We all know that Internet changes at lightning speed (could be faster) and that means, techniques and technologies we used 3 years ago are obsolete! You should be on your feet and keep up with these changes constantly. Luckily, there are some clear warning signs that tell you that your site needs an update. Here are the ‘red flags’ that will let you know.

1 – Your Site Looks Like a Coding Freak

How does this happen? You hired a designer to create the site, and then when you needed an overhaul, you hired another to fix it. And then another to fix it. Now, you’ve got ten years of bad code piled on top of bad code and your site’s design is a mess. A better idea is to make a fresh start.

2 – A Fancy Flash Intro Dazzles Your Visitors

Flash was so cool about ten years ago. Now, it’s ‘so ten years ago.’ I guarantee you that nobody’s impressed anymore when you’ve got a flash intro welcoming them to your site. People have no time for this clutter; your visitors want to access the information that they are looking for as fast as possible.

In fact, a flash intro may even keep them from viewing your site. On an older browser, it takes forever for the intro to load. While they’re waiting, they’re going to be clicking the ‘back’ button or heading somewhere else.

3 – You’re Not Being Social

We now live in the world of Web 2.0, and it’s all about communicating and networking. Your site isn’t a billboard or print advertisement; it should be an active part of a community. This means that you need to get out in the social networking sites and create some community.

The more you let your users get involved in your site, the more they’ll stick around. You can install Facebook widgets, ‘Tweet This’ buttons, and even user profile functions for your customers. You should at least have a comments section and be running a fan page on Facebook. These social networking sites are some of the most popular places on the web, so you should be there mixing it up!

4 – The Site Is Covered With Tables

Several years ago, tables were the main design used for websites. Nowadays, it’s totally a thing of the past. Tables are hard to read, and they’re just about impossible for search engines to find. In fact, they’re technically made with invalid HTML code. So, they’ve got to go!

5 – You Still Need To Go Mobile

The entire internet is now going mobile and if you’re site’s not set up for it, you’ll lose customers left and right. If your site isn’t mobile-compatible, it will take forever to load on their mobile devices and it will look like garbage.

Techie experts predict that mobile is the thing of the future, and the number of sales of smartphones is supporting this prediction. Get a mobile version of your site going so you don’t get left behind.

6 – You’re Hiring A Programmer For Every Little Change

These days, more and more companies are using a CMS, or content management system. This is an interface that allows anyone in your staff to make changes when needed. Things happen quickly in the world of the internet, so you’ve got to be able to make these necessary changes without having to hire a web designer again.

7 – No Inspiring Towards Action

Your site needs to have a simple, clear and effective call to action to get them moving. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to get them to sign up for a newsletter, donate to a non-profit organization or hit the ‘Buy Now’ button.

Everything needs a strong call to action to get them moving. For example, don’t make them sign up for a membership to buy your product; let them buy as a guest and you’ll remove one more barrier from them taking action.

(Via hongkiat.com.)

(Via Tybee Guy.)

Google URL Shortener, aptly named Goo.gl, has been available for use for almost a year, and it finally has its own website. In the past, you could only use it through the Google Toolbar, or through specific Google products such as Feedburner, News, Blogger and Picasa. Now you can get all your Google URL shortening needs done on their recently launched webpage.

Google went about things in a somewhat back-to-front fashion, launching the service itself before the website. Now, with the new website, you can get access to statistics on all URLs you’ve shortened using Goo.gl, provided you’re logged into your account. These stats include traffic, referrers and visitor profiles.

As far as features are concerned, that’s pretty much all you’re going to get. Google have chosen to focus instead on stability, security and speed. According to their blog, their priorities are uptime and spam detection. They’ve also managed to double the speed of the service since its launch, and want to keep it that way.

There are a few unofficial browser add-ons already available to use with Goo.gl, like Chrome’s goo.gl URL Shortener and Firefox’s goo.gl lite, and Google will be releasing the Goo.gl API in the future, making it easy to incorporate their URL shortener in other third party applications.

Via Lifehacker

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Another week down, and another chance to gather all the social media wisdom from the experts and put it to good use for your personal brand, your business, or for plain old fun.

