Users can import information from Twitter, Facebook and email accounts using many third party tools. However, although these contacts are added to a user’s ‘circles’ – which is Google+’s contact management and content filtering functionality that draws from elements of both Facebook and Twitter – some will be added as email contacts rather than Google+ contacts.

Consequently, when sharing with those contacts that do not yet use the service, they will receive an email, rather than an ‘in-network’ update to their ‘Stream’, which is Google+’s version of the Facebook newsfeed. Whilst this is clearly intentional from Google’s perspective to help grow usage of the service – and certainly in the user’s interest initially – the majority of recipients of such mails are likely to prefer not to receive them – and to even regard them as spam.

Pete Goold, MD of SEO Agency Punch, said:

“Whilst it’s certainly recommended to play with the functionality of Google+, which is undoubtedly a terrific new platform as it has built on the proven functionality of services such as Instagram, Flipboard, FourSquare, Twitter, Skype and, of course, Facebook – it’s worth understanding who will receive what updates, and how.

“In the early stages, most recipients of an email from Google+ will presumably be relatively happy to receive them but, given that many users will update their Google+ account several times per day, it’s unlikely that those that either have yet to use the service itself – or simply chose not to – will be happy to have their inbox filled with such content.

“The key is in importing contacts from other services but then using the circles tool to segment contacts – through looking for those contacts which contain the email icon – and thereby ensuring that content can stay within the network, unless it’s intentional to genuinely distribute to all – which of course, will certainly be the case in many instances as this is useful functionality when used correctly.”

“With StumbleUpon Advertising, we’re solving the challenge of how advertisers can get more content that is relevant and impactful in front of their targeted audiences,” said Garrett Camp, Founder and CEO of StumbleUpon. “We are dedicated to providing the tools that help advertisers identify and reach their audiences, measure campaigns effectively and gain real-time user feedback.”

StumbleUpon Advertising cost-effectively delivers advertiser content to highly targeted audiences and helps stimulate increased virality of this content. By specifying a landing page and target audience by demographic or interest area including but not limited to Health, Parenting, Investing or Travel, StumbleUpon identifies and recommends advertiser content that is aligned with targeted audiences’ interests. The new system also enhances the potential for virality and additional organic views of an advertiser’s content, based on StumbleUpon’s recommendation algorithms that adjust over time for community ratings, reviews and sharing of content.

“After testing the StumbleUpon Advertising system for eight months, we know it’s an extremely cost-effective way to drive qualified traffic and let the content speak for itself,” said Jason Clement, Director of Findability at Wieden + Kennedy. “Since StumbleUpon Advertising targets content to users based on their personal interests, we can be confident that our content is reaching the most receptive audience possible. And when an audience enjoys our content, the reward is a healthy amount of free, organic traffic.”

StumbleUpon Advertising enables advertisers to better control and increase ROI for their advertising spend with more campaign budgeting options, data to manage and track campaigns, and topics and criteria for targeting. StumbleUpon Advertising’s enhanced tools and features are accessible through a new user interface that also offers advanced payment options. Advertisers pay only for actual views of their content and can easily collect user feedback to adjust their campaigns over time and optimize results.

“StumbleUpon Advertising makes it easy and cost-effective to deliver the right content to a new audience of our target users,” said Ben Tider, Assistant Director, Audience Development at Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital Group. “With streamlined campaign set-up and management, we can better optimize ads and recommend content based on the individual user. Because readers can self-identify the types of content we show them, they are more engaged and likely to share it with friends.”

“StumbleUpon Advertising enables brand advertisers to serve up compelling content while users are searching or ‘stumbling’ around the Web,” said Josh Spear, Founding Partner of Undercurrent. “With StumbleUpon Ads, an advertiser’s content is not an interruption, but rather a fully integrated experience that affords an opportunity for additional exposure when audiences like or respond well to the content. It is comparable to a banner that becomes more cost efficient based on positive viewer feedback. The new user interface also greatly enhances the service by delivering advanced analytics and more detailed campaign management tools.”

