Google has always tried to bring the world closer to people. For instance because of services like Google Maps, Google Street View, people now get help with any address, street directions and even traffic information.

Thats not all! ….People now even use Google Maps to find the best route that is faster to reach and has moderately less traffic.

ReadWriteWeb today blogged about Google Maps being able to providing very high resolution images using their GeoEye-1 satellite. Wired Writes:

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on October 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters — close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing.

And I must say, I am very surprised to see the image quality that Google maps has produced using this new toy. The pictures are very high resolution and extremely crisp.

Here’s a comparison between the new satellite image and the current resolution (Photo Credit: ReadWriteWeb & Wired):

Google can now begin providing images for Google Maps and Google Earth which will will boast a resolution of 50 cm.

If you are looking for even higher resolution than what is being provided you will need to get a security clearance because the US Federal Government restricts distribution of higher-resolution imagery.

So finally its happening - Google has decided that its going to provide RSS feed of it’s search results! When it happens, the RSS feeds will be an additional feature of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email.

Matt McGee at Search Engine Land has pointed out that Google is the only major search provider that is not offering their search results via RSS.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote that once this feature is implemented Google web search feeds should include “site:” searches for new mentions of keywords inside particular domains so that they can deliver nice clean direct URLs - which Live.com feed is already doing well.

My Two Cents

I think its an excellent addition to Google Alerts. I personally use it to keep track of my blog - like who is linking to me, where my name gets mentioned etc. But currently I only can receive the alerts via email which sometimes gets really hectic because I have many such ‘alerts’ in place (in both Google + Yahoo) and my inbox often gets jam packed. So if google provides a RSS feed of their results page, it would be very easier to just subscribe to the feed and track it on a daily basis.

Yahoo has just announced that they have launched their Yahoo Web Analytics (Beta) on Limited Basis starting from this week. The tool is currently offered as a limited beta to customers of Yahoo Small Business, select Yahoo advertisers and some third-party application developers.

Last year back in April, Yahoo acquired IndexTools, who was a major provider of analytics software based in Hungary. So basically Yahoo has bought over the business and technology that IndexTools had and repackaged it with Yahoo’s own technology as - Yahoo Web Analytics.

Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) will provide powerful data and insights reporting that will help webmasters to evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that will help them to slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to boost up their visitor’s satisfaction.

And as you might expect, Yahoo Web Analytics also includes full integration with other Yahoo products. For instance, you can easily analyze the effectiveness of Yahoo search marketing campaigns and track how well each of your products within your e-commerce shop are selling. This analytics product can easily be compared to Google Analytics, the free analytics service from Google that has similar integration with its own products such as - Google AdWords.

Some Screen shots of Yahoo Web Analytics: (Credit: Visual Revenue)

Yahoo! Web Analytics - Dashboard

A Look at Yahoo Web Analytics Sales Summary Page

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Darren just blogged about Aweber adding Twitter updates for their publishers. So this service will automatically send an update to Publisher’s Twitter account when they send a new broadcast or newsletter. The tweet will then link to an online version of the newsletter (hosted by aweber) so that your twitter followers will get to see what you’re sending out to newsletter subscribers.

How to Activate Twitter in Aweber

In order to activate this option you will need go to the ‘Syndicate’ section in the admin area of sending out new newsletters. This is cool little feature that will definitely help publishers to extend their audiereach.

As TechCrunch reports, AOL-Yahoo Merger can take place as early as this month!

AOL’s Parent company Time Warner definitely wants this deal to go all the way but it still isn’t very clear whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s current problems.

The deal structure that is currently being discussed is Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL (content, services and advertising), minus their subscription dial up business. That plus a couple of billion dollars in cash from Time Warner gets them approximately a third of the combined entity. Time Warner’s AOL headache is gone, and they have a stake in the world’s most valuable chess piece in the Google/Microsoft search and advertising war.

Points favoring this Deal:

• Both the companies believe Yahoo’s advertising platform would monetize AOL assets far beyond what they’re generating today (a little over $2.4 billion annually).
• Yahoo & AOL has a combined dominance in e-mail market would be substantial (they’d have a combined market share of 48% wordwide according to Comscore, where microsoft in the 2nd position with 42% market share)
• In Instant messaging (Yahoo-AOL has 39% worldwide combined market share, compared to 55% for Microsoft).

But in reality, this might turn into a problem if Microsoft then comes in and buys the combined entity. (Which might actually happen!!~). Will update you if anything actually happens…so stay tuned.