Check out these indispensable resources which include an exclusive peek inside YouTube’s inner sanctum, a swath of in-depth iPad coverage, and some essential social business tools.

As if that’s not enough, there are always those hilarious cat videos.

Social Media

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• How a Facebook Group Helped Reunite a Band for Charity

  The band God Street Wine became popular in the 90s and played their last official show in 1999. But thanks to a group of fervent Facebook fans, the band is reuniting in NYC for a good cause.

• Top 10 Recut Movie Trailers on YouTube [VIDEOS]

  We’ve picked ten of the best recut movie trailers on YouTube that add a horror angle to the most light-hearted of films.

• 3 Ways Live Events Improve Online Communities

  While there is a lot of chatter about online communities, less is said about how to connect your online community members with each other, or with you, offline. Check out these three tips for improving your online community.

• The History of Location Technology [INFOGRAPHIC]

  Location-based social networks may be hot now, but location technology is nothing new. This infographic explores the history of location tech from primitive to advanced.

• Exclusive: Inside YouTube’s War Room

  Whether positive or negative, whenever a major social site rolls out a new feature, users respond very loudly. For their recent redesign, YouTube was prepared.

• Top 10 Funny Cat Videos on YouTube

  Whether you want talking cats, surprised cats, dramatic cats or nom-noming cats, this lists should tickle your funny bone with ten examples of the finest feline vids on the Internets.

• HOW TO: Clean Up Your Facebook Profile

  With all your friends, Fan Pages, apps, and friends’ apps, your Facebook feed can get pretty hairy. Check this guide for some quick tips on cleaning it up.

• 3 Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation

  As we spend more of our social lives online, our reputation becomes harder to manage across many networks. Here are some tips for keeping tabs on how the web perceives you.

• 6 Ways Brands are Using Social Media For Real-World Action

  Businesses should start thinking about new ways to mobilize their social media audiences to take action in the real world. Here are 6 great examples of just that.

• 5 Ways Mega Charity Events Can Harness the Power of Social Media

  Mega charity events like Twestival and 12 for 12k have demonstrated fantastic principles for grassroots cause efforts. These 5 pointers came from social media experts in the non-profit sector.

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

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• iPad App Hands-on Reviews: Twitterific, Netflix, and ABC [VIDEO]

  Want to see some of the most anticipated iPad apps in action? Check out these video reviews.

• 10 Great Sites for Watching Video on Your iPad

  As we know, Apple and Flash (by Adobe) do not intend to play nice anytime soon. However, there is hope for mobile web video in the form of HTML5. Here are 10 sites that utilize the new code to render video on the iPad.

• 3 Ways to Destroy an iPad [VIDEO]

  Whether for marketing, science or sport, some individuals are more interested in destroying the iPad than in ogling its sleek design. Check out these three videos and quench your thirst for techno-destruction.

• 10 Awesome Apple iPad Cases

  Apple’s iPad hit shop shelves last weekend, so we thought we’d bring you the best cases you can currently buy — as well as some coming-soon options that might be worth holding out for.

• 5 Fantastic Free iPhone E-book Reader Apps

  In case you’re not grabbing an iPad any time soon, we’ve pulled together a list of five free apps that offer you e-book reading abilities on your iPhone.

• 4 Web-Based Meeting Schedulers Reviewed

  A slew of online applications are attempting to eliminate the headache of scheduling meetings. Here is the run down of four applications that just might make the logistics a little easier.

• 3 Reasons to Get Excited About the Apple Game Center

  This summer, the iPhone and iPod touch will get an operating system update (iPhone OS 4.0) that will include a new service called the Game Center. Here’s why we’re psyched about it.

• The 10 Best ‘Get a Mac’ Ads

  Love them or hate them, Apple’s iconic ‘Get a Mac’ ads made a huge impact on pop culture. We’ve learned that the campaign is slated for the deadpool, and rounded up ten of our favorites.

• 10 Free Services to Monitor Your Site’s Uptime

  You can’t sit staring at your website(s) 24 hours a day to ensure it’s up. Fortunately, there are free services out there that can do it for you.

