Mashable: Latest 29 News Updates - including “Our Choice: The Funniest April Fools Jokes”

Of course, even the smile of Google’s Paul McDonald as he utters the announcement of the “feature” gives away that it’s really an April Fools’ joke, but it’s hilarious nevertheless. Check out the desperate-looking presenter as he twists his body trying to compose and send an e-mail without ever touching a keyboard in the video below.

Like every year, Google doesn’t stop at one April Fools trick; almost every one of its teams has the liberty to create their own elaborate joke, and some of them are funny as hell. In the video below, Google posts an ad for a job of “autocompleter”. What, you didn’t think those suggestions that appear on Google Search as you type were automatic, did you?

By the way, while we’re on the subject of Google, try searching for “comic sans” or “helvetica”. You’ll find (almost) exactly what you’re looking for.

YouTube, on the other hand, has decided to show us the top viral videos of 1911.

LinkedIn has an elaborate and fun joke this year. Log into the site, then click on Contacts – Add Connections and choose “People You May Know”. You’ll find out that the list is far more interesting than usual, featuring such celebrities as Robin Hood and Albert Einstein!

The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, claims it has bid for eBay on eBay and won! Well, we’ve seen weirder auctions on the site…

ThinkGeek has a great one this year, noticed by our reader Thomas Bollinger: it’s selling an Apple Store Playset. Now you too can have a miniature Apple Store in your living room, and if you’re a true fan, you’ll definitely want to extend it with the optional Line Pack.

What are your favorite April Fools jokes this year? Please, share them in the comments!

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After a conversation with Parsons, our suspicions have been verified: There are many shades of gray in the situation; and Parsons is hardly the black-hearted, endangered-animal-killing nut that PETA and others have made him out to be.

"I’ve been going to Africa for six years," he told us, "and I progressively became aware of the elephant situation and what a problem it is for the locals."

The “elephant situation,” as it turns out, has been a complicated one for local governments and wildlife officials for years. As humans in Zimbabwe struggled to find room to live and farm, they have appropriated land previously inhabited only by wildlife. This has set up a natural struggle between human needs and animal habits, where subsistence farmers battle wildlife such as elephants to keep their crops from being destroyed.

The issue of human encroachment had driven several hundred of Zimbabwe’s 60,000 to 100,000 elephants out of the country by 2009, but Parsons says that in the country, elephants are still “very abundant” — at least according to the villagers whose livelihoods are threatened by elephant herds, which frequently come into a village and trample fields of corn and sorghum.

“In Zimbabwe, the people there are incredibly impoverished,” said Parsons. “They treasure an empty plastic water bottle. It’s heart-wrenching to watch … These people are all subsistence farmers, and if they don’t have a good harvest, they starve. That’s it — there’s no support, there’s no welfare, and if they starve, they will die.”

To keep elephants from trampling crops, villagers try building fires, banging drums, cracking whips and even building fences. But the light and noise are ignored, and the fences, Parson says, just get trampled. As for the idea of electric fences, Parsons asks the practical questions: Deep in the African bush, where will the electricity to power the fences come from? What contractors will build the fences, and who will pay for it?

Electric fences aren’t a realistic solution — not now, at least. So Parsons is one of a few hunters who hopes to solve the crop-trampling problem for these villagers in a different way.

What Really Happened to the Elephants

When these hunters are called on for assistance, generally by locals whose fields are being destroyed by a herd of elephants, they have a careful plan in place. In these circumstances, hunters avoid shooting elephant cows because of the matriarchal structure of an elephant herd. “Taking a bull has little or no impact on the social structure or herd size,” said Parsons.

“This farmer was desperate,” Parsons tells us of his most recent — and most controversial — trip to Africa. “He couldn’t get the herd out of his field. He asked us to come and deal with it.”

As his party approached the sorghum field that night, Parsons said, “There was no moon, no stars; it was pitch dark. I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. We were moving though the field, and all we could do was use our hearing to find them. That took an hour and a half.”

When the herd realized there were humans in the field about 15 yards away from them, Parsons said they turned to attack the group. At that point, the party turned on the lights they had available. “We picked out the largest bull,” Parsons says, “and we shot and killed it. The rest of the herd left and never came back.” The farmer was able to harvest what remained of his crop.

The killed elephant was then used by the villagers in that area as a valuable source of protein, a practice that even the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has green-lit during times of economic hardship and hunger.

The PETA Reaction

Animal rights activists have taken a harsh tone toward Parsons’ actions, saying there are many other ways the elephants could have been removed from the fields. But as previously mentioned, Parsons says many of these methods have already been tried and have failed. "If you want to go and try to chase an elephant out of a field with a beehive, I’ll video it," he quips.

But Parsons doesn’t return the rancor of his critics. “These people look at this from the context of being Americans. We’re well-fed and isolated from the process of growing and butchering meat. We see this, and we’re horrified. Their hearts are in the right place, but they just don’t understand what’s going on over there.”

Acknowledging that the situation is complicated, Parsons posed the difficult question, “If you had the choice to take a few elephants or to let people starve, what choice would you make?”

Many have accused the CEO of gloating about his kill in a photograph of him with the dead bull elephant; Parsons said his attitude was far from arrogant at the time.

“When you see me smiling in that picture, I’m smiling because I’m relieved no one was hurt, that the crop was saved, and that these people were going to be fed — the type of smile when you get a good report card or achieve a goal.”

Parsons shared some photos from his trip; have a look, and in the comments, let us know what you think of the whole shebang. Is it more complicated than you expected?

More About: bob parsons, elephant, godaddy

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The founder and CEO of iPad news aggregator Zite, Ali Davar, has received a cease-and-desist letter signed by several major U.S. publishers, including the Associated Press, Dow Jones, Gannett and Getty Images, for copyright and trademark violations.

Zite is a Flipboard competitor that pulls in users’ feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and elsewhere, and analyzes users’ everyday reading habits — what stories are bypassed, what stories are clicked on, and how long they’re read for — to give users a magazine smartly tailored to their interests.

The problem is that Zite has been pulling in the good content from major publishers — namely, text, images and video content — whilst stripping it of the ads and other data. True, the formatting is much cleaner, but publishers aren’t getting any pageviews or ad impressions when their content appears in Zite, and therein lies their complaint.

“By systematically reformatting, republishing, and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses,” the letter says.

Davar has promised to comply with publishers’ requests by rendering their content as webpages. Interestingly, Zite has been doing that for the New York Times since day one; if users click on a Times story in Zite, they are sent to the original nytimes.com article page. Unfortunately for users, the changes mean that content will take much longer to load and the Zite reading experience will be somewhat more fragmented visually, unless some partnerships are formed — a strategy Flipboard has taken to energetically.

Screenshots: Reading vs. Web View Mode

[via AllThingsD]

More About: Flipboard, ipad, media, zite

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The video platform is going all out; not only has it released a promotional video depicting the “top five viral pictures of 1911,” but it has also updated the logo and inserted a classic 1911 button on every video. Clicking it will transform any YouTube clip into an old-school motion picture, complete with a grainy yellowish skin and an accompanying early 20th century piano soundtrack to match.

