Google Proof of Love: Map your Valentine!

How does Google prove its Love? By setting up a Map for your Valentine.

The idea behind this special occasion tool (click to follow the link) is to help you map your Valentine so that you can send your special someone a note about that utterly special place you've shared a memory, which actually can be anything you fancy reminding him/her about, even if this wasn't your best shot, - so here it is your chance to say it in a rather "creative" way!:) Anyway, who can now claim you're not offering at least that bit of attention on your beloved - The Day?

Always positive,
@Digilunch

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5 Most Innovative Search Engines of 2010

Search has become more diversified these days, since getting search results became an indispensable part of the overall daily web experience and it's getting more & more complex, due to a plethora of innovative technologies which just about yesterday seemed a matter of SF..

Today we can use search engines that are able to understand our voice commands, by employing voice recognition tools; that can identify objects from a photograph we've taken or from a barcode via our all-mighty phones; that can use geo-location to point at where we are in the world to find relevant results; that can find the right slot in a TV programme just by saying a quote from it, etc.

The below search engines may have been part of a wish-list yesterday while today they're fighting to become the next big thing in search:

1. TinEye - Reverse image search : www.tineye.com



The website and phone app TinEye allows you to upload an image and find where else it's used on the web. The search engine is using the image itself, instead of "keywords, metadata or watermarks", claimimg to be the 1st search engine of its kind to use solely image identification technology.

How it works?

As soon as you enter a URL of an image or upload one, TinEye creates a unique fingerprint based on its composition, and then searches within its 1.5 billion image database for others with the same or a partial fingerprint match. This would be a useful tool to find out if people are using your images without permission. Btw, the mobile app is now in beta version and it's free at the moment!

2. Siri - Voice-based personal assistant : www.siri.com



Imagine waking up one morning and receiving a handy little advice "Better wear a raincoat today!" This can now come in a message on your iPhone from a dutiful new virtual personal assistant Siri. Siri is a great cute planner and it's off to a very promising start. Shout out, "I need a taxi" and Siri will oblige with nearby options. You can ask it to remind you to send flowers to your second half on Valentine's Day, and the app will make sure to send an email to jog your memory. Try and ask where you could get your car fixed and Siri will come up with several suggestions "within walking distance" of up to two miles (on Avg.) from your current location. (As with numerous other iPhone apps it takes advantage of GPS.)

How it works?

Answers arrive within the Siri app from various Web partners. TrueKnowledge.com tackles the general knowledge queries, for example, and the weather forecast comes from WeatherBug. Other partners include Citisearch, OpenTable, Taxi Magic, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo Local, and Yelp. Voice recognition is handled by Nuance, the same techies behind the well-known Dragon speech recognition software.

3. Mobile Concierge - Your Personal Shopping Assistant :www.bit.ly/mobileconcierge

A different type of product search comes from Mobile Concierge, developed by Cisco Systems and IBM. By means of precise geolocation it's able to pop up on your mobile with info and offers on the products around you while you shop.

How it works?

Once connected to the store’s wireless network, Mobile Concierge will be able to deliver coupons, make product suggestions, allow shoppers to organize shopping lists, receive unique digital signage based on shopping preferences, and more. Integration at checkout ensures all coupons and promotions are properly credited so that you can get through checkout quickly and packed with your up-to-date in-store promotions/discounts!

4. Klout - Social media authority search:www.klout.com



Klout is a measurement tool that gives an idea of your social web influence with Twitter. Their data is used by applications such as Co-Tweet, HootSuite and others.

It's made its mission "to accurately measure and provide context around who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on".
Since Google already offers social search by integrating real-time Twitter feeds, wouldn't it make sense to order posts based on your perceived authority in the subject?

How it works?
Klout takes all the data they’ve processes and gives you a Klout score, based on actual reach and engagement and influence of your followers and network.
A similar well-renowned tool is Twitalyzer, providing statistics on your Twitter usage, displaying 15 key metrics on an easy-to-use dashboard:



5.
Haika - Semantic search : http://www.hakia.com/

How about a search engine delivering results based exclusively on relevance rather than website popularity? You'll be surprised to find out, but Haika is a search engine built from scratch using laws of ontological semantics, mathematics, computational linguistics, and fuzzy logic.

How it works?

It pulls in results from the general web, news sites, blogs, Hakia Galleries, something it calls 'credible sources' (typically Wikipedia), video and images.Finally, you'll get some kind of a "hub" of various search sources to choose from.