• How Publishers Plan to Monetize iPad Content

  The release of the iPad has the publishing world wondering if paid digital content will put the industry back in the black. A few publishers are already taking some interesting approaches.

For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business

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• 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Find Star Employees

  Successful business people are always looking for their next rock star employee. The good news is that the latest LinkedIn stats – 60 million professional profiles spanning 200 countries – would indicate this is a good place to look.

• Top 5 Ways to Make Your Site More Fun

  Just like sex, fun sells, and by using the theories of game mechanics and the Funware Loop, you can make your website or application more engaging for your users.

• 10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers

  Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. Here are 10 essentials for B2Bs.

• How Businesses can Harness the Power of Online Communities

  Online communities, whether they are managed by their related companies or not, are enormously valuable. Here are some strategies for maximizing their business potential.

(Via Mashable!.)

In this article, we’re going to delve into Google Analytics and start to tailor your account settings so you can get information you need much more easily. Google Analytics in Depth is my series of Google Analytics articles where we will explore Google Analytic’s beneficial features to help you get the most out of this powerful and free web tool.

In this first installment, we’ll be covering Goals and Funnels. For a general overview of site analytics revolving around Google Analytics, read Unleashing the Power of Website Analytics.

Defining Your Goals

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is the best way to measure the success rate of your website.

The easiest way to understand what goals are in Google Analytics is by discussing it with an example: ecommerce sites.

The aim of ecommerce sites is to sell goods to their visitors. Therefore, a completed goal would be a successful sale on their website.

This example hints at the first part of using the Goals feature in Google Analytics: defining what your site goals are.

• What do you want to measure?
• What are the factors that determine the success of your website?
• Are you after sales?
• Are you wanting to generate enquiries from prospective clients that want to hire you?
• Or do you simply want visitors to click around and spend more time on your site reading articles?

Once you know your goal (or goals), you need to work out how they will be measured.

For most sites, this will mean either identifying a specific goal completion page (or creating one).

For example, an ecommerce site might set up their ‘order confirmation’ page as their goal, because this page usually comes right after a finished sale. If you’re after client enquiries, then how about the page that is shown to users when they successfully send a message with your web form?

Adding a Goal in Google Analytics

If you haven’t added a goal yet, clicking on Goals in the left hand menu will show you a page that gives a brief overview of what Goals and Funnels are. At the bottom, click on the set up goals and funnels link to get started.

The second box after the Main Website Profile Information section will allow you to set up your conversion goals. You can group your goals together with goal sets, but to start, we’ll just look at setting up one basic goal. Click on the Add goal link on the left, preferably on Goals (set1).

After doing that, you’ll be faced with the Goal Settings page.

Give your goal a name, make it active, and then choose a position; Set 1, Goal 1, for example, refers to your first set of goals, with ‘Goal 1′ indicating that it’s your primary goal.

You will then have three types of goals to choose from.

When you choose a Goal Type, you will be shown a section called Goal Details, which are settings of your goals.

URL Destination

URL Destination is the most common option and is used when visitors get a specific page to visit. For example, a completed checkout page in an ecommerce site.

Time on Site

The Time on Site goal type will track users who spend either more or less than a specified amount of time on the site.

Pages/Visit

Pages/Visit keeps track of people who visit more than, less than or an exact number of pages on the site.

Time on Site and Pages/Visit only give you a single option aside from setting the goal and that is goal value.

Goal Details

For each goal type, there are certain goal details that you can set to customize your goal.

Goal Value

All three goal types have the Goal Value option. It is a monetary return that you estimate a completed goal to be worth; this is normally worked out as part of a website marketing strategy or review.

As an example, if a website enquiry, on average, gives a return of $10, then you should set the goal value to $10.

In most cases, this is just an estimate, so if you’re not sure, you can set the Goal Value to 0.

In the case of ecommerce sites where a completed checkout is worth a variable amount, you can set the goal value to your average basket value.

If you’ve set up Time on Site or Pages/Visit as your goal type, you’re now done and you can click the Save Goal button.

If, however, you’re setting up a URL Destination as a goal type, read on.

Match Type

The Match Type goal detail has three options: Head Match, Exact Match, Regular Expression Match.

Which one to use will depend on how much variety there is in the URL or your goal page.

Head Match: If your goal page requires variables in the URL that can change, such as /checkout/?page=1&basket=50036, then using Head Match will match the starting string of the URL (/checkout/).

Exact Match: If your goal page is a static URL that doesn’t change, such as /contact/thanks.php, for example, then you’ll want to go for Exact Match.

Regular Expression Match: If it’s likely that the start of the URL could change, then you should use Regular Expression Match; this is useful with URL cases such as /department1/checkout.php and /department2/checkout.php.

That’s it for Goals in Google Analytics—let’s move onto Funnels.

Setting up funnel

What are funnels? For certain goal pages, there is a set route of pages that users must go through to get to your goal page.

Let’s take a typical checkout process on an ecommerce site as an example: You add something to the basket, enter your shipping details, add your payment details, and when you submit your order, you get a confirmation page (which is your goal page).

This path is known as a funnel process, and by tracking people’s progress through a funnel, you can see where there are problems and where people are leaving the process.

This is most often used for checkout processes to see where people are dropping their shopping cart baskets. Funnels highlight problems with a long-winded checkout procedure.

Firstly, you need to map out the pages of your process. For example, your checkout process might have these pages:

• basket.php
• shipping_details.php
• payment.php
• confirmation.php

Once you’ve determined your funnel, it’s time to review your goals.

Reviewing Goals

So your goals are all set up, now how do you actually find out information from them?

You can see your goal data straight from the Sites Overview page. Under the headings you’ll see a completed goals column which gives you a basic, straightforward figure that is excellent for a quick glance. But let’s have a deeper look.

Note: A quick thing to highlight is that whilst you can look at visitor numbers for the current day, you’re unlikely to get goal conversions in Google Analytics for the current day, at least not reliably anyway. This is because Google Analytics refreshes its data at regular set intervals, so it is better to look at data from the days before the current day.

The basic goal page, which is obtained by clicking on Goals on the main left-hand menu, provides the immediate information you need at your fingertips.

You’ll see the standard Google trend timeline and the breakdown of how many visitors completed which goals—this is more useful when you have multiple conversions set up. You’ll then get the conversion rate and the goal value if you’ve entered a value for a conversion.

All these are fairly straightforward and the goal conversion figure is the one that most people will tend to concentrate on and quote, especially with ecommerce websites.

So moving down the left hand side, you now have a number of extra menu options that we’ll look at in turn.

Total Conversions:

This shows the total number of conversions and breaks it down by day for the period you’ve selected. This gives an easy visual comparison of better performing days and can help identify trends – do you get more conversions on weekends, maybe?

Conversion rate:

This looks the same as total conversions, right? Well, it is similar, and on sites that don’t have massive differences in traffic from day to day, they’ll look almost identical. However, where the total conversions page was based on the number of conversions per day, 40 conversions being larger than 10, for instance, conversion rate is based on the number of conversions as a proportion of the total visits for that day. So 40 conversions out of 120 is a rate of 25% – 10 out of 20 is 50%, so the weighting now changes.

Goal Verification Path:

This will list all the pages a completed goal was carried out on. If you’ve used an absolute path (e.g. /contact/thanks.php) they should all be the same. But if you’ve used a head match and the end of the URL varies, then this will show which URL each goal conversion comes from.

For example: if you have a shopping cart and the end of the URL is just the cart id, it won’t be much use as they’ll all be different, but if you have something more meaningful in the URL—lets say the source of the site visit or conversions on different sub domains—then it can become useful.

If you have golf.shop.com/finished and football.shop.com/finished, you can quickly compare where your conversions are happening.

Reverse Goal Path:

This data point shows the pages people landed on leading up to a completed goal. This is useful for seeing which pages are funneling more conversions, and for those results showing (entrance), which landing pages are funneling those conversions.

So as an example, we have thanks.php set as our conversion:

• (entrance) > index.php > contact.php > thanks.php

This shows that the visitor landing on the homepage went next to the contact page and then completed a conversion; you can quickly see which pages funnel in more conversions and easily start to work out which pages are more successful to understand how you can improve other pages.

Goal Value:

If you have various goals set up with different values, you can use this page to quickly see which days are more profitable and then use other tools to dig down into why.

Goal Abandoned Funnels:

This page gives you an overview of the number of people who enter the goal conversion funnel, but exit without completing a goal. You can quickly see how many potential conversions your site is losing and again compare over the time period you have selected.

Funnel Visualization:

Once you open up this page, it is self-explanatory: the usual timeline chart at the top of the page and then a flow diagram through the funnel you set up.

At each stage, you can see how many people enter at that stage, how many people are continuing in the funnel from the previous stage, how many people leave at that stage without completing, and perhaps most importantly, where they are going.

This is hugely useful for analyzing things such as checkout processes and seeing where users abandon their shopping carts and where they go.

For instance, if you have the first stage as the shopping basket, it wouldn’t be too alarming to see people exiting from there to continue browsing the site. But if they’re exiting all together, maybe something on the shopping cart page is making them drop from the process?

You can then look and see where people are dropping out and this can easily highlight problematic or broken forms and links or long-winded pages that people simply give up on.

Drilling down even further

The basic pages give you a very useful set of tools to analyse your conversions and abandonment, however, if you want an extra level of detail, the advanced segments tab can provide some very handy information.

Located in the top right of the page just above the trend graph and date picker, it will open up a drop down with a list of visitor types.

Selecting them via the tick box will show the relevant figures on the page and allow you quickly compare visitor types. Are conversions for new visitors higher than returning visitors? Do people who arrive via paid search (Adwords) abandon more carts than those who arrive by organic search? These are some of the questions that you can answer by using Google Analytics.

(Via Six Revisions.)

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to ‘blended’ search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query ‘777 built in 4 minutes‘:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually ‘see’ what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled ‘Dog’ is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled ‘German Shepherd Police Dog’ will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

(Via TechCrunch.)

is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Google may have finally figured out social media, even if there have been some major slip-ups in the way. The implications of that realization could dramatically change social media as a tool and as an industry.

On Tuesday, February 9th, Google launched Buzz for Gmail, a service for sharing thoughts, multimedia, and your social media feeds with your friends utilizing Gmail as the conduit. The result: over 160,000 Google Buzz posts and comments per hour.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google didn’t launch a small addition to Gmail — no, it has dropped a nuclear bomb whose fallout will permanently alter the social media landscape. I could never have predicted that it would become so popular so fast when I first learned about it.

Why? Why has it grown so rapidly? Why has it riled up such strong emotions on both sides? Are the privacy issues going to permanently damage Google? And most of all, what does Google Buzz mean for Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the social media world?

I’m going to tackle all of these questions and more in this week’s in-depth column.

Google Buzz’s Skyrocketing Usage

While it’s still very early into Buzz’s life cycle, initial indications show that Google has a hit on its hands. Linking Buzz to Gmail’s millions of users has clearly brought people into the company’s new social domain.

Google has only released two numbers so far: there have been over 9 million posts and comments in about 56 hours, amounting to around 160,000 posts and comments per hour. That’s even more impressive if you consider the fact that most users didn’t get Buzz until Wednesday the 10th.

The other number: over 200 mobile check-ins per minute, nearly 300,000 mobile check-ins per day.

Those numbers are simply stellar.

Why Have Users Embraced Buzz?

It’s a question that has both simple and complex answers: why has Google Buzz taken off as a service (thus far) in ways that Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google’s other attempts at social media did not?

Let’s start with the most obvious one, and one I think was a brilliant move, despite the privacy issues: it’s wired directly into Gmail. With a flip of a switch, Buzz gained tens of millions of users. With the Buzz tab just directly under ‘Inbox,’ the service creating its own unread count, and Buzz emails flooding inboxes, how could people not try it out?

The embrace goes deeper than that, though. I asked the Mashable Buzz community the following:

‘Why do think Google Buzz has gained traction so quickly? What’s the #1 reason you find yourself using Buzz?’