StumbleUpon, the personalized recommendation engine, is the best way to discover individually relevant content online. StumbleUpon generates nearly 600 million recommendations per month for its community of almost 11 million members.

The new fully live version features over 5,000 categories of business, and in contrast to traditional Yellow Pages websites invites business owners and representatives to add and improve their companies’ records with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.

“We are also launching new functionality today that allows the site’s users to ‘Watch’ any business, receiving an email notifying them of any additions and edits,” said Bizwiki co-founder Matt Aird. “This is useful for anyone who is interested in following changes, but is primarily designed to empower people to get involved in claiming their own businesses and ensuring the information the public sees stays as accurate and relevant as possible.”

Creating a ‘Watchlist’ of businesses on Bizwiki is free. Representatives are invited to sign up with Bizwiki.com and look up the companies they are interested in, then simply click ‘Watch this business’ to receive notification of any changes to the record. They are also able to add more information and details to records while doing so.

“We’ve tried to take ideas and concepts from some of the most successful user-created websites in the world, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project, and improve them to where the ‘anyone can edit’ principles of a wiki can be used in a business-environment,” continued Matt Aird. “The biggest single difference is probably that our site is built in a consistently structured format, allowing us to rapidly scale-up the amount of information and also give our users an easy way to search the site.”

The Bizwiki difference:

• It’s free – Unlike many established publishers that charge for inclusion, Bizwiki is free to search, free to edit and free for companies to list on.

• It’s editable – The ‘anyone-can-edit’ approach is a challenge to the frequently out-of-date records in conventional printed Business Directories.

• It’s a wiki – The wiki approach allows far more depth of information about each business to be compiled than anything conventionally available.

• It’s structured - Bizwiki is built using structured data, allowing reusability of information, bulk updates from chambers of commerce or webspiders, and an easy search experience for users.

Bizwiki was built by industry-veterans with years of business directory and meta-search experience behind them, including Keith Hinde, Matt Aird, Craig Sefton and Arthur Jenkins who between them have helped develop directory and search products for Infospace, local directory publisher Thomson Directories, TradePage and Webcrawler.

Visit www.bizwiki.com to add or edit your company or create a Watchlist of businesses.

Friendster, Inc. announced a new brand and web site packed with new features representing a significant milestone in the company’s history and further signifying the company’s evolution to focus on the Asian youth market. The notable changes include a new fun-centric brand, and a redesigned web site with an emphasis on local relevance, enhancing the overall user experience. The new direction and focus reflect Friendster’s dominant position among the youth audience in Asia.

“Our new brand is just one of the ways we are communicating the evolution of our business as well as our commitment to our users – they’ve given us great feedback and we’ve listened,” said Richard Kimber, chief executive officer at Friendster. “We understand our users and our major markets in Asia better than anyone. This is just the beginning of a series of new products and services catering to the needs of our users, and in a way unmatched by any other social network.”

Focus on Asian Youth

In 2003, Friendster pioneered social networking, and today is a leading web site throughout Southeast Asia, with over 75 million registered users and over 90 percent of daily traffic coming from the region. Today 80 percent of Friendster users in Asia are aged between 16 to 24. The youth uses Friendster to express themselves through their customization of the site, sharing content and news with friends, and as a source of entertainment. The youth user base enjoys local music, gifting, photo sharing, games, and using Friendster on their mobile devices. All of these are represented today in Friendster’s product suite and will be further developed over time specifically with the Asian youth in mind.

New Brand

At the center of Friendster’s new identity is an energetic logo symbolizing fun, personalization and individuality among youth. It’s an important visual identifier for the brand, crafted from a single line and ending in a Friendster smile, creating Friendster’s new wordmark. It represents the brand’s personality – fun, creative, friendly and personal. The Friendster wordmark is housed within a green “word cloud.” The word cloud represents communication within a community, and truly depicts the essence of Friendster’s core user base. The new branding will also include a new tagline: “Connecting Smiles.” This tagline is Friendster’s unique brand promise and portrays what drives Friendster as a company and what the brand means to its users–simply put, it represents the youth enjoying themselves with their friends.