Have you ever came across a song on Youtube and wanted to buy it? (Just like how you can in Myspace …) Well YouTube is actually counting on it! YouTube, which is now the world’s most popular online video blogging and sharing community, will start to sell music and video games via their website to grow revenue from its massive audience and eventually hope to justify the massive amount of money ($1.65 billion) they spent to acquire YouTube back in 2006.

The “click to buy” buttons has already started to appear in the U.S. today and it simply connect viewers to the product page on Amazon.com or Apple’s iTunes.

As a start, YouTube initially will receive a commission for each sale of songs from two major labels, EMI Music and Universal Music Group, and video games from Electronic Arts. But I think eventually YouTube will expand its horizon by promoting sales of other products such as movies, television shows and concert tickets.

Google usually does not disclose YouTube’s financials, but analysts at Piper Jaffray Research estimated that YouTube would earn about $200 million in revenue in 2009, compared with estimates of around $27 billion for Google.

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Just recently I blogged about Ask.com Getting a Facelift but now I see that Ask is not alone, Semantic Search Engine Hakia has launched a brand new design for their engine with some new features.

The biggest change I see at Hakia.com is their Tab interface in the redesigned Search Results Page. Now Hakia provides an option to refine your search results to sites that have been gone through review by Hakia to meet strict non-commercial and credibility standards. The results from credible sites, however, are currently limited to only in the health and the environment category.

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Yesterday, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim blogged about a new interface of twitter homepage as revealed by Twitter’s Co-Founder at the Aloha Summit. Take a look: (Photo Credit: Andy Beal)

From what I understand, they will be including saved searches and filtering on the Twitter Home. Nice Move!

Search engine Ask.com has had yet done makeover in order to boost their user base, reports BBC News. The relaunch follows the decision earlier to drop its iconic butler at the start of 2006. They have also introduced some new applications last year in order to provide users a better search experience.

But lately Ask has decided to refocus on its ability to act as the search engine that will be able to answer questions of it’s users.

A recent research at ComScore shows that Ask is more often used by people searching for specific answers to questions. While such questions account for about 5% of queries to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, it accounts for almost 15% of Ask’s total search volume.

Some of the New Addition to Ask.com

According to their claim’s the brand new Ask.com will be a lot faster and relevant in terms of search results. The new site will go live from 6th October 2008 in USA and 20th October 2008 in Europe and other parts of the world. They have extensively borrowed their design ideas from Google. (Something tells me, its going to be yet another Google clone….)

In the UK, Google currently dominates over 80% of the market share compared to only 2% for Ask. In the US, Google’s share is slightly less at 60% but Ask’s share remains the same. But searching on Ask remains pretty high. During August 46 million searches were conducted via Ask in the UK which accounts for one in five of all people using a search engine.
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Have you ever heard of 3D Browsing? I’m sure you have! Many browser makers have tried to enter the web browser market with 3D capabilities in last 2 years. But most of them failed because they were all resource hungry and slow!

I use Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome as my primary browsers. And Guess What? Now you can experience 3D browsing in your Firefox with a very simple add on, absolutely free of charge!

Why Do You Need a 3D Browser?

Well there are often times when you open so many tabs that you can’t remember which site is where, sometimes you open the same tab twice or thrice because you just couldn’t remember that it has already been open in another tab.

With the help of a 3D view, you can easily view all your tabs at once, thus letting you easily access all the open tabs and navigate them in the way you want.

FoxTab 0.9.9 - 3D Interactive Browsing (Firefox Addon)

FoxTab is a 3D interactive tab switching add-on for Firefox that is very similar to the Aero flip 3D capability of Microsoft Windows Vista. While Flip 3D in Vista allows you to switch between the numerous application/windows that you have opened, FoxTab allows you to do the same with all the tabs you have opened inside your Firefox browser. This definitely help you to spend less time on browsing by allowing you to do more in less time and with greater efficiency.

Even though FoxTab is currently in the beta testing stage, I have personally tested the latest version and found it to be absolutely bug free. However since FoxTab is still a beta software, a free registration is required before you are allowed to download and try out this firefox add-on.

Download FoxTab 3D Browsing Addon

Click on the following link to: Download FoxTab Firefox add-on

The add-on itself is really small in size (only 358 kb). It currently supports Microsoft Windows OS only. Versions supporting Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X are planned and will be made available at a later date.

FoxTab Operation Instruction

Once you have installed the add-on just press the “launch FoxTab” button on your navigation toolbar and FoxTab will arrange all the tabs you have opened in a 3D “stack” which is tabs arranged one behind another. Just roll your mouse wheel or press the Ctrl-Tab keys to flip through the various tabs you have opened and click the one you want to go to. You can press the Ctrl+Q keys to keep it in a flip mode.

Try it out and let me know how you like it via the comments.