The Google Algorithm – Google had made a number of acquisitions over the years which puts them in competition with several other businesses. Does Google favors their own services over others? Well, New York Times thinks so and they are suggesting that Google should be regulated. But Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land brought up some things about NYT and explains why it should be regulated instead.

Exclusive: Apple’s FaceTime coming to iPod touch, iPad – Boy Genius Report has a pretty interesting scope today with some screen shots & details!

Google Announces Second Quarter 2010 Financial Results – “Google had a strong second quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Solid growth in our core business and very strong growth in our emerging businesses drove 24% revenue growth year over year.

Apple Is Not Expected to Recall Troubled iPhone – As Apple prepared to address the mounting controversy surrounding the antenna of the iPhone 4, one thing appeared clear: the company does not plan to recall the popular device.

Twitter Continues To Help You Figure Out Who Exactly Is Following You – Twitter’s notification emails that are sent when you have a new follower are getting a much-needed makeover.The new emails have a cleaner interface and now include the follower’s location and bio. This should help users easily detect if a follower is a spammer. This is indeed an excellent addition.

Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month – Yahoo has confirmed today that they will be testing Bing powered results in the live search results.

WordPress And Thesis Go To Battle. Mullenweg May Sue. – Matt Mullenweg vs Chris Pearson and a never ending debate.

Video: David Letterman’s Top 10 Signs You’ve Purchased A Bad iPhone 4 – You got to watch this

Tweet With Your FACE: Why Big Brands Need Social Brand Ambassadors – Brian Carter writes why sometimes its better for a brand to have a face associated with their social media strategy.

Waging war on WordPress: Posterous prepares the switch – Looks like posterous is creating a tool everyday so that people can quickly migrate their old data from other platforms to their own. Looks like tomorrow its “Migrate from WordPress to Posterous” day!

Microsoft Opens Windows 7 SP1 Beta out to Public – Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 (along with SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2) for public beta testing. However, please note that the intended audience at the moment is enterprise users, not consumers.

Google Suggest as a Context-Sensitive Spell Checker- Google operating system reported that the Google Suggest that automatically does spell check for you when you miss spell something in your search query is context-sensitive…erm interesting!

Wrapping up World Cup Coverage with Yahoo! Search – World cup pretty much made everyone crazy (even the netizens). Digg deep into what they were searching for during the world cup.

Microsoft Launches Outlook Facebook Integration – Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.

Man Claims Ownership of Facebook – This one is kind of funny, a New York judge has issued a temporary restraining order restricting the transfer of Facebook Inc.’s assets, following a suit by a New York man who claims to own an 84% stake in the social-networking company.

YouTube ‘Partner Grants’ to Offer Money to Video Creators – With hopes of producing more high-quality content, YouTube is ready to provide financial support for some of its amateur auteurs.

It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It – A great piece by Steve Rubel on Digital Communications

Yahoo Style Guide is Available for order: Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a lead story? How can you better know your site’s audience? Why should you? If you want to learn how to write and edit for a global audience
through best practices from Yahoo! then get the Yahoo Style Guide, which is available for order now.

Show Multiple Business Address of a particular area in your Google Adwords Ad: With the makeover of the Adwords Location extensions, you can now show multiple addresses that are relevant to a potential customer’s location.

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software – Google is bringing Android software development to the masses by offering a very simple software tool that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

Google Working On Secret New Ad Format: “Interactive Video Ads”: So finally Google is thinking of a different way to monetize beyond those blue text links.

Google Maps Labs Adds Automatic Short URL For “Link” Feature: If you often link to maps, you are going to appreciate this new lab feature of Google maps that allows you to shorten the Maps “Link” to be a more compact URL.

Android Market Will Hit 100,000 Apps This Month : So you still think android platform doesn’t have apps? Think again…

Would Gaming Fuel A Google Social Network? – Google has recently shown some interest in gaming & social networks (by putting $100 mil in Zynga) and also by ‘staying quite’ about the rumors about a new Google social platform “Google Me”.

How Google’s buy of ITA signals where it’s headed in real estate – Google has recently bought one of the biggest airfare search & pricing provider ITA, and now everyone is trying to guess what are they going to do with it. Are they going to integrate it fully in search?

After looking at their website and browsing through their team profiles It is pretty clear what BlueGlass intends to do, Like Garyvee says – I think they are here to “Crush It”! The merger has brought together some of the best minds in the online marketing industry and with their diverse experience & clientèle, they can really position themselves as ‘the place’ to go to for any business who wants to excel on the web. Currently they are offering a wide range of services including Social Media Marketing, Organic SEO, PPC account management, Online reputation management, Facebook & Mobile app development, Content development and many more.

And thats not all, they are also holding BlueGlass LA, a conference in LA on July 19 & 20, 2010 which will cover a range of topics from entrepreneurship, to search marketing, internet marketing and more. I have been told that this event is going to be kept exclusive for a small crowd therefore grab a ticket before its too late. If you are in LA or can fly there for two days, don’t miss this chance! The networking session itself will be worth the money!

