Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Google has announced the launch of the “Open Social” application initaitive which will allow developers to write application that can work across various social networking such as Linkedin, friendster, Google’s own Orkut. 

This announcement is regarded by analysts as a defensive move towards Facebook’s mammoth growth in the past few month since it allowed developers to write applications to be used on its site.

The initiative was strengthened further when MySpace announced that it too will be joining the “Open Social” initiative.  Google’s decision to back this initiative stems from various factors namely:

• Google arch rival Microsoft is the sole supplier of contextual ads on Facebook

• Microsoft recently bought a %1.6 share in Facebook valuing the social networking giant at $15 billion

• Google realises the importance of social networking for the future of search. 

• Google cannot afford to be left behind in this crucial race 

 Google’s move is a smart one but is it too little too late?  Time will tell…

Google is reportedly building an avatar-based, Google Earth mashup, a virtual reality designed to compete against the likes of secondlife.com.  The rumoured name for this new virtual reality is though to be “MyWorld”.

Similar to Second Life, “My World” would allow users to create an avatar of themselves, as well as build virtual homes, watch concerts, play games and socialise with avatars of their friends.  Most importantly,  My World will allow advertisers to sell lucrative adword ads on this new platform.  But instead of a fictional virtual space.

It makes total sense that Google is taking this very seriously,  since it is better placed than Second Life to create a more realistic virtual reality world.  Google can do this better by basing the virtual world on Google Earth and integrating its other services such as social networking site Orkut, Google Talk, Google Street-View, and Google Sketch-Up. 

Bottom line… A successful virtual reality site will allow Google to sell more ads in a new virtual environment.

Speculation is that Google My World will be released later on this year, so stay tuned…

Yahoo! and Bebo, the UK’s largest social network, have forged an exclusive strategic partnership.  As a result, Yahoo! will sell the majority of Bebo’s display advertising in the UK and Ireland. This is Yahoo!’s first agreement of its kind with a social networking site, which will substantially increase the inventory available to it.

This partnership will enable Bebo’s sales team to continue and to deepen its focus on offering sponsorship and engagement marketing solutions, including brand integration in its groundbreaking entertainment properties such as the online drama, Kate Modern and the recently announced, Sofia’s Diary.

The partnership also brings Bebo users the power of Yahoo! Answers - a community-driven knowledge service that has grown to a global audience of 90 million and 250 million answers. Yahoo! Answers will be integrated into Bebo’s website, allowing users to ask and answer questions posed by other users within the Bebo community and beyond.

Yahoo! and Bebo have also announced the development of a new Bebo Toolbar that will enable Bebo users to monitor their social network even when they are not on the Bebo website.

This exclusive partnership is the next step of our ongoing strategy to build the largest and most effective online advertising network. Bebo joins our existing partners, Eurosport and Vodafone as part of that ad network, which also includes the BlueLithium publisher network and advanced targeting tools, and the Right Media ad exchange. Working with Bebo gives advertisers the opportunity to reach the important 13-24 year-old age group.

Yahoo! and Bebo will begin to roll out the initiatives outlined in the agreement during the 4th quarter of this year. Yahoo! began providing search on Bebo in May this year in a previous deal, which is extended under this new agreement

In another controversial move, Facebook has decided to make its members’ profiles public, meaning that search engines are now free to index the site and list the millions of profiles in its database and available for search engines users.

However, Facebook did give its users the option to block search engines from indexing their profile.

This controversial move on the part of Facebook comes at a time when it’s feverishly trying to expand its user base to compete with rivals such as My Space. 

Opening up its profiles to search engines will see it achieve enormous amounts of natural search traffic over the coming few month and therefor achieving that goal.

Could this be Mark’s ace card just before he sells the company to the likes of Yahoo?  I think so but only time will tell…    

Google announced today that it will be launching a new “in-video” ad format on its sister site YouTube.  The new ad format is supposed to be 10 times more effective than the existing ad formats.  The new ads will be in the form of “animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video,” said a Google spokesman.

The ads are designed to pause the video and appear within the first fifteen seconds of the videoclip and last for ten seconds.  Users will have the option of either stopping the ad and continuing to watch the video or clicking on the ad to go to the advertiser’s site.

The new ad format will only appear on videos supplied by YouTube’s official content suppliers and not on “amateur videos” which constitute the vast majority of the site’s content.

Google bought Youtube almost 10 months ago for $1.65 billion and has stayed away from monetising the videos until today.  Google will charge advertisers $20 CPM (20 dollars per 1000 times the ad is displayed), a price it deems appropriate for potential exposure to 190 million visitors per month.

You can start seeing the ads today, although, I for one would rather watch the video, sorry G!