports to make sure that campaign tracking is correctly implemented.

While the Real-Time reports are not yet currently available to everyone (request early access here), the reports are presently available in the Dashboards tab and will be moving to the Home tab in the new interface release next week.

The response so far from Google Analytics users? Very, very positive.

In Social Sharing, Google +1 Surges

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:16:00 GMT

SEO Platform BrightEdge is reporting that its analysis of the Web’s 10,000 largest websites is showing a 33 percent increase in placement of the Google +1 button in the last few weeks.

While Facebook still claims a two-to-one lead in placement on these sites over other social networks, most brands are still not linking to Facebook. BrightEdge’s SocialShare Site Analysis found that 47 percent of sites are linking to the social network with Twitter seen on 42 percent of the sites measured. It is important to note that these percentages are based on the sites “linking” to Facebook and do not include actual social plugins.

When it comes to social plugins however, Facebook still leads the way with almost 20 percent of the sites including the plugin tools offered by Facebook. But Google+ is surging, achieving placement on 4.4 percent of the sites (Plugins from Twitter are displayed on just 3.4 percent of the front pages.

“Overall, this inaugural version of our SocialShare Site Analysis shows huge opportunity for brands to engage more socially,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Fewer than half the largest sites on the Web offer any kind of social link at all on their front page and these sites represent a massive slice of Internet traffic on any given day. We would expect to see a land grab effort this year as plugins vie for placement on this very valuable Web real estate.”

Google +1 for Web Publishers

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:10:00 GMT

Google formally released the +1 button today. This “social recommendation” and “annotation” feature is a new area for Google and in turn for consumers, publishers and of course advertisers (more on that later) so Website Magazine will be watching development closely in the next few week.

Google partnered with several sites including Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Reuters, Nordstrom and others (including social sharing tool AddThis) to display the +1 feature today. Google will deploy the +1 button on Google properties such as the Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube in the coming days.

Get Started with Google +1
To deploy the feature on your Web property, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central. You will be able to configure a small snippet of JavaScript and integrate it where you want it to appear. Several button sizes and styles are available.

So what’s so important about +1? According to the official Google announcement, “By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search results and search ads could show up with +1 annotations more often, helping users see when your pages are most likely to be useful.” Google is once again playing to its strengths – webmasters (and Web professionals) – to make the +1 button a mainstay on websites that rely on both its organic and paid traffic. Whether it can compete in a landscape full with social services is something only time will tell.

Website Magazine will be covering the +1 annotation feature in greater detail in the coming days an in future issues of the print publication.

SugarCRM Gets Social with IBM, Google, Cisco and Citrix

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:00:00 GMT

CRM solution SugarCRM released several additions to Sugar 6 including most notably integration with applications from IBM, Google, Cisco WebEx, and Citrix Online.

“Today’s professionals are demanding business tools that enable them to work the way they want to work – in a connected, always-on world with fewer barriers,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “No other CRM platform offers the breadth of social business and collaboration offerings in such and open and flexible manner.”

Sugar 6 improved its integration offerings for the IBM Lotus Collaboration product family, resulting from the recent acquisition of iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises. SugarCRM and IBM are also announcing general availability of Sugar for IBM LotusLive, first introduced earlier this year, which lets users schedule/host Web meeting from inside their CRM solution and creating a more broader social collaboration platform.

Better collaboration tools are definitely in focus right now. For example, the latest edition of Sugar 6 will offer integrations with popular web meeting tools including Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre and Citrix-GoToMeeting, and let users upload, manage and share Google Docs right inside the Sugar 6 user interface.

Activity streams in Sugar 6 also got a few new features. Sugar Activity Streams include the ability to reply to individual posts, view user profile photos within posts, integrate a Sugar user’s Facebook news feeds, as well as integrate the Twitter streams that a Sugar user follows.

SEO for Google Social Search

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:23:00 GMT

Search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns have moved far beyond simply optimizing <title> tags, page content, and generating incoming links.

Now that Google “universal” or “blended” search has become widespread on almost every search query, a standard organic listing is competing with images, video, news, local, paid and real-time search. Now we can add social search results to the mix. These new sets of results not only deliver content that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, but also have the potential to push other, organic listings off the visible page. That means social media optimization (SMO) is now in direct competition with SEO. However, don’t be discouraged. The good news is that it’s often much easier to get top rankings for a blended or social search category than a highly competitive organic listing. That is, of course, if you understand how to optimize for Google Social Search.

Understanding Google Social Search
It’s important to differentiate Social Search from Google’s realtime search results. Real-time results are labeled “Latest results for ...” and include a scrolling results box for some queries. Alternatively, Google Social Search is labeled “Results from people in your social circle for ...” and results appear with an accompanying image (or avatar) from your social circle.