The speaker lineup for BlueGlass LA is pretty extensive too, I quickly scanned through the long list and saw – Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, Neil Patel from KISSMetrics
Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger, Tony Adam from MySpace, Loren Baker from Search & Social, Jessica Bowman from SEO in house, David Szetela from Clix Marketing, Marshall Simmonds from The New York Times, Vanessa Fox from NinebyBlue and many more! Do check out the Agenda, if you are interested to know which topics are going to be covered in the conference.

Follow BlueGlass on Twitter & Facebook and stay tuned for more goodies.

But very recently facebook has expanded into several countries over the past years. The social networking site plans to continue such expansions even in 2010. Now it is focusing on Singapore, where it is planning to open its office before the summer ends. The company has confirmed that it has been successful in obtaining a registered name – Facebook Singapore – from the country’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority. Laster Chan, a blogger actually went through the trouble of acquiring the BizFile for 5 sing dollers. You can download the document directly from his site here.

According to its ACRA listing, the company’s registered address is at Millenia Tower where law firm Baker & McKenzie.Wong & Leow is currently based. The law firm provides corporate secretarial services to Facebook which is one of several clients of the firm using the same address for listing and legal purposes.

The company has also listed six job openings for its Singapore office. These jobs are in areas such as business development and sales. As a result, the people who will be hired for these jobs may have to work for expanding the business in neighboring countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. These countries currently have the fastest growing number of Facebook users.

Last March, Facebook has also opened offices in India – in the city of Hyderabad. This sudden expansion of Facebook can be attributed to the growing number of Asian people who use Facebook. There are also other reasons for why Facebook has chosen these two cosmopolitan cities for expansion. Of them, the main reason may be that both these cities can offer a large number of possible employees who can speak multiple languages. This will help Facebook to retain its dominant position in these countries as well as in the neighnoring countries.

In the meantime, Facebook Singapore is planning to look for application developers. For this purpose, it has purchased Octazen, a contact importer firm located in Malaysia. This firm is providing 2 employees to Facebook. These employees will provide services to Facebook Singapore while residing in Malaysia.

(Source: Inside Facebook)

There are a number of applications on Facebook through which users can update their statuses – a method called “stream publishing”. Previously, Facebook allowed these statuses to be of as many words as users wanted. However, on April 8, the company announced – through a post published on the facebook developers page – that it was going to making a few changes to the stream publishing method. First of all, the statuses can no longer be of unlimited words. In fact, the word limit is now 420 characters only.

Facebook did not provide any additional information on how it arrived at this figure. Although many users may initially perceive the limit as too low, they would be happy to know that the limit is still much higher than those provided by other social networking sites. For instance, Twitter allows a maximum of 140 characters for each tweet. Many users had not been at all surprised by this announcement since they had started facing the limit long before the announcement came.

Also, users can no longer put any action link or attachment on the statuses – making users more aware of the difference between normal status updates and status updates through applications. However, if the users decide to use the action links and attachments, the status will show as a “regular stream story” – instead of a “status update”. In this case, the users cannot view the statuses on the upper part of their profiles. Neither can their Friends will find the statuses on their States Updates page.

This news may be disappointing to developers of the applications since the move by Facebook removes some of the fun of updating statuses through applications. However, the social networking site believes that the move will allow the applications to be similar to status.set.

On a recent blog post they have announced that from now onwards they will be allowing developers to build applications that uses data from Gowalla in fun and interesting ways. All of the technical details can be found by browsing the API Explorer, reading the Gowalla API documentation, and visiting the gowalla-dev Google Group.

On their official blog, Gowalla Team gave away a couple of cool ideas that uses the Gowalla API:

LunchVote — A social voting system that helps you to decide where/what to eat for lunch.

Gowallahashing — Inspired by XKCD’s Geohashing, a service that algorithmically pick a random spot every day for a given area, to encourage serendipitous challenges and meetups.

Sidebar Badge — A simple way to show off your top ten spots with a sidebar badge for your blog. 

Conference Games — Encourage conference attendees to explore the city and get to know each other by tracking their check-ins and rewarding those who get off the beaten path.

Now that Google Buzz is here which will eventually turn into a more open platform, do you think its worth developing apps/services for Gowalla or Foursquare?

According to the study, if you are a user of Bing, you’re probably an early adopter, but you also prefer to visit, shop and ultimately make purchases from Walmart when compared with other search-engine users. Google searchers, on the other hand, are customers of Target and Amazon, and Yahoo searchers have a strong preference for wireless service provider AT&T and Sprint.

Advertising Age reports:

The study, being released next week, was conducted by Wunderman (an agency partner of Microsoft), along with BrandAsset Consulting, Zaaz and Compete. It is intended to determine the profile of search-engine-brand loyalists and identify how search engines are changing consumer behavior and helping to build brands.