Here are some of the responses we received that I believe really sum up Buzz’s popularity:

– Adrian Eden: Ease of use and simple interface

- Eyal Herlin – it just works for me. i like the zero effort setup and the making of connections easy

- Sheldon Steiger – #1? It’s embedded into Gmail. After that, it seems to be exposing me to people and subjects that were not readily visible in the other networks.

- Roy Ruhling – On a scale of 1-10 for ‘socialness’ of social networks Twitter is about a 3, Facebook is about a 4 and Buzz is about a 9. It honestly and truly connects people from all over the world instantaneously

- Daniel L – The main reason buzz is growing so quickly is because it is easily accessible to Gmail’s large and already established user base. Normally, Gmail is the one site i always have open because it has my calendar, my to do list, and my chat all in one window. Because of this, i always see when i have new Buzz, and i will tend to check it and respond. This is the #1 reason i use it — convenience.

Summary: Easy to use, accessible, convenient, closer social circle, moves in real-time, engaging…

Google’s got a monster on its hands.

Addressing the Privacy Issue

One of the obstacles to Google Buzz’s growth — and a major point of criticism — has been the privacy issue. Since it’s linked directly into Gmail, people can figure out your email address. Since it auto-followed your most emailed friends, people could figure out your email habits.

All of these issues are legitimate, but here’s the thing: Google is responding with lightning speed. Yesterday the search giant made some serious privacy tweaks, making auto-follow into auto-suggest and giving you the ability to completely kill Buzz if you so choose.

In a few months, few will remember these privacy snafus. Just as people have forgotten about the Facebook News Feed fiasco and other Facebook disasters, people will forgive and forget about Buzz’s initial privacy concerns.

In that sense, Google will get the best of both worlds: it has seeded Google Buzz with people and content via the auto-follow and automatic opt-in features, but it won’t feel the heat for privacy issues due to the recent changes to both. It may have been unintended, but it was savvy.

The Potential Impact on Twitter and Facebook

Now that we’ve established that Google Buzz is growing and isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon, it’s time to look towards what will happen next.

If Google Buzz is here to stay, what does that mean for the two kingpins of social media, Twitter and Facebook?

If you don’t think both companies haven’t had constant meetings over the potential impact of Buzz, then you are kidding yourselves. There’s no way both companies don’t have people analyzing scenarios and Google’s plan for its social media wunderkind.

To analyze the potential impact of Buzz on both services, lets look at the key questions for Twitter and Facebook, and some possible answers:

Q: Will Buzz Kill either Facebook or Twitter?
A: No. There’s probably nothing that could kill either service. The user bases are too large and passionate for that to happen.

Q: Could Buzz slow down the growth of Fb/Twitter?
A: Absolutely. Imagine that 15 million people are spending 15 more minutes in their Gmail inbox because of Buzz, whether that’s browsing what their friends are saying or creating their own posts. There are only 24 hours in a day, so that time has to be taken from somewhere.

Yes, part of that time is being taken away from tweeting and facebooking. Even if it just means one less status update per person per day, that adds up to millions of updates lost to Buzz.

The effect could be a lot worse. We just can’t know yet.

Q: Could Buzz become bigger than Twitter?
A: It already is:

While we can’t pinpoint an exact number, Twitter has probably around 18-25 million users worldwide. Heck, let’s say there are 30 million to be generous. Gmail has over 38 million uniques in the U.S., and that was back in September 2009. Worldwide, that number is simply larger.

Yes, there are far more tweets than comments/posts on Buzz right now, but beating those engagement numbers isn’t out of the question for Buzz.

Q: Could advertisers and brands switch some of their dollars and focus from Facebook and Twitter to Buzz?
A: With millions of people using Buzz, how could they not?

Buzz is already taking a chunk out of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services. That’ll only grow as brands and advertisers better understand what they can do with Buzz and its millions of users. Buzz is equivalent to throwing a giant super magnet into a room filled with nails.

Predicting How Google Buzz Will Play Out

Google Buzz has landed, and its impact is already changing the landscape. Gmail integration, real-time commenting, ease of use, and a new base of users that might not have been as socially engaged are now part of the Buzz universe.