Other great tools worth inserting into your favs list are:

Wikitude - Augmented reality encyclopaedia :www.wikitude.org. That's pretty handy when you arrive into a new country/city and point your mobile toward a building you'd like to find more of (history,location)- augmented reality here is key!

Blinkx - Video search : www.blinkx.com You'll get results based on speech recognition, visual analysis and facial analysis - and all that coming from a filter of over 35 million hours of video!

Hope this journey was a useful one. If you've got other handy tools you're quite fond of, just drop a line and share it further!

Always positive,
Yours,
@Digilunch

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Is Google Launching a New "Facebook" alike Site?

The below screen shot was taken today while accessing the new Google blog post regarding Google eBooks application :



Would that be a testing of the new social networking "wizardry" crafted by Google for the nearest future? Or it's an "accidental error" on Official Google blog page, which was updated in real-time?

I'll leave it to your own judgement - but if anybody can explain this I'd be eager to find out.

Yours,

@Digilunch

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The New Facebook Profile - Explained

Until now, the Profile has included basic information about the user: our name, hometown, schools we attended, the place where we work. In the new features, which will be gradually rolled out to the user base over the next few weeks, the Profile now includes the last five photos in which the user was tagged. If you're wondering why would photos come in the limelight first - here's the motivation Facebook supports: “There's often no better way to learn about a person than through photos,” as mentioned by engineer Josh Wiseman on the Facebook blog. Also, according to Facebook - every day, a staggering 100 million photos are uploaded on to the site. You may see an example below:



New Options?

The new profile lets users list a wider variety of experiences. For example, under the Education and Work section, you can list more than just the schools you’ve attended and the jobs you’ve had. You can also list meaningful projects you’ve worked on. And the top interests on your profile page will now appear as a row of images, instead of just text.



"You can see all the things that you have in common with that person," Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg told "60 Minutes" interviewer Lesley Stahl Sunday night. "It gives you this amazing connection with that person in a way that the current version of the profile that we have today just doesn't do."

At the same time Facebook becomes increasingly bloated with user-created content, which means that it also becomes easier for users to feel overwhelmed and view "Facebook as a time suck" (Kit Eaton, www.fastcompany.com.)

You may now wonder:

So What's Different about the new profiles?

Current Facebook profiles list personal information such as birthday, relationship status and city of residence in a left-rail column underneath the user's single profile photo. The new design moves that information up higher, in a more conversational format - offering basically a "mini-portrait" of a person.

Another new feature, called “the friendship page,” pulls up a history of your relationship with any of your Facebook friends. It displays such details as comments you've exchanged and places you've visited together.

Moreover, Facebook engineers have came up with several new features, including a new section, located on the left of the profile page: where you can now list the important people in your life, like your parents, siblings, spouse, roommates, or friends.

So - Does my profile page have to change?

Eventually, yes.

The new profile page will be rolled out over the next month or so, according to a blog post from Facebook. If you do nothing, you'll log on to your profile page one day soon to find that Facebook has rearranged your information to fit the new layout.
But users who want to update now can do so by following a prompt from their profile pages.

How will this change impact the information I choose to share on my page?

According to Facebook blog, the change does not affect users' existing privacy settings. A quick attempt to web-search for a user's Facebook page (which had been updated) on Monday revealed the same information that was public before the switch.
And if you don't like the five photos of you that appear near the top of your page, you can hide them or swap them out for different ones.

What should I do to update my profile?

• Log in to Facebook and go to www.facebook.com/about/profile/.

• Click the green "Get the New Profile" box.

• Your new profile page will appear. At the top, you can update personal information about things like your job, current city and relationship status.

• You can click the "Edit Profile" link to change any other information.

• If you don't like the photos that appear, hover your cursor over them one at a time. A box will appear at the top right that you can click to remove that photo.

This will not make the photo disappear entirely or remove your tag; it will just mean it won't be one of the ones people see at the top of your profile.

Ok, so the info can be edited - a relief. Still, I'm just wondering who would rate their friends, relatives, etc - by matter of importance? Isn't that just too private to make it public? Or, should there be in time options to create Tier 1 TOP Friends List, Tier 2 TOP Friends List? As ridiculous as is sounds..is Facebook just getting too bloated or it's becoming a "necessary evil" we have to keep up with but know how to protect ourselves from?



Curious to hear your say,

Yours,

@Digilunch

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Facebook - launching "New Generation Email"

In February we've heard about a new project Facebook was secretly working on, called "Project Titan" (a web-based email client) which according to TechCrunch findings was internally unofficially referred to as “Gmail killer”. This has now officially turned into a personal @facebook.com email addresses for users!


