Google the search engine Giant appears to have been felled from the ranks of “giant” to now a, er- lesser giant.
The search company search engine market share dropped little more than 10%, from a whopping 73.9% in May 2010 to 63.6% as of this May due to competition from Microsoft Bing, up 7.3% from to 9.7% May 2010 up to 17% in May 2011.
What is your brand? Or what is brand? Google Doodle
Google unleashed a phenomenal interactive Doodle to celebrate birthday the 96th birthday of Les Paul, the American maker of the solid body electric guitar.
Google’s interactive homepage enabled user to play the strings with their mouse pointer, record, play back, and when finished recording, provided a link to your saved recording.
Pressing innovation in user engagement and in the meaning of “brand”, Google hosted the Les Paul Doodle up for two days.
Stand Alone Site
A real traffic driver? You betcha! The Les Paul Doodle drove enough interest it logged over 5,350,789 hours on launch day, Thursday. This does not include its Friday presence usage.
What is your brand?
Your brand. Is it the image you want people to see? Or is it the experience itself you can provide over and over again? Think Coca Cola, Maxwell House, Nike, Campbell’s Soup or Volkswagen. The images these brands left are self-experiential: where were you when you had your first coke? How do Campbell soups make you feel? Which coffee really is “good to the last drop”? What does a pleasurable driving experience feel like?
Google takes driving internet traffic and branding to a new state-of-the-art form, when a brand can focus its “image” as the engaging experience itself Be it entertainment or other, the point is to be authentically engaging.
Congress should require all advertising and tracking companies
to offer consumers the choice of whether they want to be
followed online to receive tailored ads, and make that option
easily chosen on every browser.
— The New York Times
In response to the FTC December privacy report which endorsed support for a national ‘Do Not Track’ policy, Mozilla and Google recently moved to put privacy controls back in the hands of users.
‘Do Not Track’ is a first step in putting users in control of the way their information is collected and used online.
Both browser makers, Mozilla and Google, recently took independent initiatives in advance of a national policy.
Mozilla, the Open Source web developers and makers of the popular Firefox web browser says it is seeking ways to give users better insight and control into the ways their personal information is collected, used, stored and shared. They recently announced the coming release of a ‘Do Not Track’ feature for the Firefox web browser.
Chrome, the web browser of the eponymous parent company Google, released a browser extension that offers a “one-step, persistent opt-out of personalized advertising and related data tracking.”
Google releases WebP, a new image file format to speed up the web.
Taking their initiative to the streets on the superinformation highway, Google announced the release of WebP, a new image format that will “significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.”
In its announcement, Google layed out its steps to introduce its suite of tools to help site owners speed up their websites and build new apps that offer greater optimization to all elements affecting page load times and thus, to speed up the user’s experience with a quicker, faster internet.
This time the Google engages a conversation to celebrate the 25 years since the discovery of the spherical compound Buckminsterfullerene, also known as a buckyball.
The eponymous brand logo features an 3D interactive buckyball in place of the second yellow “o” in Google’s logo. The buckyball spins to life from a blank white field and can be interacted with when touched with your mouse.
Google remains a leader in marketing innovation. The search engine and technology giant is continues to alter its only brand– the Google® trademark logo– to draw attention to, recognize, and celebrate other’s achievements and historic milestones. Other companies consider this a risk, or even fatal marketing or business step. However, I believe that Google realizes the power its brand has and shares that power to recognize others. The hallmark of a leader at the vanguard of social web movement.
“What physics taught me about marketing” - Dan Cobley
On the Law of Increasing Entropy
“With the kind of digital comment, creation and distribution tools available now to every consumer, its impossible to control where your brand goes.
“This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to people, more in with the people. It makes, this distribution of energy is a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. So the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; is the fundamental law.
“The lesson for marketing is, that your brand is more dispersed you can’t fight it embrace it and find a way to work with it.”
Dan Cobley, Marketing Director, Google UK – Biography
To better help users Facebook created a video (see below) on how to use Places and control user settings for greater privacy.
The key to moving forward as internet services advance
is to assure account security and information privacy
as framed within a quality experience.
Places offers a unique way to geotag yourself and other Facebook users by “checking in” to locations like cafes, parks, clubs, schools, and stores much like Foursquare or Gowalla. Yet, Facebook can still improve Places and its website for users to make Places more accessible and easier to use and trust for users and parents.
5 Things Facebook Can Do To Improve Places
Here are five things Facebook could do to give greater user control and assuredness of privacy, while offering quality experience in Places.
Set the User Default Settings to “Private” or “Only Me”
By setting the Facebook Places default setting to “Friends”
Facebook exposes all users to being tagged or identified
in any locations if a friend tags them, whether they are in
that location or not.
Add Security Feature to block Work, Education
and Other Categories
Just like selective privacy settings using in Photos and Videos
or for your Wall, Facebook could add User Folders to Places
privacy settings block groups of selected “friends,” Facebook
could add a feature in Privacy Settings.
Add Places icon on Home Page Apps Column
to Enable “Friend Discovery.”
This would add a conspicuous monitoring page of friend’s
who allow their locations to be discovered. Also a great to have
for conferences, when travelling in a group or family and at
large venues or public events.
Add Places link on
Upper Menu Bar > Account Setting > Privacy page
This would give Places its own Category row for greater visibility
and easier access to user Places privacy controls.
Disable Status Tagging feature
without select user approval.
Facebook should give users the default controls to choose if
and by whom they want to be tagged and identified at
a location when someone else tags them.
Facebook is an innovation leader in the social web. With services like Facebook Places, Gowalla, Google Places, and Foursquare we will eventually be able to extend our personal reach and business communications with geo-targeted ads, real-time updates, customer feedback, group offers, auto-reservation services and check ins, and more.
The key to moving forward as internet services advance is assuring account security and information privacy as framed within a quality experience.
An “accidental” leaked screencast appeared today of Microsoft’s next web browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). It’s slimmed down profile resembles the Google Chrome browser .