New Web Site

Building on Friendster’s position as a leading social network, the redesigned site is a clean, simple approach to sharing, communication and self-expression. The new design also places emphasis on those features that are favored by the Friendster community–like shoutouts, profile personalization, photo sharing, games, finding friends, and messaging. Every user’s logged-in homepage includes a redesigned network activity Stream and Shoutout publishing box, making it easier to keep track of everything friends are doing, what content is being shared, what new photos have been uploaded and more. Each user also has a new Shoutout history page called the Shoutout Stream, where Shoutouts are aggregated, allowing users and their friends to view historical Shoutouts, especially the ones they missed when they were originally posted.

The new site is designed to be colorful, fun and easy to use. The global site navigation bar and Friendster logo are in vibrant, bright green although users can select their own color theme for their homepage and their site-wide navigation bar at the top of every Friendster page. Given the importance of customization to the users the user profile page has been enhanced and redesigned, optimized for profile skins and themes from Friendster’s directory of skins or a user’s own images, designs and colors. In addition to the home and profile page, many of the popular pages have been redesigned to simplify the site experience, including the friends, messages, comments, photo browsing, and photo uploading pages. The primary features on these pages have been optimized for usability, putting all the features Friendster users love right at their fingertips, with games now available through the ‘Fun’ menu on the Navbar.

New Product Launches
The Friendster Wallet is a new micro-payments platform that allows users to purchase products and services on Friendster such as virtual gifts, and to send and receive money to one another. The Friendster Wallet enables users to store account balances and supports a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments. Moving forward, Friendster will enable users to make purchases surrounding online games and other offerings. The Friendster Wallet is powered via a partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL)*, a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide.

The Friendster Gift Shop enables the Friendster community to send virtual gifts to one another, quickly and conveniently. Friendster Gifts are used to send personal gestures of kindness, celebrate significant accomplishments, and recognize friends and family on special days, like birthdays, or just for fun. A variety of gift themes are supported and more will be added over time. Currently, users can choose from virtual birthday gifts, collectible gifts, greeting gifts, premium gifts, romance gifts, seasonal gifts, thank you gifts and more.

Friendster Games is an online games destination, which will offer Friendster users a wide variety of fun, entertaining games and applications to play online with their friends. Building on the games already available on the site (through the ‘Fun’ menu on the Navbar), users will be able to easily search and bookmark the games they like to play. Game developers will be able to incorporate The Friendster Wallet into their games, allowing them to participate in the Friendster micro-payments ecosystem.

“We look forward to delivering a great user experience and continued product innovation surrounding our new brand and web site. We have a lot coming in the weeks ahead – this is only the beginning,” said Kimber.

Source: Friendster, Inc.

Business.com — the Web’s leading ally for busy people interested in making more informed and effective business purchasing decisions – unveiled today results of its 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study. Based on insights from 2,948 professionals across North America, the study provides extensive information on how businesses and business people use social media in the workplace.

Key survey findings include:
– Webinars and podcasts are top social media resources for business professionals, used by 69% of those who turn to social media channels for business information.
– Facebook is the dominant social network on which consumer-focused companies maintain one or more profiles, cited by 83% of respondents versus 45% for Twitter. Business-to-business (B2B) companies, however, maintain a presence on both platforms with 77% maintaining a profile on Facebook and 73% on Twitter.
– Current trends to restrict access to social networks like Facebook or Twitter at work need to be re-thought in light of the business value in such activity.
– Among respondents using social media for business purposes in their day-to-day jobs, 62% visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55% search for business information on these sites.
– Consultants and marketing communications professionals are the most active users of social media as a resource for business information, particularly in micro (<10 employees) and small businesses (10-99 employees). IT professionals have the lowest participation rate.
– Both companies and employees are scaling a massive learning curve with social media.
– The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven different social media initiatives; 65% of respondents staffing those initiatives, and 71% of companies themselves, have less than two years of experience with social media for business.
– Building brand awareness and brand reputation are two of the top social media success metrics, but nearly two-thirds of companies focused on these metrics have little to no insight into performance via standard or easily accessible reports.