Think of Social Search as Google “Trust” Search. By personally choosing to “follow” certain friends and websites online, Google assumes that information from these sources is important, relevant and trusted by you and uses these contacts to form your social graph. Then, particular queries will return results from those in your circle — their blog posts, Twitter updates, etc. Google feels this can add yet another layer to search results and improve your overall search experience.

How does Google Determine Relevancy for Social Search?
Google claims to use a normal ranking algorithm when determining what websites to display first in Social Search results. So, page content, number of incoming links, and incoming link quality and authority are the primary ranking factors. However, expect this to change as Google continues to test and tweak Social Search results and puts more emphasis on the Direct and Secondary connections within your social circle.

Optimizing for Google Social Search
First and foremost, you must have a Google Profile that includes information about you, and links to websites you want to promote. This should include links to your primary website and its weblog, and social profile URL’s including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, FriendFeed, Yelp, etc. In short, any active social network profile should be included. While some networks and their content will not be indexed by Google (such as Facebook), linking those profiles to your Google profile (and vice-versa) will offer a better chance of connecting with people through Google and, ultimately, be found in Social Search results.

Establish Connections within Gmail and Google Chat
While time consuming, it is worth gathering as many Gmail and/or Google Chat contacts as possible, as it will increase your exposure in Social Search. Unfortunately, contacts from other networks are not as easily imported. You can’t add Twitter followers easily — they must be added one-byone. But you can import contacts from a CSV file, for example. Remember, not only will your contacts see you in their Social Search results, but you have the potential to be seen by the connections-of-your-connections or friends-offriends. In short, your reach will grow exponentially as you add connections.

Keep Content Relevant and High-Quality
Aggressively pursuing new contacts is important to Social Search success. However, you want to stay relevant and post quality content. Posting low-quality, keyword-stuffed content will result in the same fate as usual — low conversion rates. Or, in this case, you might find yourself banned from your contacts’ Social Search results. Remember, these results are targeted to friends and trusted contacts. So, you want to appear as genuine and trustworthy as possible.

Social Search is Here to Stay
With the explosion of Facebook and Twitter you can no longer ignore the enormous potential in being social. Google wants its share of the social pie, so don’t expect them to remain idle while Facebook and Twitter try to eat into their search market share. However, it is important to keep in mind that Google will continue to test and tweak results. Not every query will result in Social Search results, and you can expect many changes on the results pages and to the social ranking algorithm in the future. In the interim, get ahead of the game by optimizing your Google Profile for Social Search while competition is fairly low. It will benefit your overall social media and SEO efforts.

:: by Dante Monteverde, SEO Corner Columnist at Website Magazine ::

Google Steps Up Social Search

Mike Phillips — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:31:00 GMT

Google has posted on their blog that Social Search is now available to everyone. Within the next few days, users will be allowed to participate in Social Search by simply creating a Google profile then linking their online content and profiles from other websites. Then, when searching, users will see results from those people connected to the profile, and connected through other websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

Why is this significant to Web business? Simply put, the more connections you make, the better chance you have of appearing on the first page of search results of those with whom you are connected. For example, if you build a robust profile on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and have many connections, you stand the chance of being featured in any one of those users' Social Search results every time they use Google. Within your Google profile, you can also add other, non-social websites, such as your company blog. Again, when you are connected to a user, your blog content (if relevant) could show up as a Social Search result to that user. It's a quick, free and easy way to get your content in front of people who likely share common interests. In essence, the more connections you have, and the more outlets you have to share your content online, the better chance you have of appearing in users' search results.

While logged in to your Google profile, take a look at "My social circle" after conducting a search on Google. This will show those with whom you are connected and gives you the option to add and remove connections. According to Google, it will take "a few weeks" for Google to make all the connections and start returning Social Search results. The video below gives a brief overview of Social Search.

Read the official Google blog post on Social Search.

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Google's Real-Time Search Changes Everything

Mike Phillips — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:59:00 GMT

The real-time Web is here. Google has officially jumped into real-time search, taking full advantage of its recent partnerships and changing the face of search engine optimization. Conduct a search on Google and you might now see a sizable part of the page dedicated to real-time search. This is a scrolling, live update of content from across the Web about your query and one of the most significant public-facing changes Google has made in a long time. It's also one of the biggest changes to SEO (as it applies to Google) in recent history.

The real-time updates - or "Latest results" - take up a significant portion of screen space. After the sponosored listings at the top of the page, then the top organic result comes the real-time updates. In some cases, the box is also very close to the fold. In short, as it stands today, your company's organic listings might have already changed dramatically. While the total number of results does not seem to have changed, you might have dropped below the fold. That means checking your search positions immediately, and getting to work on improving them.

