Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Jan 28, 2010

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Starting as soon as sometime this week, the 75 million monthly active users playing Zynga’s FarmVille will have a new way to buy virtual tractors and seeds; they’ll be able to “Pay With Facebook.” – The Apple Tablet Will Save Media, But Not How You Think (Silicon Alley Insider)

Obviously Apple’s new iPad has been revealed (and I’m sorry, that’s a horrible name). Silicon Alley Insider’s point reminds us that Apple’s product will indeed save newspapers – because of all the advertising spending Apple will be doing to promote the iPad. I think newspapers do have a chance – not due to the iPad or any other device – only if they embrace the Internet and use a model that works. It will require some hard decisions.

RSS technology makes it possible for anyone to keep up with fresh content without having to visit the site in question. Now the same holds for webpages without RSS thanks to a new Google Reader feature. – Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web (Mashable)

Mashable points out that this new feature can be used to create updates when any web page changes (she used the example of apple’s iphone page). I think this will have a broader appeal. Many people don’t understand RSS feeds. They probably are already using them when they subscribe to a feed. As Google improves this feature, people will be able to subscribe to any webpage without having to worry about RSS. And RSS can fade into a very useful background feature that everyone uses but no one really has to worry about.

Last summer Google announced a new project called “Caffeine”, which was described as a re-write of Google’s web search architecture. Around that time, Matt Cutts discussed Caffeine with WebProNews, comparing it to the “Big Daddy Update” of 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites. It appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild. – Has Google Begun Changing How it Indexes the Web? (WebProNews)

Google is supposed to be changing how it builds it’s index and crawls sites. One of the big changes is that site speed is supposed to affect ranking. It’s also supposed to build it’s index faster and visit sites more often (important for real-time results). Whether or not the changes have gone into effect isn’t clear, but web masters did say that they saw a change from 3 to 5 “bots” working on the site at once. It also isn’t quite clear how Caffeine will change search engine ranking or SEO (yet).

The picture being painted is that Facebook is still trying to perfect their ad sales strategy while exploring new monetization routes. Advertising is supporting the site and helping to keep the services freely available, while new monetization models will provide Facebook with a large portion of their growth opportunity. – Update On The Death Of Facebook’s Banner Ads (All Facebook)

As Nick points out – it may be that banner ads have been removed because other revenue streams are performing better (like their self-serve ads). Or Facebook may be making room for a new revenue stream. It does mean that large advertisers really only have a few places to get broad reach – maybe the advertising power on Facebook has shifted to smaller advertisers?

Updating a social networking website has never been easier with the plethora of tools available. And for many of today’s Internet users, updating these networks has become a common thing. According to a study performed by the North American Technographics Empowerment Online Survey, 33% of the surveyed group indicated that they update a social networking website or post tweets to Twitter on a weekly basis. – More Than A Third Of Internet Users Update Their Status Weekly (Social Times)

This is good news. Not only are people using social networks to connect & share, they’re also providing content. It may not all be interesting (no one is interested in what you ate for lunch – except maybe the food establishments). These updates are also the basis for much of the real-time search results and news.

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