Tweet Tweet…Shhh! Library voices!
The 140 characters of the little blue bird have found a nesting place among the stacks at the Library of Congress.
Fellow Tweeps, if you never thought you would get your 15 minutes of fame as a published author with enough clout to be among the greats in the card catalog, never fear! Thanks to Twitter’s collaboration with the Library of Congress every 140 character message you have posted over your Twitter lifetime will soon be on display for all to see.
There is a six-month lag in storage so you can’t look back to yesterday’s gossip, but the archive will prove useful to look back at significant moments such as the very first tweet ever posted and events such as coverage of the Haiti earthquake.
One other reason to check yourself before you Tweet – your great great grandkids can look back and find out when you had a “fail whale” of a day. You don’t want to be rolling over in your grave now do you?
Side note: Another neat tool released recently by Google is Google Replay. It lets you re-live real-time search results from a certain moment in time (right now only back to Feb. 2010, but it will soon go several years back).
Will Google's Phone Change Mobile Marketing?
News broke this week that Google, the search giant, is entering the smart phone market with its own device. The phone made by HTC, has the potential to greatly impact mobile marketing in 2010. The phone is poised for wide adoption because it is back by Google, but more importantly is the fact that it is being sold without a contract to be used with the customers choice of carrier. It will also use Google Voice, a VOIP service to make and receive voice call over the web. This means that for Internet and unlimited call users would pay around $30 a month and have no contract.
This price point drastically undercuts current cell phone pricing and could see the phone and its operating system Android reach mainstream adoption. This potentially changes the way many companies and web services view Android. Until now it has been seen as niche player in the mobile software space. With this new device companies may be forced to move up development priorities for Android applications in order to meet consumer demand.
Google Analytics Adds New Features
Google Analytics has added some new features that enable tracking of mobile websites and mobile apps, the ability to set engagement goals, the ability to filter based on different metric conditions and use multiple custom variables. Another new feature is called Analytics Intelligence. It will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Very cool stuff! Check out the video: 
Read the entire article here.
Google's News Timeline A New Tool for PR
This week the folks over at Google gave us a cool new way to look at news. Google released its News Timeline services as a new lab product, which means that it is in beta and being tested. The timeline is a simple and straight forward service that lets you search for a term and then see news related to it as a timeline instead of standard search results listings.
This is a great tool for people in the public relations industry because it gives them a way to easily show news coverage that occurred surrounding a client event or announcement. If you had a product announcement on a Tuesday, you can quickly show the news stories related to it that were published in the following days and even weeks. This would be a great tool for people who were big on visuals.
Marketing In A World Without Phones
Yesterday, Read Write Web posted an entry about a world without phones. The post was about T-Mobile working with Google on mobile data devices. The central idea is that in the future we will all have mobile devices that are driven by data transfer. Voice will be only one of the many things that would be transmitted by these devices. Is this going to happen? Most likely it will, we are already seeing it with things like Skype for the iPhone. It is easier for mobile devices to not have “voice” plans. Sure this will take a while as phone companies become data companies.
What does this mean for marketing?
A world driven by mobile data devices offers a strong opportunity for companies to reach customers in more relevant ways. As devices become carrier agnostic companies have the opportunity to create their own experiences for customers. This could mean niche mobile operating systems, custom VOIP clients that interact directly with customer service and sales, or company sponsored data networks. The potential and possible relevant application is almost limitless.
We have seen some of this tried in the past. Anyone remember ESPN’s failed mobile phone effort? Many of the past ventures have failed do to contract restrictions and closed cellular data networks. As devices become more focused on data and flexible across multiple networks, marketers have to understand the long-term applications of interacting with their customers.
Find the perfect desktop image
Here’s a quick tip for finding a desktop image that’s the right size for your screen. Sure you could go to a site like InterfaceLIFT and browse around, but maybe you want the perfect picture of your favorite place in the world: Las Vegas. Head on over to google’s image search and try searching for this:
imagesize:1680x1050 las vegas
The trick is in the first half of the query (the ‘imagesize:’ part) tells google to only return images of that exact size. So now when you need that perfect image of a trebuchet for your computer, you know how to get it without too much hassle.
