Twitter Promoted Accounts Adds New Revenue Line To Microblogging Service

Twitter’s monetization model has always been a closely scrutinized affair and with the microblogging service yet to show revenues commensurate with its user growth, the company had recently announced a change of guard with COO Dick Costolo taking over as the CEO of Twitter.

Close on the heels of the announcement, Twitter has also launched a new monetizable feature – Promoted Accounts. Based on the long-tested Promoted Trends feature, the new feature will promote the advertisers’ Twitter account to targeted users who may be interested in the advertisers’ offering. Carolyn from Twitter writes on the blog,

“When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. For example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

That sounds pretty weak to me. A promoted account is only shown to users who are already following several related accounts. In that case, wouldn’t the advertiser’s account be offered as a suggestion to the user in any case? Will that mean that the advertiser will be paying for something that they can get done for free anyway? An alternative would be to target users by geography or age group (which the Twitter database does not have at present) and let advertisers reach out to those users who they may not be able to target otherwise.

Having said that, this is still in testing phase and it will be interesting to see how the functionality pans out moving forward.

Facebook Video Chat And Voice Calls Coming Soon?

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with over 500 million registered users is said to have signed a deal with Skype; the world’s largest VoIP calling network with more than 560 million registered users to bring together a feature that will let users to send SMS, make voice calls as well video chat with their Facebook friends. The new functionality is expected to be available in the new Skype 5.0 that is all set to be made public in a couple of weeks from now.

What is interesting is that the feature is confirmed to be available on the Skype application interface but it is unclear if a voice-calling functionality via Skype shall be made available over the Facebook web interface. That would have been a much more disruptive offering considering that Facebook has a much larger user interaction. Nevertheless, this is a good beginning and it will be interesting to see if this functionality will be made available on the mobile apps as well.

Steve Ballmer On Facebook – “I’m On Facebook Every Day”

It’s not often that you have corporate CEOs admit to visiting social networks every other day; at least if they are not Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently, Microsoft head, Steve Ballmer does. In an interview to the Seattle Times, not only did Ballmer admit to having a Facebook account that he visited every day, but also agreed to the problem with fake accounts. On being asked if he was one of those several Steve Ballmers on Facebook, the Microsoft CEO said,

“Yeah. I do, but I don’t want to tell you which one it is because I don’t want to get those friend requests. There’s about 11 of them (Steve Ballmer pages). Not as many as there are Bill Gates, but there are a few Steve Ballmers.”

Ballmer later also admitted to being a frequent visitor. He said,

“Every day. Oh, absolutely. I’m on Facebook every day.”

That doesn’t sound surprising. But I really don’t think he goes there to check on his crops. What do you think?

Amazon “Kindle For The Web” Launches

Amazon has released a beta version of the new “Kindle for the web” feature that allows its users to surf through samples of their digital books before going for a purchase. The feature will allow users to read through the first chapter of any book for free from the web browser before choosing to buy the Kindle edition of the book. The web browser version of Kindle will let users format content by adjusting the font, line spacing, background color besides sharing the sample with friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

One of the primary targets of this new feature are web publishers. The new Kindle for the web function allows publishers to embed these web samples on their websites and earn money through referral purchases. Sounds like a pretty neat idea, right?

Download iTunes 10.0.1 From Apple Website Now

Apple has released an update to the recently launched iTunes 10. The new version 10.0.1 brings a number of performance enhancements – mostly minor – as well as fixes several bugs that existed on the older iTunes. Some of the important changes as listed in the change log include

• Addresses an issue where the picture quality of a video changes depending on whether the on-screen controls are visible.
• Resolves an issue where iTunes may unexpectedly quit while interacting with album artwork viewed in a separate window.
• Resolves an issue that created an incompatibility with some third-party shared libraries.
• Like or Post about music right from your iTunes library
• Easily see the recent activity of a selected artist in your library, or of all artists and friends you follow on Ping using the new Ping Sidebar.

So as you note, Apple has made the necessary updates to fix the picture quality issue that we had discussed sometime back. Sadly though, no work appears to have been done to fix the credit card issue that seems to have been plaguing a few users.

You can download the latest version of iTunes from the Apple website here.

Netflix In Canada : Launch And Subscription Fee Announced

After months of speculation, DVD rental and online movie streaming company, Netflix has finally announced their foray into Canada. The service can now be accessed at Netflix.ca and will come with a monthly subscription fee of $7.99 along with a possible free one-month trial sign up.