“It’s going to wake people up because it’s a new wrinkle,” said David Sable, vice chairman-chief operating officer, Wunderman. “What this means if you are managing a brand is that you need to know how consumers relate to Bing, Yahoo or Google and how that reflects on you.”

It is very interesting that the findings sort of indicate that the different search engine consumers has a different perception on the big brands and the search engines really influence their decisions that they make while they are on those sites. The study found different degrees of consumer engagement, from visiting to purchasing, based on the search engine used and the brands and vertical categories studied — automotive, travel, retail and wireless.

Below is a small summery of the findings:

• Google users are more likely to book a flight online at JetBlue or make a reservation on Hotwire.
• Google users tend to do research on a Lexus, while Bing users tend to like Toyota cars more.
• AOL customers feel less intellectual than their peers and are usually 55 and older. They spend their money more responsibly, want to blend in to the crowd, feel like they’ve gotten a raw deal out of life, expect less from their future and, believe it or not, still use dial-up modems.
• Bing users are middle-aged, highly educated tech-savvy individuals who consider themselves to be average and spend more than 10 hours a week online.
• Googlers tend to be the average internet Joe. They are usually conventional people yet open to trying new things, believe in following rules and don’t consider themselves any smarter or less intelligent than the person next to them.
• Yahoo users tend to be 55-plus, reserved and a less-independent group with little faith in imagination. They feel they have little control over their future and are skeptical and cautious of new or untried ideas.

Discussion on Techmeme

Bloomberg writes:

“Yahoo! Inc., owner of the No. 2 search engine in the U.S., was targeted by a Chinese attack similar to the one that affected Google Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter.”

Well, Google did say that they were not the only one who were targeted in these attacks. In fact Adobe was very quick to confirm that they were apparently one of those 20 companies who were attacked by the cyber terrorists.

Adobe wrote:

“Adobe became aware on January 2, 2010 of a computer security incident involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies. We are currently in contact with other companies and are investigating the incident. At this time, we have no evidence to indicate that any sensitive information–including customer, financial, employee or any other sensitive data–has been compromised.”

According to a Cyber security firm iDefense, The attackers were simply trying to exploit security vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader, which is widely used to create and read documents. The vulnerability in Adobe’s two products could allow an attacker to inject a small piece of code into the computer once a PDF file was opened. Even though Adobe did not directly link this problem with the Google-China attack, they have managed to quickly release a critical patch for this problem on Tuesday.

Microsoft Corp., which operates the other player in the search industry – Bing, said it was not aware of any security issues across its properties. A spokesperson for the Redmond, Wash. software company said in a statement:

“We are aware of the situation involving attacks against the corporate networks of Google and a number of other companies. At this point, we don’t have any indication that our corporate network or any of our mail properties were attacked. We work closely with the authorities and other technology companies like Google on Internet safety issues, and we will continue to actively monitor this situation. As Google and the State Department have indicated, this situation is the subject of an ongoing international investigation, so it is not appropriate to say anything further.”

On the other hand in response to all the allegations & threats, The Chinese government said global Internet companies are welcome in the country provided they obey laws that restrict their content.

“The Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet,” Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a regular briefing in Beijing today.”

A separate Chinese government official today defended the nation’s right to censor the Internet.

“Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information,” Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, a transcript of which was posted on the office’s Web site today.”

So basically what I feel is despite of Google’s threat, the Chinese government will never allow Google to display uncensored search results in Google.cn. So basically its pretty safe to say that we may be seeing the end of Google China. But it would be interesting to see whether the Chinese government would want to keep the other google products running, such as Gmail, Google Maps etc.

Some Other Interesting Related Stories:

Yahoo backs Google’s response to China hackers – Yahoo News

Sergey Brin Is Force Behind Google’s Showdown with China, Ken Auletta – beet.tv

China Says Internet Firms Abiding by Its Laws Welcome – Bloomberg

Baidu: The Official Google Blog You Seek Does Not Exist (& Don’t Even Try Looking For It) – Search Engine Land

Google China Employees Given Holiday Leave, Networks Being Scrutinized – Techcrunch

Google’s Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China – New York Times

Read more on Techmeme

Techcrunch today reports that The USA Today has launched a site called “NewsDeck” that sort of aggregates the top news stories from their site and nicely puts them in different categories/Sub-section. Currently the site features stories on 8 different topics, including News, Trave, Money, Life, Sports and many more.

Each of the section on the page works like a widget that allows you to auto scroll down with your mouse for more headlines. The widget cards can also be flipped by clicking on a ‘flip’ icon on top of each widget to view headlines between the USA Today’s top stories and most popular stories. USA Today says they are looking to test products like this on the web to see what users really need from a news site when it comes to finding headlines and top stories from a news site. NYtimes has a similar service called Article Skimmer, that lets you quickly skim through their stories.

Personally I don’t know whether these sort of services are that useful for the general public. Honestly, If you have a good RSS reader like feedly and you have subscribed to USAToday & NYtimes via RSS, you actually get even a far better reading experience in one single place.

But do try Newsdeck, it does look pretty cool.