WebProWorld
Facebook is now testing a new kind of engagement ad. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook found an ad for Chik-fil-A, which requires the user to fill out a form in order to get a free sample.
Smith says the new format is "the most integrated leadgen-style home page ad unit we’ve seen Facebook launch."
There’s fresh word this afternoon about when (and to whom) Google Wave will become available. Schools and businesses that use Google Apps appear to be first in a line that should start moving this fall.
The New York Times is reporting that eBay has a deal to sell Skype thus ending a rather tragic acquisition saga that began in 2005 when eBay ‘won’ in their fight with Google and Yahoo to buy the Internet phone service.
Social networking sites in the U.S. accounted for more than 20 percent of all display ads viewed online in July, with MySpace and Facebook combining to serve more than 80 percent of ads, according to a new report from comScore.
"Over the past few years, social networking has become one of the most popular online activities, accounting for a significant portion of the time Internet users spend online and the pages they consume," said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president.
A report from Nielsen indicates that ad spending in the United States fell 15.4% in the first half of the year, compared to the first half of last year. Preliminary estimates show that US ad expenditures fell over $10.3 billion to a total of $56.9 billion.
"While some of the larger categories have cut back spending, we see others that continue to raise the ante on their media investments," said Annie Touliatos, VP for Nielsen’s advertising information services.
Google has added its Google Suggest feature to Google News in its English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions. Now when you go to search for something on Google News, Google will attempt to guess what you may be searching for.
Update: The announcement has been made. Some details from the press release:
Today Opera released the final version of Opera 10, the long-awaited new entry in the company’s browser family. It’s free and comes in 43 languages.
Opera points out three things that it says users "must try" in this version:
Google announced today that it has added nine new languages to Google Translate. That brings the total number of languages supported up to 51, as well as 2,550 language pairs, including all 23 official EU languages.
comScore has released some new numbers for the global search market. The highlight of the findings is that the market draws over 100 billion searches per month.
To be more specific, over 113 billion searches were conducted in July. This is a whopping 41% increase from a year ago. Obviously, Google sites received the bulk of these searches.
