Google has finally decided to open a Twitter account. It is attached to a random googler and the bio states “news and updates form Google”.
The first tweet was created around 7pm EST last night, and Google already has 24,149 followers. They are following 58 other people mostly fellow Googlers, and Googles products. Biz stone, Evan Williams, Pete Cashmore.
The Google Twitter account was long overdue, but well liked as the number of followers shows you. First of all, this enables Google to have yet another outlet for distributing updates about the company.
The list of follower is a good way to find other Googlers to follow like Matt Cutts @mattcutts. The Google product accounts like Google Reader are not just throwing links to their blog posts either. For every one that want to keep up with every Google detail, this is the account to follow.
Tonight: Ning will be introducing some new chat functions, giving Ning administrators the ability to integrate a rich chat environment for their users. Ning’s new chat system is flash-based, allowing users to have a chat bar along the bottom of the screen. Users have the ability to chat through an interface at the bottom of the screen, or can pop-out their chats into a new windows. Although the interface will remain consistant through out each netowork, users are not able to chat with users out side of the current network they are on.
Putting Ning’s growth in chat aside, Ning has been posting really impressive stats recently, they have grown to 4.8 million uniques in january ( 368% growth year over year) even though they recenty banned pornography networks, and we all know porn used to be the most sought out thing online, until recently when social networks passed it up!
Last Tuesday Google Maps made a small tweak, finally. Now, instead of showing just the top ten results for local search on the map, now it shows all of them. It’s still going to show you the top ten with the map markers, but now little circles will also show up, showing all the other places that may be closer but did not show up before.
This will be good for smaller businesses and smaller restaurants to gain visibility. But it currently does not work on mobile devises or other websites, Google says that other domains that use Google maps will not be supported yet but in the future. For now, the only way to see these new results are by going to Google Maps search page.
The new version is available in limited Beta, but will come out to the general public in the next several weeks. Once it comes out, expect a lot more sharing going on. CEO Tim Schigel says “we see that sharing frequency increases 5 times when users leverage tools like ShareThis with access to their contacts and friends”
ShareThis is featured in tens of thousand of sites including NFL, MTV, TechCrunch, Wired, and many many more. You can see the new version in action now on the beta sites including: Boston.com, Elle.com, and FoxNews.com
New Features in the beta version include:
* ShareBox v.2.0- Users can now save the content rite to their ShareBox through the link within the widget, allowing for easier access to the content you shared previously.
*Contact Manager- Now users are able to import email addresses and contact names right through the widget from most of the major webmail providers with the ShareThis new contact manager, making it easer for you to share with all your contacts without ever leaving the site where you are getting the content.
*Better Design- ShareThis is completely redesigned to be tab free.
*Widget Gets Smarter- It will automatically display the last 3 email addresses you used, making it faster and easier to share content with friends and family
Google has recently announced canonical tags. Now this is great because it allows everyone to fix the duplicate content issue. For instance you site has identical or very similar content that can be accessed through multiple URLs, this tag provides you with more control with the URL that comes up in the search results.
Check out this quick video of Matt Cutts from Google speaking with webpronews.com