As Telegraph mentions - "Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief has effectively hailed the end of email for the next web generation calling the system ‘too slow and formal’, while launching the social network’s new messaging service".

Although it might be too early to end a long-lasting dispute of Facebook vs. email vs."battle", the social network founder insists on its several competitive advantages:

- the new system will combine Facebook’s instant messaging system, SMS, Facebook messages and email in one place,
- it will also keep all conversation history in once screen shot (on both emails or IMs);
- also, it would allow people to reply seamlessly across multiple devices to different types of messages.
- an finally - the new system will be based on the premise of the ‘social inbox’: it would have certain "filtering options", which are announced to be able to work better than email spam detectors and will prioritise key contacts’ messages. Quite frankly, this statement reminds of Google's Saint Graal "relevancy, relevancy and again - guess what?.."

Thus, the intended aim is to combine all types of messaging in one place, allowing people to reply in real-time.

In terms of future plans, Zuckerberg has announced that the system is intended to be able to sync with other email accounts in the future - in which case an alliance with current competitor Google would be inevitable?

Keeping an eye on e-curiosities,
Yours,
@Digilunch

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New Drop Down Adwords Ads - PPC gaining or losing?

The below might be a proof for a new PPC-oriented beta-project launched by Google and currently being tested in the US. Although there's no official statement made by the company yet, the screenshots I've collected today on the web have just been placed on some US-based PPC/SEO blogs who may have noticed a new feature for web search users - the new drop-down Adwords ads.

The screen shots below show how AdWords top ads can expand to eight additional ads. When expanded, you may see a total of 11 ads, followed by the free organic Google search results:



and an expanded view:



An other US-based PPC blogger has noticed a 3 ads drop-down listing:



Quite an interesting move, right? Although both sources are seeing it mostly beneficial for traffic drive I'm just wondering:
- what if the new drop-down arrow will prove less popular than expected?
- what if the add-on ads will remain mostly..unnoticed?
- would that really be an "additional" #1 spot or just a new advertising push - relevant (according to Google) but "fluffy" enough to eclipse natural search listings?

In a dilemma..

Yours, @Digilunch

P.S Many thanks to Boris who has shared with me the 1st source, so that I could pick it up and share the news.

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Measuring Phone Calls via Google Adwords : introducing AdWords Call Metrics

Google has aired today an announcement regarding its trial for a tool that lets advertisers measure how effective their mobile search ads are at generating calls:



For some time now, Google has allowed mobile advertisers to add their phone number to AdWord text ads. The aim of that was to let customers just click on the number and place a call. Yet, so far it was hard to track how well these ads really performed, as Google didn't give advertisers a convenient way to track these calls. Today Google announced the launch of AdWords Call Metrics with a limited set of U.S.-based advertisers. The company plans to open this beta up to more advertisers in the coming months.

The tool registers every phone call generated when a consumer clicks on an advertiser’s AdWords campaign. Call Metrics uses the technology behind Google Voice to assign unique phone numbers (both toll free and local) at campaign-level and then tracks the number of calls generated by each campaign:
-total nr. of incoming calls,
-received calls and
- missed calls, plus the average and total call duration. Furthermore, in the near future Google plans to add caller area code. However marketers will only get reports on area codes in the aggregate - they won’t get individual call records.

This project falls in line with newest e-marketing trend announced by phone-tracking companies and known as “Call Conversion Optimization”.

Although Google says that Call Metrics will be “available to a limited number of US advertisers”, in the coming months more people will get access. You’ll know when the option shows up in your AdWords account. Here’s what it will apparently look like:



Google claims the feature will allow advertisers to accurately refine their mobile AdWords campaigns according to users’ responses.

“For example, you could test different ad text variations to see which results in the most calls, or reallocate budget to campaigns that truly bring you the highest ROI,” wrote Chatterjee.

Google gives a case study example on its new tool efficiency - a campaign involving furniture retailer Room and Board (which is shown in the below screenshot):



The retailer claims that about half the people who called the 800 number in the Room and Board ad bought something online. However the other half who called the number ultimately bought something in a local store!

The company insists that precisely the latter 50 percent was almost entirely invisible in determining ROI prior to AdWords Call Metrics. The company’s SEM firm figured out the in-store conversion rates by comparing the Google call data with in-store sales records and discovered “the other half”..

Let's see what other successful case studies the new tool will bring along. Until then - as always happy to keep you in the loop of e-marketing diverse menu - yours, @Digilunch.

Any ideas/suggestions - feel free to join in!

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