The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Mar. 11: Interest-based advertising by Google
- Mar. 16: InsideFacebook's PageData
- Mar. 17: Improved MySpace ID
- Mar. 17: Forrester Research Survey: +50% of marketers increase spending on Social Media
- Mar. 17: iPhone OS 3.0 is coming your way
- Mar. 18: Silverlight 3 beta
- Mar. 19: Internet Explorer 8 has landed
Mar. 11: Interest-based advertising by Google
Until now, the selection of which ad Google would serve when on what page was determined by keywords entered or the content of the webpage the ad was displayed on. But thanks to the acquisition of the DoubleClick advertising platform almost 2 years ago, Google now takes it a step further with 'interest-based advertising'. With interest-based advertising, which ads are being served depends on your overall web behaviour, on which pages you visit, which videos you watch. And via the Ads Preferences Manager you can even opt-in to different categories of ads. Of course, this sounds and feels a lot like big brother watching your every step. And given Google's long history of privacy battles, they already announced no personal profile information will be used. Furthermore, people can also opt-out from the service (through cookie placement or installation of a browser plug-in). The first tests will run on partner sites and YouTube.
Mar. 16: InsideFacebook's PageData
InsideFacebook, one of the best blogs dedicated to Facebook, just released a new metrics product that tracks the popularity of Facebook public profiles (previously called 'Pages'). With InsideFacebook's PageData, you can get a leaderboard of the best performing pages, see which public profiles have gained or lost fans, and get data from any page on Facebook. Including a nice chart showing the progress in number of fans over the last month. The data also reveal some recent trends:
- not all top brand pages are owned by the brand itself (example: the Coca Cola page)
- there are a high number of pages in languages other than English among the top gainers
- there are a lot of 'novelty pages' (pages dedicated to general terms like 'pizza', 'dormir', ...) among the top pages
P.S. I had some troubles searching for a specific page in PageData using FireFox. Using Internet Explorer did the trick...
Mar. 17: Improved MySpace ID
Previously called 'MySpace Data Availability', MySpace ID is MySpace's answer to Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect (the latter which is now by the way also available from the iPhone and the desktop). With MySpace ID, web publishers can access a MySpace user's activity stream, post back to the platform and allow for easy login using the MySpace OpenID uri. As a first test-case of the improved ID, MySpace ID can now be used on the Yahoo! homepage to receive updates on friends within both networks directly in their Yahoo homepage experience.
Mar. 17: Forrester Research Survey: +50% of marketers increase spending on Social Media
Despite the current economical climate, over 50% of marketers will increase spending on Social Media. This is the outcome of a Forrester Research survey taken from 145 digital marketers worldwide working in companies of 250 or more.
Although this might in many cases be a smart way to move, care should be taken that social media is not regarded as an easy and cheap marketing solution. Just as with any other marketing channel it is important to measure your actions and reflect upon the results. And this is in fact where social media differs from other channels: it uses its own set of metrics such as engagement and share of voice every marketer should first get himself acquainted with.
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Via)
Mar. 17: iPhone OS 3.0 is coming your way
Apple announced a new version of the iPhone operating system. Among the new features are the long-awaited copy/cut & paste functionality, push notifications, MMS, Mac's Spotlight search across most info on the iPhone, stereo blootooth, a landscape keyboard and much much more. One of the nicest new features from a digital marketers point of view might well be the possibility to have in-app purchases: Every application on the iPhone will be able to offer online purchases from within the application. Until now, there was basically only one contact point between the publisher of the app and the user: at the moment of the purchase. This now could change with recurring billing services such as virtual gifts, ebooks, and application upgrades, allowing for better lifecycle management.
Mar. 18: Silverlight 3 beta
At the MIX09 conference, Microsoft announced a new beta version of Silverlight, its Flash/Flex/AIR competitor. Silverlight beta 3 comes with over 100 components for charting and layout, assembly caching, enhanced SEO capabilities (still an issue for Flash files), .NET RIA services, out-of-browser capabilities (an open attack on Adobe AIR) and much more (see here for a full overview).
Although Flash still has the lion's share of the market, Silverlight could get another big push with NBC using the technology for the coverage of the 2010 winter olympics, and even YouTube using Silverlight for the live coverage of the March Madness college basketball tournament!
Mar. 19: Internet Explorer 8 has landed
Already available for some time in beta, the new version of Microsoft's browser 'Internet Explorer 8' has now been officially launched. This means that the browser will be made available through the Windows automatic updating system. Although promised to have a better support for web standards, Internet Explorer 8 still scores below average on the latest web standards ACID 3 test (but much better than IE7). New features include:
- webslices: the possibility to offer (and subscribe to) parts of a webpage with specific easy-to-access content
- accelerators: accessing more information on selected text (eg a map for an address) with a right-click
- visual search suggestions: rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information
According the Net Application's 'Market Share', Internet Explorer still holds a 67% browser market share, but is loosing ground to Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
You can download Internet Explorer 8 here.
On a related note, the team of Internet Explorer 8 created some nice videos. One of them talks about the history of the Internet:
