Facebook the new age marketing platform

Are Search Engines the only way of marketing? Think twice before answering.

Social Networking Platforms have given webmasters with more ways to try out their luck in Internet Marketing. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Twitter are just a few names. Specially, Twitter and Facebook have grown beyond expectations.

Here are some facts and figures:

Facebook is closing in on the 500 million monthly unique visitors mark. The social network saw 484 million unique visitors worldwide in March, 2010, according to comScore’s latest estimate. That number is up 64 percent from a year ago, and up 22 million from just February, 2010. In other words, it grew by about the size of Twitter.com’s entire U.S. audience in a single month. (ComScore puts Twitter’s worldwide audience at 79 million people).


Courtesy: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook-500-million-visitors-comscore/#ixzz0lpSw9jH5

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Easiest way to add a forum

Now adding a forum to your website is as easy as clicking a web link

If you are not so much a programming geek then this is your first chance to grab a forum and integrate into your website by just clicking a few links.

Tal.ki is a new forum product from Lefora. You can grab the embed link, put it on a website and you’ve added a forum. The best part is users don’t have to create accounts – they can sign in via a variety of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo or OpenID.

Check this site for more details http://tal.ki/

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Growth at Goole doesn't stop

Google : Q1 Financial Highlights 

Revenues : Google reported revenues of $6.77 billion in the first quarter of 2010, representing a 23% increase over first quarter 2009 revenues of $5.51 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting TAC.

Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.44 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2010. This represents a 20% increase over first quarter 2009 revenues of $3.69 billion.

Google Network Revenues - Google™s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.04 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2010. This represents a 24% increase from first quarter 2009 network revenues of $1.64 billion.

International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.58 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 53% in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 52% in the first quarter of 2009. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the fourth quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, our revenues in the first quarter of 2010 would have been $112 million higher. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the first quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, our revenues in the first quarter of 2010 would have been $242 million lower.

• Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $842 million, representing 13% of revenues in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 13% in the first quarter of 2009.

• In the first quarter of 2010, we recognized a benefit of $10 million to revenues through our foreign exchange risk management program, compared to $154 million in the first quarter of 2009.

Paid Clicks : Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 15% over the first quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 5% over the fourth quarter of 2009.

Cost-Per-Click : Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 7% over the first quarter of 2009 and decreased approximately 4% over the fourth quarter of 2009.

TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $1.71 billion in the first quarter of 2010, compared to TAC of $1.44 billion in the first quarter of 2009. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 26% in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 27% in the first quarter of 2009.

The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.45 billion in the first quarter of 2010. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $265 million in the first quarter of 2010.

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Are you there in twitter

Micro Blogging software Twitter is the buzz word around

Well surely, if you aren’t there yet then you are missing out on a chunck of data and information. At least the statistics suggest that.

Twitter Numbers and Stats Revealed: 19 Billion Searches Per Month [blogs.ft.com]


• 105,779,710 registered users.
• 300,000 new users per day.
• 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com
• 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US.
• 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.
• 100,000 registered apps
• 19,000,000,000 searches per month.

The choice is yours whether you want to check out who has what for their breakfast or want to check out on real information. The scope of Twitter is evolving faster than we can categorize. Real time reports and those entire sneak peaks into reports are making people going crazy about it.

Is it the perfect time for twitter to bring in contextual ad system?

Follow me on twitter @arnabseo

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Facebook and Twitter the next two big media’s of marketing

The New Age Internet Marketing

Facebook Update

Over the last few months there have been non-stop rumors about Facebook finally launching its location feature (an announcement may well come at f8). But a startup called Glympse has already beaten them to the punch (well, sort of). The service now allows you to share you location with Facebook friends via the News Feed, using a nifty widget that plots your position on a map and updates it in real-time.

Glympse, is a bit like Google Latitude in a way that it allows you to passively share your location with friends. But unlike Google Latitude, Glympse is for granting people temporary access to your location.

Twitter Update

Dealing With Google: Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, “Can we do to google what google has done to others?”

In a May 7 management meeting, Twitter’s search syndication strategy with Google is discussed, as is the desire of “every tech company” to gain access to “Hosebird,” an API Twitter is working on to deliver its full stream of Tweets to search partners and others. The attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”

But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense – with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great – better than the landing pages on Google.”

Courtesy: www.techcrunch.com

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10 things you never new about dot com

Internet's most popular domain name dotcom (.com) has turned 25! The domain of Internet's most successful companies Google, eBay, Amazon has through the years shaped World Wide Web what it is today.

Short for 'commercial', the .com extension was initially intended to be used for ecommerce websites. However, over the years, the domain has been in use for any and every type of site, from business to blogs to personal websites.

As the .com celebrates its 25th birthday, here are 10 interesting facts about the domain.

1. Twenty five years ago, on March 15, 1985, the first commercial dotcom company Symbolics.com was born. It was one of the six dotcoms registered in 1985.

2. In 2009, Symbolics.com was sold to XF.com Investments. The current Symbolics web site is available at symbolics-dks.com. XF.com is a commercial real estate and investment site.

3. Before the domain name .com was finalised, .cor was the top runner for corporation names. The .com was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by VeriSign.

4. Any guesses on the number of .coms today? Of the current 250 million websites, a whopping 80 million are .coms.

5. Between 1985 and 2000, over 21 million domain names were registered. 57 million domain names were registered between 2000 and 2010. The .com domain initially saw a slow pick up with mere 100 .com domain names registered two and a half years after the first .com was registered.

6. During Internet boom in 1997, .com count reached the one millionth number.

7. You thought dotcom bust of 2000, which saw large number of dotcoms of all sizes crumbling like nine pins, stole the domain's scorching growth march? Not really! In the year 2000 too, the number of dotcoms grew by a monthly average of 668,000 globally.

8. Ever wondered which is the .com with the longest name? It is: http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com. The domain name belongs to a Welsh village.

9. Which is the world's most expensive .com? No, it is not sex.com despite the huge number of takers for porns on Internet. The world's most expensive .com is insure.com. In 2009, the site was bought for a whopping $16 million by QuintStreet. Presently, the site offers life insurance, auto insurance, health insurance and other policies.

10. Before 2009, sex.com held the title for the world's most expensive .com domain having got sold for $14 million in 2006. At No 3 & 4 are Fund.com, which got sold for $9.99 million in 2008 and Porn.com, which got sold for $9.5 million in 2007.

The most popular words used in domain names are home (1.2 million), online (one million), and land (891,000), according to VeriSign.

Today, nearly 53 billion requests for websites including .com are logged every day.

World's first ten dotcom names were sold between March 1985 to March 1986. Below are the top ten in order...

Symbolics.com (March 15, 1985),
BBN.com (April 24, 1985),
Think.com (May 24, 1985),
MCC.com (July 11, 1985),
DEC.com (Sept. 30, 1985),
Northrop.com (Nov. 7, 1985),
Serox.com (Jan. 9, 1986),
SRI.com (Jan. 17, 1986),
HP.com (March 3, 1986) and
Bellcore.com (March 5, 1986).

According to a new ITIF study, the dotcom domain has become the platform for $400 billion in annual economic activity, a number that is expected to rise to $950 billion by 2020.

E-com has been one of the major driving force in the popularity of dotcom. According to the report, 11.9 million are e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million are entertainment sites and there are 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.

Courtesy: http://infotech.indiatimes.com/

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Password Security and Hacks

Are you aware about your Password Security?

If not then this is probably the time to think about it in a serious manner. According to a study conducted the top ten most used passwords were:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

"Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second-or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technical officer.

"Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like '123456'," he added.
It is time before you should realize its importance. With the growth of social services and applications getting you busy, we should mange it with utmost care.

Ref: http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20100121/854/ttc-the-ten-most-commonly-used-internet.html

Here are top 10 ways to best use your password.

1. Create a password with minimum six characters.
2. Use combination of characters and numbers
3. Don’t use generic passwords like password, mypassword or password123
4. Keep changing your passwords every week.
5. Don’t keep the same password for all your application
6. You can maintain a diary or a notepad to preserve your passwords
7. If possible always connect it to another account
8. For email accounts always use security question and its answer that only you are aware.
9. Never share your password with anyone.
10. Don’t store your password online.

Waiting for your comments and suggestions.

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