The promotional prank video depicts what some of YouTube’s biggest sensations would have looked like in 1911. It’s tough not to notice the cameo appearances by Annoying Orange, Rickroll (Ruth Roll in 1911 vernacular) and Keyboard Cat (or, as they called him back in the day, Flugelhorn Feline).

YouTube’s prank is a pretty good start to April Fools Day, and we’ve already caught other pranks popping up on our Twitter feeds. It’s going to be an interesting 24 hours.

More About: april fools, April Fools' Day, keyboard-cat, youtube

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Name: Frenzapp

Quick Pitch: Frenzapp is a free app that allows users to automatically discover and easily share the best apps with their friends.

Genius Idea: App Store app crawler that checks twice daily for price changes, updates and new apps.

In November, Singapore-based mobile app shop Bitsmedia released Frenzapp to help iPhone users better navigate the hundreds of thousands of applications available in the App Store.

The idea, far from original with the likes of Chomp competing in the same arena, was meant to provide a practical solution for discovering and sharing applications with friends.

“It’s a natural for people to pull out their iPhones and share apps when they meet face-to-face,” says creator Erwan Macé. “We tried to reproduce these behaviors.”

Despite receiving positive reviews after launch, the first version of Frenzapp fell flat with users — but not for lack of originality. The application was the first in its genre to automatically detect the applications on a user’s phone, and the first to connect to Facebook to show the user the applications his Facebook friends’ like.

Still, “the adoption rate was pretty low; the usage rate was even lower,” admits Macé.

Macé and the rest of the four-person team found that the on-boarding process was far too complex, that users experienced a sense of loneliness if their Facebook friends were not using it and that there was very little incentive for the user to return.

Thursday evening, the Bitsmedia team is trying again with several significant additions in version 2.0 of the Frenzapp application.

To solve the loneliness problem, Frenzapp has introduced a much improved friend finder with Twitter, Apple Game Center and native address book integration. Users can also now discover and follow new people using Frenzapp, including popular and nearby users of the service, who may not be in their pre-existing social media circle.

One new feature that might encourage more repeat usage is the enhanced push notification system that users can configure to receive notifications when their favorite applications release updates. Bitsmedia has developed an application crawler capable of indexing the entire App Store two times per day. The crawler checks for price changes, version updates and new applications, which means that this information is also accessible to users in the form of push notifications.

Frenzapp has also dumped the three-step user on-boarding process and instead drops application users instantly into the app experience.

Perhaps best of all, Frenzapp version 2.0 comes with nine options for discovering new applications. The “Find Apps” tab includes buckets such as Trending, Popular, Now on Sale and Most Recent to provide users with a plethora of choices for browsing apps.

Macé has high hopes that this release will finally help Frenzapp attract a sizable user base. Should the release prove successful, bootstrapped but profitable Bitsmedia’s focus will shift from building applications commissioned by clients to raising venture capital and making Frenzapp its priority.

The application makers get a 4 to 5% cut of all the App Store application sales it helps to generate — if it crosses a certain threshold of users, Frenzapp will finance itself.

Up next: Version 3.0 of the application. It’s already in the works, says Macé. The plan is to extend the application discovery experience to music. “Music is even more emotional than apps,” he says, “and technology-wise we can use 99% of what we’ve already built.”

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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The IT Dashboard gives citizens important information on how the government uses tax money for technology initiatives across various agencies. Citizens can see how government investments are paying off, and they can compare types of IT spending over time by accessing easy-to-reach charts and graphs.

But this clarity of and access to vital information isn’t just good for citizens; it’s also used by the Federal Government, including Congress, to make important decisions about IT budgets and spending. Open-sourcing this cost-saving tool is part of the government’s larger plan to save on IT by eliminating redundant efforts. In other words, the IT Dashboard already exists and has been paid for, and the government isn’t going to hide that light under a bushel.

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the features of the federal IT Dashboard:

The government is working with Code for America for this release. In am announcement, CfA said, “The IT Dashboard was a major component of the process the Federal Government employed to save over $3 billion in just its first two years of deployment.”

In addition to the Dashboard, the government is also open-sourcing the complementary TechStat Toolkit, a set of tools and processes for reviewing any yellow or red flags that might pop up while using the Dashboard.

In this video, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra talks about the results the government has seen by using the IT Dashboard and how those results were achieved:

But open-sourcing something like this isn’t a cakewalk. The government worked with FOSS and government experts, Code for America and CfA’s Civic Commons project to get the job done.

Project lead Karl Fogel wrote on the Civic Commons blog, “We knew from the beginning that a high-profile project can't be open sourced casually. It's not enough to just put an open license on the code, move development out to a publicly visible repository, and call it done.”

He continued to note that for the Dashboard, Civic Commons had to ensure that all the code and documentation was safe for public use (i.e., not classified or a government secret) and audit the code; reduce dependencies on proprietary libraries; write documentation; ceate non-sensitive, non-classified sample data; work with the Drupal community; and much more.

Interested parties can download the Dashboard code now at SourceForge. While the Dashboard is intended to help governments cut costs and manage IT budgets, we can see such tools coming in handy at just about any large company, tech or otherwise.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, GottfriedEdelman

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The experimental tool is straightforward to use; just type in a website and Google will come back with suggestions for how to improve that website’s speed. The suggestions are ranked as either High, Medium or Low. In addition, Google displays which rules of thumb a website is already following. Each website also gets an over score out of 100.

Here are a few examples of site issues that Google says might be slowing down your site:

• High Priority: Enable Keep-Alive and leverage browser caching.
• Medium Priority: Combine images into CSS sprites and minimize redirects.
• Low Priority: Minify JavaScript and remove query strings from static resources.

While speed analysis tools have been around for years, Page Speed Online has a neat little trick; it can also analyze mobile websites for their performance. And rather than using the same set of suggestions for desktop websites, Google has a fresh set of suggestions for mobile site optimization.

Google has been consistently launching tools like Site Performance and its page speed Apache module in order to help speed up the web. The search giant has made speed one of its core missions because a faster web equals more revenue for Google.

Which of Google’s rules for speed do you still have to implement? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eole

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It’s great that Facebook is offering users this tool, but those interested in the migration should proceed with extreme caution. I unintentionally committed Facebook suicide earlier this afternoon when I participated in the process myself. What I had hoped would be a way for me to create a fan page and then re-establish a new personal account has instead turned into a bit of a technical, and social media-induced nightmare.

Understanding the Target Audience

Facebook told me that this is a tool meant for businesses, not individuals. The company doesn’t encourage users to convert their profiles to Pages because content doesn’t move over, only connections.

Just looking at the page for the new migration tool, Facebook makes this point clear, but the site isn’t explicit about what this actually means.

Here is what converting a page actually means, in terms of user content:

• Only your profile photo transfers, no other profile photos or intricate profile information carries over.
• Any uploaded photos, wall posts, comments and likes disappear.
• Facebook messages disappear.
• Any applications linked to a Facebook account lose that connection.
• The username you have on your profile may or may not transfer over. In my case, it didn’t, and now http://www.facebook.com/christina.warren serves up a big fat, not found page, rather than my profile. The kicker? The name has been “used” so I can’t claim it again.
• The resulting account is known as a Business Account and can only be used to create and manage pages, not to engage in personal contact. This means that even if you do create a brand new Facebook profile (more on that later), you have to consistently switch between the two accounts for different tasks.

