Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Jan 22, 2010

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While most industry insiders have a firm grasp on Facebook’s monetization models, most people still don’t understand how Facebook makes money. For those that still don’t know how Facebook makes money, we thought we’d take the opportunity to break down Facebook’s various revenue streams including past and future streams of revenue. – The Secret To How Facebook Makes Money (All Facebook)

Facebook actually has a very robust revenue model for a social network. Not only do they have traditional display advertisements, they also offer self-serve contextual ads, what they call engagement ads, virtual goods and Facebook credits. While some of these revenue sources have developed as Facebook has grown, many were thought of from the start.

Now it appears that Bill Gates joined Twitter with calculated intentions. After passing 100,000 followers in eight hours (now he has nearly 250,000 fans), the Microsoft visionary used his now-popular account to announce a new web project: The Gates Notes. – Bill Gates Uses Twitter Account to Unveil New Website (Mashable)

There was quite a buzz when Bill Gates joined Twitter. I’m just not surprised. Many “celebrities” use social media for promotion – many of their accounts are also run by an agency instead of the person. When it was discovered that Gates had joined Twitter to promote his new blog, it just made good marketing sense (although he really should have joined a few months in advance so it wasn’t quite so obvious, in my opinion – most of us can’t just join Twitter and instantly have 250k followers).

It’s becoming increasingly common for the web’s many publishers to offer their own native smartphone applications in addition to mobile-optimized web versions. But few web publishers have the resources to actually develop an app for themselves. – iSites Will Let Publishers Simultaneously Build Apps For iPhone And Android (TechCrunch

Two interesting things to this service: 1) It lets publishers build their own apps and 2) it builds apps for both iphones and android. How well-built the apps are remains to be seen. Some apps are nothing more than a glorified RSS reader. But one of the difficulties in providing mobile content is building something that works and looks good across multiple devices.

Baby boomers are avid Internet users. They make up 32.5% of the U.S. adult population and 36% of the adult online population, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. On a typical day, boomers account for one-third of all Internet traffic, Pew found. – Boomers online (SmartBrief)

If you still weren’t convinced that the Internet isn’t only for the young, maybe this will change your mind. It looks like the relationship between the number of Boomers and how much Internet traffic they account for is fairly close. So if your product or service is targeted at an older segment, take a look around the net.

While the largest social platform today is arguably Facebook, browsers have increasingly become a host for numerous social applications. Today we look atworld’s number two browser Firefox and some of its add-ons which are very handy for sharing on the internet. – 5 Social Sharing Extensions For Firefox (Social Times)

I mostly use Chrome exclusively these days – except when checking websites in multiple browers. What causes me to fire up FireFox again? Extensions. Chrome is adding extensions in a near future release (finally!). But I still find myself opening up Firefox to use some much-needed extension. While extensions are not really a competitive advantage because they’re “easy” to copy, the usefulness and number of Firefox extensions may help them keep market share (especially if they can fix their memory/speed issues soon).

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