The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Feb. 10: AdSense for mobile search
- Feb. 11: Google Friend Connect adds social bar
- Feb. 12: Search giants join to clean up the web
- Feb. 19: Facebook commenting widget
- In pursuit of Apple's App store
- Facebook: all your base are belong to us
Feb. 10: AdSense for mobile search
Google's AdSense program -a way to easily earn money on your website by embedding advertising- has also been available for some time now for publishers who want to embed Google's search functionality into their website. The idea is that you put a co-branded Google search box on your website, tell it what it has to search (all of the web, just your site or a couple of websites), specify the color scheme for the results and Google will deliver you with not only the relevant search results, but also relevant (contextual) advertising. The revenue from the click-throughs on the ads is shared between Google and you.
Now, Google launched the same kind of functionality for mobile network operators and mobile website owners: You can add a co-branded search box on your mobile website, let people search for text, images, local content of news, and have the results delivered together with AdSense advertising.
Feb. 11: Google Friend Connect adds social bar
Google Friend Connect, Google's take on opening up the social web through easy integration of login, commenting and other widgets, has a new member: the social bar. The social bar is a bar that can be added to your website using a small bit of code and which adds a couple of social features to your website: sign in using your Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account, leave comments, watch the website's activity stream (comparable to Facebook's live feed) and see the other members of the site, check out their profile and become friends.
Check out the sample website or Google's Social Web Blog to see it in action.
Feb. 12: Search giants join to clean up the web
In a never-before-seen act of collaboration, search giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft join forces to tackle an old pain: Sometimes different URLs actually point to the same content. Maybe a shortened URL is used for marketing purposes, maybe the page is reached in different ways with specific parameters, maybe a session id is passed ... but each time, the end-user is presented with basically the same page. Each variant is picked up by search engines and is shown in the results page after a search. The result is that you, as a web publisher, might not see the URL you hoped for in the search results and that link popularity is calculated on different versions instead of being consolidated for one single 'main' URL.
And that is exactly what engineers at Google came up with: the possibility to define your 'main' URL or 'canonical' URL as they call it. All you have to do is add that URL into the head segment of the pages that have the same content, but a different URL.
The code looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />
To get a full explanation, head over to the
Google Webmaster blog.
Feb. 19: Facebook commenting widget
In the battle to become the social epicentre, Facebook reaches out further beyond its borders by launching its first social widget. The widget -which is part of Facebook Connect- offers an easy way to integrate commenting capabilities into a website (much like the Google Friend Connect commenting widget). People can use their Facebook account to log in and leave behind a comment. If the user approves, the action is also recorded in his Facebook activity feed. And: if someone comments on it on Facebook, this comment will also appear back on the originating website. Publishers will also be able to customize the widget (via CSS) and moderate comments, though it is not clear yet what this moderation will look like.
Although Facebook is a member of the OpenID foundation, it is not yet possible to use anything else but your Facebook login to use the widget (unlike Google Friend Connect).
In pursuit of Apple's App store
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft, Nokia and Google made some announcements in pursuit of Apple's App store.
Microsoft presented its Windows Marketplace, an application store allowing you to search for mobile applications using your mobile (Windows) phone or PC. Currently, already more than 20.000 mobile applications were developed world-wide to run on the Windows Mobile operating system. Windows Marketplace should be up-and-running before xmas 2009.
Also Nokia is launching its own mobile application store, called 'Ovi'. But Ovi is promised to be more than just another application store: apart from applications, you will be able to also buy games, videos, widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalised content. Moreover, the ’social discovery’ feature will enable users to find out which content is being used by their social network peers, as they will automatically be highlighted and made available for download on their devices. Ovi store will be launched beginning of May 2009 and will be available on S60 and series 40 devices.
Finally, Google announced that developers of Android (the Google mobile operating system) applications from now on can make money by selling their applications on the Android Market. As with Apple's App store and Nokia's Ovi, there will be a transaction fee of 30%. Developers will get 70 percent of the revenue from each purchase and the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees.
Facebook: all your base are belong to us
A lot of commotion took place when social networking site Facebook changed its terms of service. In the new terms, one could read how Facebook owns everything you put on there website or everything you allow people to put there (for example using a 'share this' button on your website). And how Facebook would retain all these rights, even after you deleted your account. As a result, a lot of people went out of their minds and some even left the platform. The blog post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laying out that that was not what they meant and that it's all 'complicated', didn't cool down the mob either. So Facebook -temporarily- reverted to the old terms of service. And they created a Facebook 'bill of rights' group where people could give their take on the question. On February 26, Facebook released what they're calling "Draft Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities For User Review, Comment and Vote", "a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook's operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes." If not anything else, at least an interesting experiment in online democracy...
And for those who are wondering: no, Facebook doesn't own all your content. Zuckerberg said so.