I understood that I would lose photos, wall posts and messages. What I didn’t anticipate was the loss of my username (a name I had to fight to get in the great Facebook Username Race of 2009) and that any applications associated with my account (including games) would now have major issues working.

The real trouble, however, came when I attempted to re-create a personal profile page.

Personal Profile Hell

I have been using Facebook since 2005. In that time, I’ve amassed far too many “friends” and had over 800 pending friend requests in my queue. That was the reason I wanted to convert my account to a public page. My thought was, if I can make my main page and point of contact public, I can have a more private regular profile and use Facebook like a normal person again.

This, was not to be. Forgetting the actual concerns with managing a public page in this way, for starters, re-creating my personal profile page required a number of new hoops.

The first problem was that I could not longer associate myself with any networks or e-mail addresses in use by the other account. That meant I couldn’t show that I work at Mashable and I couldn’t add my cell phone to my new profile. Removing those e-mails and networks from the Business Account was that workaround, but it creates more of a problem in maintaining separate pages.

Second, and this is the real issue in my case, I can’t even send friend requests to half of my friend or even some family members because Facebook thinks that I’m spamming people I don’t actually know. I can’t do anything to convince them that I do know said individuals and instead will have to harangue my friends and family to add the new me as a friend.

Third, even though I can switch between acting as the Christina Warren that is my personal profile and the Christina Warren that is a fan, because all of my social accounts are linked to a now defunct personal account, I have to reset every tool I have used that integrates with Facebook. I was under the impression that as a Page, I could still like a share content to that page’s feed without having a problem. Not only can I not do that, if I want to like or share content on my personal account, I need to be logged into a totally different setup.

Don’t Try This at Home

As usual, I should have listened to Jeffrey Zeldman. Had I seen the great web standards guru’s blog post from March 5, 2011, I might have avoided this entire mess. Zeldman also underwent the process of converting a personal profile to a public figure page and met with the same set of problems that I am now facing.

Fortunately for Zeldman, a kind anonymous Facebook engineer was able to reverse his account to working order. Facebook makes it clear that once the conversion is done, it’s done. So for me, that means that I will have to try to figure out a way to manage the hell I have created for myself, all in the interest of trying to better separate my personal and professional Facebook presences. (An aside, if anyone at Facebook wants to throw a good gesture my way, holla!)

I can’t say I wasn’t warned, but the reality of the situation differs so dramatically from even my worst-case scenario thoughts that this is a process I can only recommend to users who created regular Facebook accounts specifically for a business or public figure and that never had a real personal connection of any type associated to that account.

The real solution, sadly, for individuals looking to migrate, is to create a Facebook page and then try to convince friends to fan that page and look at it as a source of news.

More About: facebook, facebook migration, facebook pages, facebook profiles, trending

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The premium car company launched a $100 million venture fund in February that is aimed at developing what it calls “individual mobility solutions.” On Thursday, it announced that it will open a startup incubator in Lower Manhattan.

BMW i Ventures will focus on startup solutions that make it easier for individuals to navigate urban areas. Apps that crowdsource parking information or traffic conditions and apps that help consumers navigate multiple modes of transportation are some examples that fall in this category, said i Ventures Managing Director Alexander Diehl in a phone call.

Unlike the $100 million venture fund that GM launched in July 2010, BMW is interested in financing solutions related to any form of transportation, whether that be car, bike, subway or walking. This might seem counterintuitive for a car company, but while BMW may not historically be interested in non-automotive transportation, many of its customers and potential customers in urban areas are.

“Urban environments are becoming more relevant to our consumers,” explains Joerg Reimann, another managing director of the fund. “We see services arising that are relevant for everyone that is part of the mobility game…Being part of the mobility playground, we have to be able to play on the service area as well as the product area.”

BMW has already made an effort to target city dwellers with a car sharing program that it announced in March, and the kind of startups that it plans to finance will likely increase its visibility among a similar crowd.

i Venture’s first investment of $5 million went to MyCityWay, a company that makes location-driven city guidebook apps. Those apps now include a “powered by BMW i” banner. Other apps funded by the company will include BMW advertising on a case-by-case basis.

The startup was a winner of the NYC BigApps competition, which challenges developers to create apps using city databases. This year, BMW is sponsoring the competition by matching the prize money in each app category.

More About: BigApps, BMW, i Ventures

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The report, by Arc Worldwide, based on a survey of 1,800 U.S. mobile phone users and a smaller qualitative study with 30 mobile shoppers, shows 50% of consumers are using their mobile devices while shopping. Since the smartphone penetration rate in the U.S. hasn’t yet hit 50% that means that many consumers are using feature phones. In fact, such shoppers are the majority — 80% of those users are consulting their feature phones for purchases.

William Rosen, president and CEO of Arc, puts shoppers in two groups — heavy and light users. The former tend to be wedded to their phones and love experimenting with new apps. The latter view their cellphones as an inferior, on-the-go version of their computer. While many marketers are focusing on the former, Molly Garris, digital strategist at Arc, says that light users will remain the majority for some time. She suggests the best way to address the market right now is via multi-tiered campaigns aimed at users with smartphones and feature phones. Garris says Sephora is a good example of such a marketer; the brand has in-store displays directing shoppers to m.sephora.com, which can be accessed with a feature phone, but Sephora also has a barcode-reading app for those with smartphones.

Otherwise, the report also finds that what is becoming a considered purchase has been redefined. “What’s casual is now more considered,” says Rosen,”and what’s considered is more casual.” For instance, shoppers are finding that bringing their phone with them helps them research big, considered purchases like cars on the fly, but phones can also add a layer of complexity to simple purchases, like coffee. “Nothing more casual than buying a cup of coffee,” says Rosen. “But now Starbucks is using it to broadcast your location and pay for coffee.”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

More About: display phones, Mobile 2.0, smartphone

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Manually entering ISBN or UPC codes for every item you’re willing to trade, however, does not make a lot of sense.

Swap.com is the first of the mainstream swap sites to solve this problem with an iPhone app that it released on Thursday. The new app allows you to simply scan the books, video games, movies and music that you want to trade. No manual entry necessary.

If you scan something you have and are willing to trade, the app shows you what the people with that item on their “want” lists are willing to trade. If you scan something in a store that you want, the app shows you how many of Swap.com’s more than 1 million members have that item up for trade.

You can browse potential trades in a “Get Now” section at any time.

While it’s possible to handle the entire trade process using the app, including paying Swap.com’s fee using PayPal and emailing a printable shipping label to yourself, everything that is scanned also integrates with the desktop version of Swap.com.

This way, even users who have no intentions of browsing the app can use it as an easy item entry mechanism.

More About: mobile apps, scan, swap sites, swap.com

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Kaplan, whose departure from Blippy was first reported by peHUB, says he stepped away from a full-time position with the startup several months ago.

“I’m still involved. I’m on the board. I go into the office every now and then, and I’m a large investor,” Kaplan told Mashable. “I’m very excited about Blippy.”

Still, what would Kaplan’s younger self have written about an exit of this nature? After all, Kaplan was the cynical scribe behind F*ckedcompany, an irreverant website chronicling the troubles of dot-com era companies from 2000 to 2007. The site gave rise to the book F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts, also penned by Kaplan.

