Category: Archive

It is, of course, the thought that counts.  A message from a friend or loved one means a lot regardless of what form it takes.  Still, physical items tend to have more of an impact, and Google’s made a very nice gesture by offering to send out real postcards this holiday season.

If online retailers have a profitable holiday season – or even if they don’t – they’ll owe a "thank you" to social networks for helping out.  New data from Hitwise indicates that retail sites are receiving a significant (and ever-increasing) amount of traffic from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Those who have been following the search industry for some time, may recall that Google had some legal issues with the (former) magazine Perfect 10 (nsfw). The company, which ceased publication of its magazine, but still operates on the web, has issued a press release saying that its five year battle with the search giant is "about to heat up."

Cyber Monday sales were up 5 percent compared to a year ago reaching $887 million and matching the heaviest online spending day on record, December 9, 2008, according to the latest report from comScore.

"We’ve seen an encouraging start to the online holiday shopping season and it would appear that retailers’ aggressive and early marketing efforts have so far succeeded in persuading consumers to open their wallets online," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Google has introduced a new Gmail Labs feature, which gives Gmail users control over the default style of their text. In other words, you can set how you like your text to appear normally, and it will automatically appear that way.

Yahoo said today it is expanding its integration with Facebook to allow users of both sites to share more content.

Yahoo said its deeper integration with Facebook will roll out in the first half of 2010. Users will be able to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo, view a feed of their friends’ activity on Yahoo, and share content such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories.

Google has begun including geographical region information on some search results. The information is used when supplied by webmasters, and appears in the green address line on the results that include it.

Despite all the gains other companies (Google, Facebook) have made, it’s still Microsoft’s world, according to new statistics from comScore.  comScore found that, in terms of time spent on sites, the Redmond-based corporation continues to maintain a huge lead over its competitors.

Microsoft is either taking the holiday marketing approach or the Twilight/Vampire trend approach with its latest commercial. The title is Bing: Vampire Decision Engine.

The company uploaded the new commercial to its (Google-owned) YouTube channel. Accompanying the video is a short description:

"When you’re looking for a restaurant that is family friendly, romantic, or maybe something with an otherworldly atmosphere, use Bing’s reviews to stop searching and start deciding."

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today that more than 3,500 registered state sex offenders have been removed for social networking sites Facebook and MySpace.

Under New York’s e-STOP law, which was written by Cuomo, Facebook was able to identify and disable accounts linked to 2,782 registered New York sex offenders, and MySpace was able to identify and shutdown accounts linked to 1,796 sex offenders.