Netflix has come a long way since it was merely a DVD rental company in the US. Their content can now be streamed online from a variety of devices including desktop computers, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation, iPhone, iPad and blu-ray players from Samsung & Toshiba. Support for Microsoft XBox 360 is expected to happen later this year. All of these connectivity options are available to Canadian customers as well. The Canadian service will be English-only to begin with though support for French is expected to happen very soon.

And in case you did not realize yet, the Netflix Canada service is online-streaming only. No DVD rental is being planned for the time being.

Bing Rewards – Get Paid To Search Program Rolls Out

If you have been on the internet for long, I’m sure you may have stumbled upon one of those sneaky websites that promise to pay you peanuts for simply searching (and possibly clicking on ads?). Now, this business of incentivizing people with cash rewards for searching just got a legitimate turn with the new Bing Rewards program. Microsoft’s latest venture is to push people into searching more on Bing by offering them credits; call it a loyalty program of sorts like you see in airlines, for merely using the search engine service. Microsoft says that users accumulate these credits over time to win for themselves something pretty nice.

But a catch here. To start accumulating these credits, users must make these Bing searches from an Internet explorer running on a Windows computer. And yes, you will need to install a Bing bar on the browser and sign into it using a Live ID. Not too many people are going to go the length I’m sure. But it will be interesting to see how many new loyal users Microsoft can make with this latest move.

So how much can you make for your searches? SearchEngineLand writes,

Until October 2, you can earn one credit for every five Bing searches, and up to eight credits per day. According to that schedule It would take just under a year to qualify for a Scrabble game (8 credits per day X 358 days = 2866 credits).

That’s the hardest you will ever work to enjoy a game of scrabble..

Planet Michael – New Free Online Game For Michael Jackson Fans Releases

Michael Jackson has been one of the most loved as well as reviled pop star in recent times and his death a year back shook up the internet, literally, as Google nearly went down giving in to frantic searches from people looking to know if their favorite star was dead.

Now 15 months on, a gaming development company, SEE Virtual Worlds, has announced the launch of Planet Michael – a massively multiplayer online game that is dedicated to MJ fans. USA Today writes,

“We put a focus on something that will truly allow fans to immerse themselves in a Michael Jackson-like universe or music-video-like world and interact with each other and then go on adventures and do gameplay stuff and socialize,” says Josh Gordon of developer SEE Virtual Worlds.

Think World of Warcraft— with no violence and more dancing. “The player is more apt to succeed in a situation using song, dance and adventure as opposed to violence,” Gordon says.

The gaming application is free to download for users and is open to players 13 years and above. You can check out the game yourself at PlanetMichael.com. And in case you are wondering, the website is Flash based so OS platforms that do not support it are exempt.

New Two-Step Google Apps Authentication In Place

With a lot of new businesses turning up to Google Apps to serve their email and document management needs, it is becoming increasingly important for Google to enhance the security level of their applications. In a step towards this, the big G has now announced a new two-level authentication system for Google Apps login. The feature needs to be enabled by the administrator and will come with a PIN authentication mechanism in addition to the password. The PIN shall be sent to the user either as an SMS or shall be generated over an Android or iOS app that may be used to authenticate the user.

The new enhanced security feature is already rolled out to users of Google Apps Premier, Education and Government Editions while users of the Standard Edition may have to wait a little longer.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta – What’s New?

So as you know, Microsoft has unveiled its latest IE 9 beta browser. The new IE 9 for Microsoft Windows brings a lot of performance improvements to the internet browser. But what’s more significant is the number of features that have been removed, hidden or realigned in order to make the web experience much more comfortable. Here’s a roundup of all that you have to expect with this new browser version

Minimal Branding – Microsoft has simplified the title bar to remove all its  branding efforts and the result is rather impressive. The entire browser is given a sober look in order to bring more focus to the website itself. Dean Hatchamovitch, the General Manager of the Internet Explorer division explains the philosophy as, “How can we quiet the browser so that the site shines?”

Warnings & Notifications – Unlike the earlier versions of the Internet Explorer, the new 9.0 version relegates the notification dialogs to the bottom corner of the window so that the user can attend to them at their convenience.

Tab Management – Managing tabs has been simplified and similar to what you see on Google Chrome, users can simply click and drag a tab to a new window, merge a tab with an existing window or dock them to the side of the pane.

Private OneBox – Another area where Microsoft seems to have taken inspiration from Google Chrome is the new private OneBox. The new version of Internet Explorer no longer contains a separate search box on the top right of the window. Instead, users may simply type a URL or search query on the address bar to get started.

Pinned Shortcuts – Users may now access their favorite websites via a new feature called pinned shortcuts. To pin a shortcut, simply click on the favicon of your favorite website and drag it on to the TaskBar of your desktop. You will then be able to access your favorite websites in just a single click.