The Guardian wrote the following about F*ckedcompany in 2000:

“Visitors to the site place bets on which companies they believe will be next to fire staff, restructure or ultimately close down, and points are awarded each time the bad news is confirmed. As the rules state, ‘a company is officially ‘f*cked’ when they do something that signals — or attempts to correct — impending doom’, with one point awarded for minor layoffs, and 100 for ‘an all-out corporate slaying’.”

So if F*ckedcompany was still around, would it be soliciting bets on Blippy’s longevity? Let’s look at the evidence.

Blippy has already done one major pivot during its brief life. It’s no longer positioned as a site for sharing your credit card purchase history, but instead as a place to review the things that you buy. “Thousands of reviews are submitted to the site everyday,” Kaplan says.

Two metrics that signify health are the number of registered, active users and percent growth over time, but Blippy has never publicly revealed the size of its user base. That’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Also somewhat telling is that Blippy competitor Swipely recently shifted away from a public purchase-sharing experience to a private savings site rewarding users for swiping their credit cards at local merchants.

“We don't think people want to share their purchases. Period," Swipely founder and CEO Angus Davis then told Mashable.

Still, Kaplan assures us that things at Blippy are, “going really well” and that the site has been “growing a lot in the past year.”

Why, then, is he taking a step back? “I’m just working on a lot of other things,” Kaplan says. He speaks of a passion for mobile applications and projects that support new forms of mobile communication.

“2011 feels the way 1996 felt. In 1996, there was limitless opportunity and there weren’t that many interesting things happening on the Internet,” says Kaplan of the current opportunities in mobile.

Yet not too long ago, Kaplan’s enthusiasm was saved solely for Blippy. In December 2009, he told the Times, “I met the other two Blippy co-founders at C.R.V., Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich. They originally built the concept, and I was popping into their office every day, trading ideas. The more I worked on it, the more excited I got, to the point where I couldn't think about anything else and basically begged to work on it together.”

More About: blippy, FuckedCompany, philip kaplan, social media

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As a musician, you could send out an email entreating folks to check out your new album, or you could create a rad, interactive experience bursting with music and freebies for fans to get them pumped for said album. Indie rock band The Wombats chose the latter option.

In order to introduce their new album, The Wombats Proudly Present … This Modern Glitch (out April 25), the British band has teamed up with music discovery service Shazam to create www.wombatizer.com. Upon visiting the URL, enter in any site you wish to “Wombatize” (as you can see above, I chose Mashable).

The site then transforms into a Wombats-themed location, in which you can “scratch off” images in order to reveal videos, pictures, giveaways (including a free download) and songs. By Shazaming a certain song when prompted, a user will garner a promo code, which he or she can then use to enter a contest. The prize? A trip to see the band play in Spain on May 21.

We’re increasingly seeing musicians call upon fans to interact with their music pre-release. Just yesterday, Jennifer Lopez launched an initiative on her Facebook Page, calling upon her followers to “Like” her new song in order to unlock it early on iTunes.

What do you think of efforts like this when it comes to hyping an album release? Do they make you more likely to hit “buy”? Do they make you feel more involved with the work of the band in question?

More About: MARKETING, music, shazam, social media, the-wombats

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Let’s follow the money for a moment. Both companies get most of their revenue from advertising. They pitch their ad services based on their ability to serve highly targeted ads that get good results for brands and businesses. They are able to target ads based on the data they gather about users.

But here’s the main difference: Facebook gathers data based on user-submitted profile information. Google has to rely on roundabout ways to get data for ad targeting. And some of those methods, including cookies that track browsing behavior, are coming under fire from citizens and governments.

As you can see from the chart below, Google has a lot to worry about when it comes to competing with Facebook for ad dollars. Google commands 12.6% of the annual $10.1 billion U.S. online ad spend; Facebook trumps that figure by nine full percentage points:

Here’s how Google’s +1 may pit the search giant against the social network in four key areas.

New User Acquisition

Google’s +1 buttons will soon appear in Google Search, one of the most widely used services on the Internet. And clicking them will require the user to have a Google profile.

As Google’s Manager of Global Communications Jim Prosser told us in an email, “We think it’s important for users to know who they are seeing +1′s from, which is why we have the upgrade or creation of a Google profile as part of the flow of a user’s first +1.”

Facebook profiles are more or less de rigeur for anyone with an Internet connection. Meanwhile, Google Profiles — and most of Google’s other social products, such as Hotpot and Buzz –have mostly remained in the rarefied domain of the digerati.

Making a Google Profile a requirement for those addictive little +1 buttons is a smart move on Google’s part. It may not match Facebook’s 500 million-strong membership when the feature rolls out to all users, but it has a good shot at vastly increasing levels of profile adoption.

Facebook’s critical mass of users has been one of the things that’s allowed it to succeed in capturing more ad spend that Google. Even though it is a closed, unsearchable system, Facebook has the sheer number of users and amount of behavioral and demographic data to sweep up ad dollars no matter what.

Data gathering for ad targeting

If Google’s +1 does lead to a larger number of Google Profiles, Google will have even more personal and demographic data than it currently does about web users.

Right now, Facebook has the ability to offer extremely highly targeted ads because of the kinds of data it gathers about its users. It knows whether you’re single or not, it knows your gender and sexual orientation, where you work, where you live and a great deal more. Advertisers are very excited about being able to narrow their campaigns’ scope by such finely tuned variables.

If Google could get more profiles, it could increase the accuracy of its targeting beyond keywords and browsing data, potentially matching Facebook’s level of personal relevance. With the push toward Do Not Track features, including a new privacy bill introduced in the U.S. Congress, who knows how long cookie-based browsing-data gathering will last?

In short, Google needs other ways to gather data to target ads, and it needs huge amounts of this data very quickly. What better way to do this than by introducing a compelling search product with a social prerequisite?

Whether better-targeted ads from Google will positively impact clickthrough rates and inspire further advertiser confidence remains to be seen. Currently, clickthrough rates for Google AdSense and AdWords campaigns vary widely, with around 30% of advertisers in a SearchEngineRoundtable survey reporting rates of 1% or less. Facebook ads might be underperforming the industry standard of 1%, as well.

Socially Driven Recommendation Engines

Facebook Likes are already recognized by brands and businesses as a measurable marketing tool, and Facebook itself has been embraced as a legitimate marketing platform. Likes can act as a social recommendation engine between friends, and these recommendations count a lot when it comes to making purchase decisions.

In fact, in a recent survey from Nielsen, 90% of respondents said they had some degree of trust in a recommendation from a friend or family member. Those recommendations count more than consumer reviews or branded websites. In other words, a Facebook Like could count for more than a banner ad when it comes to moving product — and the Like is free media.

Once Google has its +1 wheels in motion, the feature stands to become a social recommendation engine, as well, but a more targeted one. On Facebook, you see Likes for brands, photos, and posts that have nothing to do with you. But on Google, you see personal recommendations for products and places you’re actively seeking out. It’s a powerful concept, and advertisers will surely want to optimize for that situation.

Prosser notes, “While we can’t speak to what other products are doing, we think there’s a great deal of value in surfacing personal recommendations and endorsements where they’re most valuable, in search … We’ve really focused on relevance. When you +1 something, you know your friends will find it in search, but you won’t be pushing a notification to everyone.”

