The Web Uncovered

Four months ago Mashable asked it’s readers to vote in for their preferred social network between the two current giants: Twitter versus Facebook. The results were pretty close, although Facebook edged out Twitter in a 48% to 40% victory. Now, there’s a whole new game in town (google buzz).

Google Buzz is now the new shiny, and represents Google’s big push into social networking meets mobile social meets location services. We know it’s still the early days for Buzz, but it seems like a good time to gauge the opinion of our readers thus far.

Have you had a chance to spend some quality time with Buzz? Do you like the service? Are there parts about it you don’t like? Does it draw you away from other social networks or complement them? Let us know your vote for best social service in the poll below, and be sure to let us know why you picked your favored winner.

While online marketing speaks a lot about online location, if your business has a physical location, they you should consider your target audience as those in your community.  While targeting by location can range from mildly difficult to damn near impossible, there are some tools and tactics that should be implemented.

Firstly, age old outlets like a local business associations and Better Business Bureau have made the transition into the digital world.  Getting placement on their websites could do more for your business any many of the large-scale social networks that don’t have a locality focus.

Even bigger for your business could be map placement.  Googlemaps had become the standard by which people find businesses they need around them.  Luckily for you, Google offers free listings for local businesses on their maps.  You can register for this at Google’s Local Business Center.  Beyond giving local businesses free listings, they also update you on your listing, and even offer analytical insight on how often your listing is viewed and clicked.

If it seems like I am writing a lot about Google products, it is because I am.  Lately it seems like Google has become a factory of clever ideas trying to one-up and out maneuver their competition.  Whether it be Google Squared, (I’ll write about this when its up), set to take on Wolfram-Alpha, or Google Wave, which could end up revolutionizing group projects online, Google is always up to something.

This time it’s Google’s Web Elements.  For those of you who read my blog article on Google Friend Connect Social Bar, this is very closely related.  Simply put, rather than having to reinvent the wheel when you want to add basic functions to your website, you can get them pre-fabricated by Google.  This includes:  Calendar, Conversation, Maps, Custom Search, Video, Presentations, News, and Spreadsheets.  So This is how easy it is:  You want to add a calendar?  click on the calendar on the Web Elements page, type in the the size, links to content, whatever they ask.  Then Google prepares a custom javascript snippet that you can cut and paste into your code.  Couldn’t be any easier!  Check it out for yourself.

For those of you who missed it, there is a new website called WolframAlpha, which was prophesized to be the Google killer, launched last Thursday.  While the hype is mostly hot air, there are some important reasons why we should take note to this new service.

WolframAlpha is a computational engine.  What this means is that it is a database of billions of pieces of information, along with thousands of formulas and models to analyze this data.  Rather than having preprogrammed answers to quiries, it can actually create answers to unposed questions on the spot.  For instance, you can type in “the weather in Bogotá on Obama’s date of birth.”  Low and behold, it was 53 degrees and overcast.  Similarly, it can complete complex calculations for engineering, physics, calculus, genetics, and more, all in less than a second.  

What it’s not:    This is not a Google Killer, it has a different business model and it is a completely different technology.  While Google helps users to find websites based on content, WolframAlpha is completely in-house, as all the computations and information is done on their super-computer clusters.  Furthermore, WolframAlpha is probably not useful to 80% of computer users, as most of use don’t have a need for indepth computation at a moment’s notice.

What it is:   WolframAlpha is the beginning of a new technology that may revolution information dissemination in the coming years.  As the technology becomes more concise with more data and better language-to-command, this is nothing short of revolutionary.  Once adapted to include information regarding items of popular culture, it would become a tool of daily use for everyone with a computer and an internet connection.

So for those of you who have a content-based website that you are marketing, you know that search technologies are important.  Not only are these technologies important to understand, but media consumers are increasingly looking at keyword searches and trends to determine legitimacy.  Showcasing your own searches, or searches for keywords related to your product or service, has been impossible.

Until Now.  Google has released Google Trends Gadget, which is available for free.  Still not sure how cool this is?  Imagine you are selling an over-the-counter flu remedy from your website.  When people visit your website, they can see how the search results have increased for the word “flu” at the beginning of the flu season.  Also, it allows for comparables.  The customizable aspect of the tool makes it easy to implement and use.  

The Takeaway:   In the new epoch of microblogging, the term “now” means less “this year” and more “the next fifteen minutes.”  Harness developing technologies to exploit this trend, especially those involved in search technology.

For those of you who already use Gmail, you can stop reading immediately.  For everyone else, Gmail is revolutionizing email with some very basic technologies.

Archiving:  With over seven gigs of storage, you never have to delete emails, furthermore it works perfecting with Labels.

Labels:   These color-coded tags works the same way as folders, only you can have more than one label on an email.  This allows you to create sub-categories, or criss-cross organize anyway you see fit.

Conversations:  Emails are listed as conversations.  This means that if three people respond to the same email with you cc-ed, it shows up as one tab, with three parts.  For those of you in large organizations, this means instead of finding 45 new emails from lunch break, they are seperated by topic into the six conversations.

Filters:  Whether you want to automatically archive all emails from your mother, or have all your golfing buddies’s emails go into a special label (which then looks like an inbox on the sidebar), filters can save you time.  It takes only a few seconds to set up, and can filter by email address, topic, keyword, or other methods.

Spam:   Google has the best spam guard in the business.  Furthormore, it holds spam emails in a special folder for 30 days, just in case your important contract in an email from an unknown friend’s address ended up there by mistake, you’ll have time to save it.

Apps:   Google has some of the best integrated applications, including calendar, documents, and many more, which can save you lots of time, and are extremely easy to learn and implement.

The Takeaway:

While moving your email could seem like an intense process, it’s easy to sign-up for google, and takes less than a minute to set-up your email so that you can send and receive email from your old address.  Furthermore, you can set it up so that you can send emails from countless addresses and domains.  Test it out, you have little to lose, but it can save you enough time to make it worth the short time it takes to figure it out.