“We are constantly analyzing trends to determine exactly what tools business professionals leverage most for purchasing,” said Ben Hanna, Ph.D., vice president, marketing, Business.com. “This survey was a way for us to benchmark where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media in order to further enhance our site offerings and better serve our users.”

The study also delved into business participation on, and attitudes toward, Q&A sites to support development of the company’s new offering, Business.com Answers (http://answers.business.com/). Business.com Answers is an online resource where users ask questions about business challenges, products or services and receive high quality advice from experienced industry colleagues.

The survey was conducted online from August 11 to September 4, 2009. 2,948 unique respondents from the United States or Canada currently using social media as part of their normal work routine (e.g., read blogs, use Twitter to find business-related information, etc.) and/or work for a company involved in social media initiatives participated in the study. A copy of the complete study can be downloaded from http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

Source: Business.com

Highlights of the new version include:

Simpler

• Anyone can receive personalized recommendations directly from the StumbleUpon homepage–from any computer, no install or registration required
• Simple, sleek site design and enhancements to the StumbleUpon add-on, make it more user friendly and make it easier for new users to begin discovering great websites

Searchable

• The same intelligence used to power “Stumbles” now applied to search–personal preferences along with collaborative human opinions help deliver the most personalized and relevant search results
• Search is now available on every StumbleUpon page, allowing users to search through their own favorites, others’ favorites, or exclusively through friends’ favorites

More Social

• Improved Friend search makes it easier to find the people you know on StumbleUpon and meet others with similar interests
• See recommendations from people you know highlighted in search results and easily Stumble or search within their favorite sites

“Our vision for StumbleUpon was simple–create a site where you could click a button and discover interesting, personalized and highly relevant websites,” said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO. “We are now combining the power of discovery with search–and offering another way for people to access over 35 million user-endorsed websites.”

“It’s great to see the original founders’ vision reflected in this release, StumbleUpon’s first major product release since its independence from eBay,” said Ram Shriram, StumbleUpon investor and board member.

StumbleUpon is the Internet’s largest social discovery site, with 8.5M users, 11B ‘Stumbles,’ and an index of over 35M of the best sites on the web. StumbleUpon is backed by company founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as a number of well-known investors including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital.

Source: StumbleUpon

Shutterstock, the world’s largest subscription-based stock photo agency, announced the launch of Shuttertweet, a new tool for Twitter that empowers stock image and stock footage submitters by instantly sending out messages (or “tweets”) announcing when new images and footage clips have been added to their Shutterstock portfolios.

Shuttertweet also enables submitters to monetize their use of Twitter. Submitters earn a referral commission from anyone who makes a purchase after clicking on the link to their Shutterstock gallery in one of their Shuttertweet messages.

In addition, Shuttertweet sends an update regarding submitters’ download counts on a daily basis to share the success of their portfolios with people that follow them on Twitter.

“Shuttertweet is truly a win-win for our submitters: not only does it automatically showcase their work, it also allows them to make money via our affiliate marketing program using Twitter,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock.

To sign up, submitters login to the submit site and click the option under “Make Money” or click here to enable Shutterstock to send tweets on their behalf. Submitters can deactivate Shuttertweet at any time.

“Shuttertweet is a great way to advertise my work,” said Jake Hellbach (Shutterstock submitter name: JHDT Stock Images LLC), a successful Shutterstock photographer and videographer based in Sugarland, Texas. “I used to post links to my images and footage clips manually on Twitter when I had the time, but with this tool, I know my name is getting out to stock photo and stock footage buyers each day, so I can get back to shooting.”

Source: Shutterstock

Type “140 characters” into Twitter’s search box and the resulting tweets come flooding in — predictably the majority of them lamenting this constraint. A new Twitter service, http://www.maxitweet.com/, has found a way around the restriction by clever use of letter-like symbols called Unicode characters.