As DeepFocus CEO Ian Schafer told us Wednesday, "When someone is searching for a piece of information about a product, a review, or insightful commentary, it is typically a very insular activity," says Schafer. "But being able to place a 'seal of approval' next to a search result may have the effect of making a typically insular activity more collaborative -– hopefully improving the 'algorithm' through the quality of your connections."

Search Algorithms

The other interesting piece of the puzzle is the SEO question. Google came at search in the 1990s with an algorithmic approach that put it head and shoulders above contemporary UGC engines. Now, it’s turning back the clock and allowing user feedback to drive search results once again. Does this mean algorithmic web search has failed? Will user-driven search data be just as gaming-prone as algorithms are?

Google communications manager Jake Hubert wrote to us in an email, “We rely on a fundamentally algorithmic approach to search quality because this is the most scalable way to answer more than a billion search queries each day, many of which we’ve never seen before, in more than a hundred languages. Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving and improving. For example, in 2010 alone we experimented with more than 6,000 changes and launched 490.

“Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as another ranking signal. As with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how the signal is related to quality.”

As users begin to see these +1s from friends and others as recommendations in search results, the results will likely become more personalized and hopefully more relevant. And when it comes to search, Facebook Likes — an unindexed piece of data in a closed network — don’t count for a hill of beans.

Who Will Win the War?

Which company will end up with the most users, the most data, the best targeting and the most profit? The answer to that question largely depends on whether +1 can successfully change the game, whether this innocuous little button is actually Google’s first killer social product.

But regardless, online ad spend is hardly a zero sum game, and both of these companies are setting themselves up for a long-term, multilateral tug of war to capture as much of that market as possible.

More About: 1, facebook, Google, plus one

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The social network currently has two primary mobile websites: touch.facebook.com, designed for high-end smartphones with touchscreens, and m.facebook.com, suited for feature phones with a touch interface.

Facebook says having to maintain multiple mobile websites has stifled its ability to innovate and forced the company to build new features for multiple code bases.

Starting today, Facebook will be unifying its mobile presence on m.facebook.com. “There will no longer be a difference between m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com,” Facebook’s Lee Byron said in an official announcement. “We'll automatically serve you the best version of the site for your device.”

Facebook also announced that 250 million people — around half its user base — are actively using Facebook mobile on a monthly basis.

Erick Tseng, Facebook’s mobile chief, says this change should not only provide a more consistent user interface across mobile devices, but it will make it easier for Facebook to push out new features — since all of its mobile websites now share the same code base.

Users may see different changes to the mobile interface, depending on what device they use to access Facebook. Some mobile UIs will appear relatively unchanged, while others may look and feel significantly different. The new framework is smart enough to know when to deliver a touchscreen experience complete with CSS3 and HTML5, while customizing itself for feature phones, devices without keyboards, and mobile OSes with major bugs.

The new website is made possible through a new UI framework that uses XHP (a PHP extension that incorporates XML), Javelin (Facebook’s lightweight Javascript framework) and WURFL (an open source mobile device database).

More About: facebook, facebook mobile

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It felt like I was letting go of my child when I packed the final copy of my book into a box and shipped it away for final publication. I had spent nine years living and writing the memoir about the melding of social entrepreneurship in one of Africa's largest slums — Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya — while serving in the Marines. That time included a year of full-time writing after graduate school, and months of shifting, tweaking, and tightening with a team of talented editors from Bloomsbury publishing, my "house."

So I was a bit surprised to learn that in the long birth of a book, there were still a lot of things to do before it would appear in print five months after I had sent in the final edited copy. My "to-do" list ranged from launching a social media platform, to getting endorsements, figuring out how to earn income during the tour, and creating a book trailer.

Book trailers are relatively recent additions to the literary world. Most of the authors I know detest the very idea of them. We pour our souls into creating a book, a piece of work that can take people deep into places, problems, and things that matter. The experience of reading a book unfolds over hours, and sometimes days. It takes time and commitment to draw knowledge and meaning from narrative, and the pay-off of such an investment can be enormous. Some books change lives.

Can a few minutes on a screen really do justice to such a rich experience?

I don't think so. Yet I realize that book trailers are important to me as a reader. I watch them when they appear on Amazon or B&N.com, and for books I don't know much about, the trailer often influences my decision to buy.

When I began exploring how to create a great book trailer, I discovered that there wasn't much reliable information on the web. In fact, two of the sites that I landed on searching for "book trailer awards" gave my computer a virus.

Eventually, I found a few companies that produced short promotional videos. Unfortunately, these companies charged $5,000 – $10,000, and none of them appeared to have any particular expertise in how to differentiate a book trailer from an ordinary advertisement. I was not going to let my book be the subject of an average trailer. It would either be exceptional, or it would not be.

Fortunately, the non-governmental organization that I co-founded 10 years ago with two Kenyan social entrepreneurs is producing a documentary to follow on the release of my book and our 10th Anniversary. The documentary producer Beth-Ann Kutchma offered to make a book trailer at no cost. Beth-Ann is a friend and long-time volunteer to our organization. She had been an advance reader of the book's manuscript, and we had years of archived footage from Kibera and even some film from my time as a Marine in Iraq to pull from. If I could write a compelling script, we could create an exceptional book trailer together.

Capturing a 120,000-word book in a hundred words is hard enough without thinking through images, sound, and timing. I didn't know where to start. So I spent a weekend combing through book trailers online. Some looked like Hollywood productions (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, above). A few were beautifully simple (Kelly Corrigan's The Middle Place). Most felt either too long or too short.

Some social media gurus urged us to limit our book trailer to 30 seconds. They argued that most modern attention spans would not last longer than that. Maybe they were right. But we chose instead to create something that would last a few minutes and convey some of the depth of the book's dueling narrative between military service and social entrepreneurship.

The draft script that I came up with inspired Beth-Ann's husband Jason — the lead singer of the rock and roll band Red Collar — to write the song "Arms Around the World."  "He literally read the script and recorded the song that evening," Beth-Ann recalled. "After that, the editing was a piece of cake."

The book trailer the Kutchmas produced has had over 1,100 plays on Vimeo. Seventy percent of people who played the video watched it until the end. That's not bad considering that the average abandonment rate for videos over a minute is 44%.

Will a book trailer broaden your audience?

I don't know the answer to that good question. We live in an age where fewer people are reading, and more people are watching. That reality has driven the rise of book trailers. My skeptical friends argue that these trailers simply contribute to our increasingly short attention spans. Having just gone through the process, I have a different view. My hope is that book trailers like ours help bridge the divide and draw more people to the beauty, substance, and transformative power of books.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kertlis

More About: book trailers, books, MARKETING, publishing, social media, video, web video, youtube

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Today is opening day, thus commencing a long and exciting season of homers, no-hitters (hopefully) and enjoyment from this all-American pastime. If you're finalizing your fantasy team, fancy yourself a baseball historian, or just love the game, there are a bevy of mobile apps to help you get more out of the 2011 season.

Play ball!

1. ESPN Fantasy Baseball 2011

The right pick in the draft can make or break your whole (fantasy) team. You need to have the information up front so you can make informed decisions, maintain the integrity of your picks, and ensure the success of your roster. This app enables users to trade players throughout the season, make impromptu lineup changes and manage your team on-the-go. (Note: You must have an ESPN Fantasy Baseball account for access to all the features of this app.)

