I am sure Yahoo! would take care of Tumblr

It seems that Yahoo! is shopping for relevance again and appears to be interested in Tumblr. Obviously this has worked so well in the past for all involved, as seen with both Flickr and Delicious. If this purchase ever happens, the only question is will Tumblr benefit from the ancient online giant’s benevolent neglect or active management? Or perhaps Tumblr might prove to be too expensive…

If a social media app screws it’s users, do we have to use ‘gate’ as a suffix? Again?

Path, a niche social media app, managed to briefly feature in a number of blogs when it SMS’ed and robo-called a user’s contact list indiscriminately. Obviously this is not a good thing, even if you only have 10 million registered users after a few years on the market. Not sure if this will hurt it any more than it’s current rate of expansion however. It is also not a good idea to make Facebook look like the respectful custodian of their user’s details by comparison when you’re whole selling point is in being far more private. Which is a shame because it is actually a cool idea.

But this time it is true…

So, apparently Bing Ads (formerly Microsoft Adcenter) will finally be released in Australia. Perhaps this time it is true, and perhaps this will also mean the replacement of Yahoo! Search Marketing, just as we have seen in other markets.

Not that anyone is saying anything about that. Either way it looks like Yahoo! might just be one more step closer to leaving the search business, a process it started in 2009 when it decided to outsource that part of it’s business to Bing.

But how will we disguise the true cost of a lead now?

It isn’t that Google Adwords is telling everyone to go out there and bid on their competitor’s brand names, merely that Adwords will no longer stop you from doing so…

Last month, Google had an important high court case ruled in their favour. In short, this case means that Google is no longer responsible or obliged to prevent advertisers from directly targeting branded keywords, bringing the Australian market in line with other English-speaking markets such as the UK and USA.

Comioc was written for “Adwords Trademark Changes on Google.com.au“.

This time you know it is for keeps.

A week after Google announced the closure of Google Reader, the company has offered another brand new way to organise your life and information online. They even gave this service a seemingly ironic name, given the general pessimism and lack of trust some sections of the Internet currently have toward Google’s non-core services.

Kind of like a stunted version of Evernote with most of the features removed, Google Keep makes it easy for users to store text, images, audio and to-do lists for as long as they can be bothered to keep yet another service without ads running. What is more, they have gifted the Internet with an awesome product name just made for bad jokes. Especially when viewed in the context of their latest round of spring cleaning.

* Google makes no guarantee that it will keep Google Keep online. Google reserves the right to close Google Keep should it be unsuccessful, should Google be unable to place ads on it, or after Evernote has been ground to dust and the product vertical itself left a desolate wasteland.

Everything is better with more baby photos

Google is going to kill Google Reader. Unsuprisingly the response is mixed. On the one hand some people say that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have replaced RSS readers. And anyway it is far too hard for normal people and they could never understand something so complicated. Clicking a subscribe link is practically rocket surgery.

On the other side there are those that are mourning the loss of the best posible way to consume all the content in the world and plug it into your brain like some kind of text powered cyborg. While giving you super powers. Such as avoiding Iranian censorship. It can also send traffic, something Google+ appears to fail at.

Fortunately it seems that others have spotted the gap in the market and are rushing to fill it. Or at the very least state that they plan to.*

* All links referenced were found via my Tech News RSS folder. In Google Reader

At least Facebook didn’t do it anonymously.

Due to an issue with Facebook Connect, for a brief period visitors to sites like CNN and Yelp were landing on a Facebook error page instead. This issue only affected people signed into Facebook when they visited the sites. Which more or less means pretty much everyone. Sure you could fix the issue by signing out, but who has time for that.

In the past the only way social media was able to take other sites offline was with traffic. There is even a word for this, the Slashdot effect. Facebook certainly seems to have come up with a real game changer as far as this is concerned.

AdWords makes it so much easier to optimise for what works…

AdWords has announced this great new feature called enhanced campaigns. It streamlines device and location targeting, conversion tracking and managing ads to match the device they are displayed on.

It also groups desktop and tablet users together. Streamlining that awful, old system where you were able to apply a different bidding strategy to both devices to match users’ actual behaviour. Because who would want to do that? It isn’t like there are any real differences. You can find out more in the upgrade guide.

Fortunately you can still treat mobile differently. So I guess that is something.

* Might actually be kind of about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.

You can now Google social on Facebook

It has been a busy few days for tech news, first there were days of speculation on what Facebook was not going to announce, followed by another day of posts on what Facebook had in fact announced (spoiler: it is Graph Search). There was also something about a singer releasing a single and consequently turning MySpace into the single most expensive camapign microsite ever. To be fair though, Justin’s single could be just as much an ad for MySpace as MySpace is an ad for the single.

This comic was also used for the post: Graph Search: More Searching Social than Social Search

Got any new New Year’s Resolutions?

So it is that time of year again. Time to look at all the things you know you should do but don’t care enough about to actually do and pretend that it will be different this time. Or get drunk. Either works.