“Maxitweets” are up to 200 characters long, an increase of nearly 50%, and have opened up new possibilities for the fast growing Twitter communications platform.

For example, tweeted recipes (“twecipes”) are easier to read with the extra space available. A number of poets have also responded enthusiastically. A limerick aficionado, who had given up on trying to tweet the humorous five-liners because they tend to be around 180 characters long, now posts them several times a day as @limerik. And breaking news services — among the more prominent users of Twitter — are able to tweet the news item, rather than just a link to it.

How does it work?

Twitter caters for users in many countries and therefore transmits in a universal font language called “Unicode.” It contains over 100,000 glyphs in hundreds of languages. Maxitweet was the first to realize that glyphs resembling two or more normal letters can help to transmit text more efficiently.

In the word “lions,” for example, two characters are saved by replacing the vowels with a Cyrillic letter resembling “io,” followed by the Unicode symbol for nanosecond “ns.”

“We spent weeks combing through thousands of glyphs in many languages — Cyrillic, Thai, Arabic, Hiragana,” says Wytze Hoekstra, project manager at FrisianStyle Productions, which runs Maxitweet.com. “We then wrote a javascript engine that compresses text in the background and delivers a user-friendly experience.”

Will the new limit improve the Twitter experience? Even though 140 was enough to produce many memorable tweets, like those collected by http://www.besttweets.com/ — “Museum for the Art of Micro-Elegance” — it remains to be seen whether the expanded limit will take Twitter to new heights. Some say 140 characters is too many. “I’d only call about 30 of them ‘characters.’ The other 110 are quite boring.” — Aimee Brock (@Aimee_B_Loved on Twitter).

Perhaps the argument is best summed up by Jason Shellen (@shellen): “When people ask me about the brevity of Twitter I always tell them ‘You can really say a lot in just 140 characters. More than you would th ‘.”

Source: FrisianStyle Productions

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Source: Facebook

Twitter, the newest social networking sensation, can generate sales leads for your business faster than other social network, even with a slashed budget. So says David White, Founder and Chief Executive of Weboptimiser (http://www.weboptimiser.com) and he’ll tell you how your company can benefit from it when he presents his webinar during July.

He’ll explain how Twitter is generating up to half the hits on his company’s website, building their contact list and their reputation fast and effectively. With a successful background in SEO he is one of the best people in digital marketing to see the massive potential Twitter has for business and, what’s more, he’s investing his own time and money in spreading the message. His team of engineers and directors has been working on social media projects for two years and the work on Twitter has come from the last six months of development. David already has a strong following for his online services on Twitter, some of which are free, as are the webinars running on 14th and 21st July at 6pm UK time and 6pm US CDT. Each will last for 60 minutes including 20 minutes for Q&A. Join the webinar at http://bit.ly/Cxzmb

Most people now know that Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing? Once Barack Obama started using it the world sat up and took notice. It’s a phenomenal success with growth in one year calculated at 22-fold. It’s also said to have played a key role in the recent anti-government demonstrations in Iran.

But it’s the business application that David will be talking about in his webinar and you can join if you hurry, numbers are limited and going fast. He will share his experience in developing business applications for Twitter where there is a fast, measurable return. He’ll discuss the do’s and don’ts of Twittering that he’s learned the hard way or, as he puts it, ‘don’t try to work from scratch, you’ll be spending more time on technology than on your clients’.

He’ll emphasise the importance of getting your planning right, with clearly set objectives. He’ll demonstrate how you can turn followers into prospects and then into increased sales – and all in very short time and at a fraction of the cost of mounting a full marketing campaign. You’ll hear details of the surveys he’s conducted himself that show the effectiveness of Twitter and the competitively-priced packages Weboptimiser offers to get you Twittering and Tweeting with the best of them.

Join the webinar at http://bit.ly.CxZmb

For an advanced view of the presentation click http://www.tweetmaxi.com/Twitterfollower.html