Cost: FREE

2. ESPN Fantasy Baseball Cheatsheet 2011

Now that you have your fantasy team in place, you should have the accompanying cheatsheet app that will help inform your roster selections. This is a serious game, and when you have a good player on the line, you want to make the best decision possible. This app provides everything you'd want to know about a player, including past season performance, projected stats, injuries, rankings and draft position — insider information, if you will, on MLB players.

Cost: $4.99

3. EvriThing Baseball

This app is a thorough resource for, well, everything baseball. It aggregates baseball news from sources all over the country, and covers topics like standings, injuries and free agency. There's also a dedicated channel for each MLB team that lets you hone in on the club you're most interested in. If there are particular stories of interest, you can share them on Twitter and Facebook via the app. It’s also available on Android.

Cost: FREE

4. Ballpark Envi

Each baseball stadium has a history and life of its own. Regardless of which stadium holds a special place in your heart, it's still fun to explore the environments in which other teams play their home games. Ballpark Envi gives you an in-depth preview of all other team stadiums in the league using photos and information. You can take a visual tour of the venerable Fenway Park, see the brand new Yankee Stadium, learn a bit of history and even access seating charts. If you can't get around the country to every MLB stadium, this is a good alternative.

Cost: $0.99

5. MLB.com At Bat 11

Before you dismiss this app because of its high price, keep in mind that this is probably one of the most comprehensive sports apps on the market. You can customize the app to track your favorite team, or use it as a single resource for everything you'd want to know about the baseball season as it's happening.

The price tag includes livestream broadcasts of 150 spring training games through its free preview of MLB.tv. Throughout the season, you can reference this app for breaking news, audio/video broadcasts of regular season games and stats for your favorite players and teams. It’s also available on Android and BlackBerry.

Cost: $14.99 (There is also a free lite version available, but it does not include any live or archived audio and video broadcasts.)

6. Baseball Trade Rumors

A late night trade can wreak havoc on your fantasy lineup. Be sure to stay on top of the latest rumors and rumblings with the Baseball Trade Rumors app. This app is a complement to the popular BaseballTradeRumors.com website and keeps tabs on every hint of a move. You can set the app to send you texts with only the content you want — for example, just trade rumors in the National League.

Cost: $2.99

7. Baseball Road Trip

If one thing on your bucket list is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, or at least hit a handful of them, the Baseball Road Trip app is a must-have. It serves as a tour guide for the ballpark and surrounding area. Not only does it provide information on the stadium, seating charts, tickets, schedules, even food options, it also offers details on nearby sports bars, hotels and attractions that you'd want to know about as a visitor. Once you've hit all the ballparks and accomplished that gargantuan goal, the app lets you rank the stadiums you visited by preference.

Cost: $1.99

8. Baseball Memories

We've all heard stories of that one ultimate sports fan who has an amazing ability to recall stats and scores from sports events from 20 years ago. Anyone remember that ESPN game show, Stump the Schwab? Well, if you want to be like Howard Schwab and have an almost savant-like memory of baseball games of yore, the Baseball Memories app is a good place to start. It’s a virtual historian, containing everything you'd want to know about 200,000+ baseball games from 1871-2009. In addition to game stats, it even includes details about game day weather, start time and field conditions.

Cost: $1.99

9. FanGraphs Baseball

If you're a data geek and need to see things visually, you'll appreciate the numerical wizardry that the FanGraphs Baseball app provides. By taking league statistics and analyzing the heck out of them, anyone with a penchant for data will revel in the graphs and analysis around win probability, player stats, individual plays, even team financials. This app gives a whole new meaning to "game day analysis."

Cost: $2.99

10. SportsTap

SportsTap eliminates the need to ever have to stop and check the score of the game on the Internet again. The app is updated in real time and provides current scores and game information for the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, NASCAR, PGA and more. You can designate specific teams and leagues you want to follow and have immediate access to the score of the game, as well as see how other teams in the league are faring. Upon logging into the app, the home screen designates your favorite leagues with red circled numbers that show how many games are currently in play. This one is also available for Android.

Cost: FREE

Image courtesy of Flickr, mistycabal

More About: android, App, Baseball, iphone, List, Lists, Mobile 2.0, mobile apps, smartphone

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(Note: The video embedded below plays automatically.)

A video of Parsons shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe made the rounds Thursday, causing the domain registry company to become a Google Hot Topic and the subject of criticism. Leading the charge is PETA, the animal rights group, which has closed its account with GoDaddy and is asking others to follow suit. Parsons, a Vietnam vet known for his brash image, brought on the publicity by posting the video on his blog.

The video shows the damage elephants caused by trampling a farmer’s sorghum field. Parsons and his fellow hunters are shown waiting at night for the elephants to return. Then Parsons shoots and kills one of the elephants. In the next shot, dozens of villagers then come to pick off the elephant’s meat.

Anticipating a backlash, GoDaddy competitor NameCheap.com has already swooped in. The company is running a transfer from GoDaddy to Namecheap.com for .com, .net and .org domains for $4.99 with 20% of the proceeds going to SaveTheElephants.com. For its part, GoDaddy has yet to address the issue on its company blog. Reps from the company could not be reached for comment.

This isn’t the first time GoDaddy has courted controversy. The brand is known for its envelope-pushing Super Bowl ads that feature “GoDaddy Girls” bouncing out of their shirts. One such spot, featuring a retired football player named Lola who becomes a lingerie designer, was punted from the 2010 Super Bowl.

More About: advertising, godaddy, MARKETING, trending

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The as-yet-unnamed app is capable of grabbing a Google Profile user’s name, email address and phone number. The technology is also capable of accessing Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or other online photos and data.

Naturally, Google has to wrestle with the privacy implications. How do you harness the power of this technology while still allowing individuals to maintain some semblance of anonymity?

Right now, Google is working on an opt-in model. Google Profile users have to elect to participate, and they must explicitly give Google permission to use their profile data and picture. If they don’t, the photo app won’t recognize them.

Googler Hartmut Neven is in charge of the company’s image-recognition applications; his company, Neven Vision, was acquired by Google in 2006. He told CNN that people are right to be wary about this kind of technology.

“In particular, women say, ‘Oh my God. Imagine this guy takes a picture of me in a bar, and then he knows my address just because somewhere on the Web there is an association of my address with my photo,’” Neven said.

“That’s a scary thought. So I think there is merit in finding a good route that makes the power of this technology available in a good way.”

The app makes use of Neven’s facial recognition technology, which is already being used in Picasa, Google’s photo-sharing application. And similar object-recognition technologies developed by Neven at his previous company are being used in Google Goggles.

Google’s balancing of high technology and human privacy has come under fire in recent months. Last fall, the company had to settle a privacy-related lawsuit when its social product, Google Buzz, shared personal data without user consent. And the company was subject to international scrutiny over Street View privacy violations; these issues came to a head when the FCC opened an investigation into the matter last November.

We’ll have to wait to see if Google can skirt privacy violations while still rolling out really interesting apps like this one. What do you think the company would have to do to ensure personal security for users of this app?