Below is a Google results page for "Obama health care." The first result is the top result, then you will see the real-time results. The bottom result after the real-time box is just above the fold. This is a hot topic, so keep in mind that not all queries will produce real-time results, or results will be ordered differenlty. For example, a search for "zhu zhu" (a popular toy this holiday season) shows real-time results, but at the very bottom of the page. Also impacting the position of real-time results and normal organic listings will be the number of paid search results.

One thing is for certain - Web professionals' stock in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca just went through the roof. Those companies are now partners, waist-deep in the Google mix; and that's where many of the real-time results are coming from. In short, if you're not on some or all of these networks, it's time to get started. And you must go beyond just making a profile. These real-time results will take into account your social graph - the connections you make and your "authority" in the space, as well as the content you provide on these networks. We're talking quality here. Businesses must provide value to their social connections. For example, if you tweet an important piece of information and it gets re-tweeted by your followers, you can bet Google will take notice. Google will be examining accounts' social stock and including those in the updates - on the first page of Google. You will also notice that real-time results are not limited to social networks, but include blogs and other websites. Content creation and optimization (creative copy, keyword-friendliness, etc.) becomes a mission-critical business objective.

It will also be interesting to see if these new partner networks get flooded with "content noise," once publishers realize the opportunity. It's quite possible the personal space users feel they have within networks like Facebook will be come serious spam magnets.

Don't miss Website Magazine's February issue. Included is Dante Monteverde's SEO Corner, focusing on optimization for Google's Social Search and real-time results.

Below is a brief video of Google's latest innovation. It's not hard to see the impact looming for Web professionals.

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.

Google Social Search and the Battle for Social Dominance

Mike Phillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Google has announced the release of Google Social Search; promising to bring the most relevant results to your queries by indexing the content submissions of your "social circle." Here's the quick version of how it works:

When you search on Google (through Google Labs) you can select "Social" from the "Show options" link on the top left of the page. This will present results from your social connections that are integrated with your Google account; Reader, Picasa, Blogs, Twitter, Gmail Chat and FriendFeed. So, if you include your Twitter profile on your Google account (more on that in a minute), you will get relevant results from the content submitted by all those you follow on Twitter. In addition, to round out your "extended social circle," you will get results from the followers of those you follow. Mixed with those results will be mentions of your search query in the blogs you follow through Reader, related photos on Picasa, and so on; down to any network you belong to and your contacts within that netowork - as long as they are included in your Google Profile. On the surface, it sounds pretty useful. And for some, it will be. But don't get too excited yet.

Think this will make a big impact on how consumers find your brand? Think again. Sure, millions of consumers have Gmail accounts. But it's a safe bet that a very small percentage of those users have a Google Profile set up, much less take advantage of Google Reader. That number likely continues to shrink for the number of those users who write blogs, and use Twitter or FriendFeed.

Try this - log out of Google then do a random search. Do you readily see the option to build a Google profile? Have you ever seen a complete Google rookie try to set up (much less understand) Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed or anything of that likeness? I'm reminded of a common saying in the industry; If you can't explain it to your Grandmother, you're doing it wrong ... or something to that effect. Go ahead and ask 10 random people over your next lunch hour if they've ever used Twitter, FriendFeed or Google Reader. The point is, we're dealing with a small segment of the consumer population.

What's missing from all the buzz on Google Social Search?

Facebook.

Make no mistake, Google and Facebook are at war - that's what this expirement is really about. Social Search is Google's early answer to Facebook Search and the countless connections being made and information being shared through Facebook. This is a war for the very social fabric of the Internet. Facebook (with likely millions more users than registered Google Profile users) will reveal social search in a way that's not limited to information from Google Profiles, but will include Google products - because Facebook doesn't limit anything that users want to share with their online network. Blogs can be included through Networked Blogs, Twitter can be integrated, photos can be shared and tagged, movies can be recommended ... there are even apps for most of that. Facebook has created a hub for social activity that's remarkably easy to use, which is why the age demographic keeps rising. Google is attempting to build a way to patch together a very fragmented social scene - it all has the feeling of a reeling empire trying to corral it's loyal subjects before an all-out desertion.

Google Social Search is not easy. In fact, it's quite confusing. Also, if you want to take advantage of Google Social Search, be prepared to limit yourself to one Google profile and its contacts. At this time, you cannot merge profiles - for those of you who have mulitple Gmail addresses or profiles for multiple reasons ... like me.

Finally, understand that this should serve as a major red flag to those who don't quite yet grasp that everything you publish online is public domain unless you explicitly protect it. Think about it like this: If I use Google Social Search, I might get results from your Twitter account (or Digg submission, or Flickr account, etc.) even though you have no idea who I am. It could be that I follow someone on Twitter who you follow ... one of those 1,000 people you follow in hopes of gaining more followers yourself. Your online network just expanded to all registered Google users ... whether you like it or not. Be careful what you say - Google is listening ... and indexing.