Not only can you expect Facebook and Twitter to respond with their own features and partnerships, but you can expect developers to shift their focus as well. Remember last year when there was a Twitter app gold rush? I do — as the service skyrocketed, countless developers embraced Twitter’s API and built amazing apps on top of it. Facebook had the same experience when its platform first launched.

Now it’s Google’s turn. Buzz is an open platform, meaning that developers will soon be able to create new apps for Buzz — everything from iPhone apps to analytical services will be built on top of it.

Now if Google wanted to really shake up the developer ecosystem, it could offer ad revenue share for Buzz apps and its own app store. Gmail advertising is already well developed, and if you haven’t noticed yet, Buzz already has Google ads being placed against it. Offering apps the ability to quickly and easily monetize within Google Buzz could really take away from development resources being placed towards Twitter, Facebook, and mobile platforms.

If Buzz can keep up the momentum, everyone from publishers (like ourselves) to developers to Fortune 500 companies will have to pay attention to the conversations happening on Buzz. If this thing can drive traffic or put a big brand on its toes because of a buzz that goes viral, then there’s no telling how far it will go. Oh, and Google’s only just begun with this thing — more killer features are in its immediate future.

The social media landscape has been permanently altered. To ignore Buzz would be a costly mistake, because Google has finally created the definition of a game-changer.

(Via Mashable!.)

Lorem ipsum is a block of dummy text in Latin often used in design and publishing to fill space in a mockup. The brilliant Dummy Image Generator is like ‘lorem ipsum’ for images.

Like ‘lorem ipsum’, the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator offers a glimpse at what content might look like in a layout, but instead of placeholder text, it creates a placeholder image. Using the service is dead simple:

Sometimes you just need a placeholder image right at your finger tips. Just enter the width + x + height at the end of this URL and off you go!

Example: http://dummyimage.com/640x480

You can even use a dummy image as a source in your HTML, like <img src='http://dummyimage.com/340x123' alt='A Dummy Image'>, which would look like this:

The Dynamic Dummy Image Generator is free to use, and is a bit on the geeky side, but if you’re a designer or just spend the occasional free minute tinkering on the web, it’s a really simple, well-executed idea.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Saving something as a PDF file is a great way to preserve it for future reference or for sharing with others, without risking the site changing before you look at it again. PDFMyURL makes it easy to convert sites to PDF.

Point PDFMyURL at a website URL and it will convert the site into a PDF document. Not only can you do a simple conversion just by plugging in a URL but you can also modify the PDF with a wide variety of flags—see the advanced menu for a full list—that let you set the page orientation and size, header information, print orientation, and more. PDFMyURL also has a bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar for easy access to the PDF creation service.

PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn’t watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF.

(Via Lifehacker.)

If you’re both a Gmail and Google Voice user, you should be thrilled with the latest feature from Gmail Labs: The Google Voice Player feature embeds a voicemail player inside Gmail so you can listen to new messages directly inside Gmail.

To enable it, just hit up the Labs link in Gmail, find the Google Voice player in mail feature, click enable, and save your changes. Now not only can you read your transcribed voicemail from directly inside Gmail—you can listen to it, too. In fact, your message status will even sync to Google Voice, so if you’ve listened to it in Gmail, it’ll show as listened to in Google Voice, too. Handy.

(Via Lifehacker.)

In one of the more intriguing surveys of recent weeks, website One News Page has found that over half of the people it surveyed will be replacing Google with Bing as their main search engine.

The news portal surveyed 1,000 people and found that 55 per cent of those who answered preferred to use Bing to search for things on the internet.

Even more unbelievable, 68 per cent of those surveyed actually liked the name Bing – they must really like Chandler from Friends – and 90 per cent said they would use the expression ‘to Bing it’.

Just Bing it!

‘Microsoft has a winner in Bing and in a couple of years it may be a force to be reckoned with,’ said Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, founder of One News Page.

‘Microsoft finds ways of entering late into mature markets and flexing its huge marketing muscles to grab substantial share.

‘My verdict is that Bing will give Google a good run for its money, and the resulting competition in the search engine market can only be a good thing.’

In other news, three out of three out of four TechRadar journalists will never say the expression ‘to Bing it’ without sniggering. And that is a fact.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)