Image courtesy of Flickr, sazfar

More About: face recognition, facial recognition, Google

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Only a few spots remain for our invite-only conference, Mashable Connect 2011, a unique event at Disney World in May that will bring together thought leaders in a variety of industries such as media, technology and marketing.

The attendee list is filling out nicely with people from companies including 92Y, American Association of Advertising Agencies, American Express, Behance, Buddy Media, Constant Contact, Converseon, CNN, Deep Focus, The Daily, Demand Media, Edelman, Fenton, Fidelity Investments, Ford, Gist, Gowalla, Groupon, Hallmark Cards, Hasbro, Havas, HBO, Hilton Worldwide, Idea, InterContinental Hotels Group, Intridea, iStrategyLabs, Meetup, Microsoft, MTV Networks, NBC, Nestle, Ogilvy, PepsiCo, Rackspace Hosting, Radian6, Rockfish, Saatchi & Saatchi, Scripps Networks, SocialVibe, Sony, Spotify, Syncapse, Taco Bell, Thrillist, Triton Digital, Tumblr, TV Guide, UN Foundation, Unilever, Universal Music Group, Webtrends, Wells Fargo, Xero, Yahoo! and the majority of the Mashable team. The conference promises for great content as well as time to meet others and discuss ways the spaces we work and live in are changing. There’s even an opportunity for attendees to meet each other before the conference begins via a private social network created just for Mashable Connect.

Recent Keynote announcements include Raymie Stata, Yahoo’s CTO, and David Jones, who Adweek named one of the top two executives of the 2000s for his role as global CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide and CEO of France’s Havas Worldwide.

Mashable executives, editors and writers are very excited to host our speakers and attendees joining us in Florida on May 12-14. We hope to see you there, so apply now if you’re interested:

Registration for Mashable Connect 2011 is all-inclusive and includes content, meals, special events and surprises, hotel rooms and ground transportation.

There will be plenty of opportunities to connect with speakers, including:

• Scott Belsky, Founder & CEO, Behance
• Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Global Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy
• Sabrina Caluori, Director of Social Media & Marketing, HBO
• Cameron Death, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NBCUniversal Digital Studio
• Craig Engler, SVP & General Manager, Syfy Digital
• KC Estenson, SVP & General Manager, CNN Digital
• Elizabeth Gore, Executive Director Global Partnerships, UN Foundation
• Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder & CEO, Meetup
• Lisa Hsia, Executive Vice President, Bravo Digital Media
• David Jones, CEO of Havas & Global CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide
• David Karp, Founder, Tumblr
• Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
• Dave Knox, Chief Marketing Officer, Rockfish
• Josh Koppel, Founder, ScrollMotion
• Michael Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media
• Marcel LeBrun, CEO, Radian6
• Adam Rich, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, Thrillist
• Steve Rubel, SVP/Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
• Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus
• Michael Scissons, President and CEO, Syncapse
• Raymie Stata, SVP, Chief Technology Officer, Yahoo!
• Christy Tanner, Executive Vice President & General Manager, TVGuide.com & TV Guide Mobile
• Josh Williams, CEO, Gowalla

For more details, click here.

Thanks to our sponsors:

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Sponsorship opportunities are available via sponsorships@mashable.com.

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Anyone else getting high school chemistry flashbacks whilst looking at Google’s homepage? Well, that’s because today’s Google Doodle was created in celebration of what would have been Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen’s 200th birthday.

Bunsen was a chemist who discovered the elements caesium and rubidium, and he invented the Bunsen cell battery, according to The Telegraph. He also invented — surprise, surprise — the Bunsen burner.

Head over to Google.com to check out the Doodle, which bubbles and boils like the real deal — sans noxious odors.

More About: bunsen-burner, google doodle

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Sheen’s public meltdown was one of the top trending topics of the month on Twitter, according to our friends at What The Trend. Sheen’s series of social media activities — joining Twitter, breaking the Guinness World Record for reaching 1 million users in the fastest time and then using his Twitter feed as advertising — consumed social media conversations early in the month, but then faded out.

Unlike Sheen, whose public falling out with his Two and a Half Men producer and the network were brewing for some time, the month’s other big curiosity, Rebecca Black, seemed to come out of nowhere. The likely impetus for the 13-year-old’s fame was Tosh.O’s blog, which cited Black’s video “Friday” on March 11 with the headline “Songwriting Isn’t for Everyone.” Black’s video, now at close to 70 million views on YouTube, had just the right so-bad-it’s-good vibe to ensure its viral success.

While Sheen and Black dominated a lot of discussion in social media this month, it’s heartening to see that they didn’t eclipse the unthinkable tragedy in Japan, which continues to be a major topic of discussion.

For the full list, check out our chart below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render

More About: charlie sheen, japan, List, Lists, Rebecca Black, social media, Top Twitter Topics, trends, twitter

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The $1 million investment is being lumped in with Qwiki’s $8 million Series A round led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and brings the final tally for the round to $9 million.

“Doug [Imbruce] and the Qwiki team are solving a real problem with a technically innovative and scalable solution that applies to multiple verticals,” says Keywell, Lightbank’s co-founder.

Qwiki, which creates interactive video presentations from multiple data sources such as YouTube and Wikipedia, released its product into public alpha a few months ago. “The alpha response has been tremendous: site traffic is growing beyond our wildest expectations,” says CEO and founder Doug Imbruce.

The startup’s iOS applications and API are still works in progress, though the iPad application is said to be coming soon. These future releases are part of a larger strategy to make Qwiki’s information experience cross-platform.

“The additional $1 million will help accelerate our product rollout by allowing us to recruit more top-tier talent,” says Imbruce. “The vision of Qwiki has always been to create a consistent experience that supports media consumption as it moves off the desktop; With more capital, we can deliver the Qwiki experience on mobile and iTV platforms faster.”

Qwiki has raised $10.5 million in seed and Series A funding to date.

More About: funding, groupon, lightbank, qwiki, series a

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The widely unpopular addition, more commonly referred to as the “dickbar,” was included in an update to Twitter’s iOS apps in early March. It displays a hovering list of rotating trends, including those paid for by sponsors (see right).

Frustrated by what many saw as invasive advertising, users dubbed it the “Dickbar” in reference to CEO Dick Costolo whom, as you might have guessed, is in charge of making Twitter profitable — and that includes making advertising products like Promoted Trends visible to users. The press has been quick to link its disappearance to the recent return of Twitter inventor and co-founder Jack Dorsey.

In a blog post, Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman said the team is “going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery” — suggesting that some form of the Quick Bar might return to Twitter’s mobile apps in the future.

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Today, Pitchfork alerts that Lance Bangs, director of the band’s final show, has posted a call on his website for “footage of clouds and sky shot from airplane windows,” which could be used during the musical finale.

We’ve reached out to Bangs to see if we can learn more about how this footage will be used, but, in the meantime we’re intrigued.

The idea of integrating fan footage into a show is reminiscent of what the Arcade Fire did with its “The Wilderness Downtown” video and accompanying “Wilderness Machine,” which brought fan-made drawings into the band’s live shows.

Will you submit your cloud footage for possible posterity?

Photo courtesy of Flickr, karindalziel

More About: crowdsourcing, Lance-bangs, LCD-soundsystem, music, pop culture, video, Vimeo

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The notion that marketing costs can’t always be understood is an ancient one. John Wanamaker, a department store mogul who died in 1922, once mused, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

The same could be said for social media marketing. Though there are a lot more metrics than Wanamaker could have imagined back in his day, the tricky part is determining the right ones to use. Is it retweets? Facebook Likes? Or maybe just product sales?

To get a sense of where social media marketing metrics are right now and where they might be going, Mashable recently contacted some people on the front lines. The group we chose includes:

• Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of emerging media and brand strategy at 360i
• David Rosenberg, director of emerging media at JWT
• Dexter Bustarde, senior web analyst at Digitaria.


From left: Sarah Hofstetter, David Rosenberg and Dexter Bustarde

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A lot of campaigns seem aimed at accruing Facebook Likes. But is that success? What’s the point?

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Dexter Bustarde: Earning a Facebook Like, by hook or by crook, is a success, but it’s a success at a very tactical level. If I have a client with a campaign completely focused on getting Facebook Likes, I’ll do what I can to show that this tactic should be working towards a broader strategy (using Facebook to tell people about your brand), which in turn should drive towards a business goal (getting people to spend money on your brand). Far too often, I’ll see Facebook campaigns that are very successful at getting a lot of Likes during the campaign, but I’ll have no concept of what to say to people after the campaign is done. When you earn yourself a Facebook Like, you’ve successfully opened up a line of communication with a potential customer and his or her friends. What you communicate after that is where we should look for real lasting success.

David Rosenberg: The value of a Facebook Like is directly connected to the anticipated actions the brand hopes its newfound followers will take on behalf of the brand. Is bigger better? If the brand is engaged in social selling or F-Commerce, then this more traditional CRM approach might lead a brand to goals such as include a large following. However, if the brand is looking to attract its most loyal fan base to use for product development, R&D and research, the quality of the fan reigns supreme over the quantity.

Sarah Hofstetter: The question you're posing is actually interesting in and of itself. The question above referred to Facebook Pages as a "campaign," but Facebook is a platform for ongoing conversation, which is really not a campaign at all. Putting your brand on Facebook — or any other online community — is an invitation for conversation, not merely a reach-and-frequency play, and it shouldn't be measured as such. In fact, the whole premise of Pages is that they’re free real estate from Facebook where you still have to earn attention. Depending on your objectives, you may be interested in inviting lots of people to a continuous mass event, and you'll even pay to get them there in media or coupons; or you'd rather focus on quality of engagement to foster a real relationship with the people who matter most, and invest your efforts in getting a continuing dialogue going between yourself and your consumers — and even better, connecting fans of your brand to each other. Ultimately success is defined by objectives.

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What about Twitter? How do you measure success there? If it’s the total number of mentions, how do you take into account negative sentiment?

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Hofstetter: Twitter is interesting because the way people use it can vary. There are broadcasters, there are "listeners" who follow and read groups of tweets in some sort of aggregated way (celebs, friends, news, etc.), and then there are a select few who do both … and actually have conversations. Influence + mentions = second degree followers, which is why influence can be both a positive and a negative.

Rosenberg:There are different ways to measure success. If you are a news organization, watching a news link spread organically is a measure of awareness, engagement and traffic drivers. But if you are a luxury brand engaging in an influencer program, having the “right” people share your content may be your tactical goal. Having clear business goals and tasks will help solve for the approach a brand should take.

With regard to total mentions and negative sentiment, it's a larger discussion. The use of conversation monitoring tools can help you get an estimation to some degree. But when dealing with natural language and slang, its important to hand-sample and depend on automation.

Bustarde: If we frame Twitter (and social media in general) in the context of real world conversations, it becomes a little easier to understand how we should measure successes or failures. You want to know a few things about how people talk about you in the real world. Ideally, you want to know that they’re talking about you to begin with. Once you know that they’re talking about you, you want to know what they’re saying and how much they’re talking about you. If they’re getting some piece of information wrong about you, you want to make sure that they get it right. If they’re complimenting you, you want to thank them. If they want to ask you a question, you want to answer it. When we look at it that way, we realize that success can happen at a bunch of different levels. Do we want to know if we’re successful at getting people to talk about us? Go ahead and measure the number of mentions. Are we successful at curbing negative sentiment? Well, that’s a trickier question. In the context of a real world conversation, if we overhear somebody saying something negative about us, we don’t (typically) leave the room and go write a press release. We respond and have that conversation about what we did to upset the other person. What could we do better? Trying to “measure” that process almost wastes time that should be spent actually talking to our not-so-happy customer. With that understanding, in the face of negative sentiment, it is much more straightforward and useful to hold yourself accountable to a success measurement like “time to respond” instead of some difficult-to-measure metric like “sentiment.”

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Are there certain approaches that seem to work better for different media? For instance, if you’re a new brand trying to create awareness at any cost, does getting Charlie Sheen to tweet for you make sense? But how do you go about it if you’re already well known and want to change the way people think about you?

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Bustarde: First off, if you got Charlie Sheen to do anything for you, you are working in the realm of warlocks and tiger blood — stuff well beyond traditional analytics. That said, the marketing person in me likes the idea of doing something to get yourself noticed. The crisis management person of me cringes at the thought of “at any cost.” If we really buy into the idea that social media is just a series of conversations scaled up to an almost-ridiculous level, we can go about changing perceptions by understanding how people are talking about us now and how we’d like for them to talk about us. For some brands expanding within the same vertical — say, a clothing brand branching out into shoes — this might be just a new topic that our social media presence touches on. For a brand undergoing a more drastic change in terms of new vertical or shifting perception, we may consider starting a whole new social media persona complete with a new Twitter presence, Facebook presence and so on to really distinguish it from what people used to think.

Hofstetter: The approach to social media marketing is the same that it would be for any marketing, except in this case people talk back at scale. How you align your brand in social media — and who you align with — would go through the same considerations as you would for any other marketing mechanism.

Rosenberg: The potential speed of the content spread may be alluring to some less risk-averse marketers. Twitter has the power to ignite fast content sharing, while more closed networks may make the recommendation of content seem more trusted and therefore worth spending time with.

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A lot of Facebook programs require you to like the brand, which seems a bit disingenuous. Would it be better if Facebook provided another way for consumers to note their interaction with the brand without “liking” it, or does “liking” work pretty well?

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Rosenberg: It depends on the value exchange. Achieving a higher level of status or entitlements may be worth it for some consumers assuming those levels or opportunities are really perceived as valuable. Consumers always have a choice, so the pressure is really on the marketers and their brands to over deliver on the value exchange.

Bustarde: Even if there were a way for customers to note interaction with a brand, marketers would (and probably should) make the effort to get people to “like” the brand. The disingenuous part is for a marketer to really believe that these people truly “like” your brand. You can pay somebody to pretend to be your friend, but that’s not to say they’ll be there when you really need them.

Hofstetter: “Liking” is a relatively low barrier, so if you communicate value up front and make it clearbefore they become a fan, they'll oblige. Getting them in the door is just the first step, though. Convincing them to stick around is harder. Getting them to engage and share is even harder. A recent study showed many reasons why people “unlike” brands, and it's largely tied to overmessaging and lack of relevance. Twitter lets you create lists of people or brands without having to follow them. This way, you get information without expressing a public affinity.

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Do clients generally come to you with stated goals for a given social media campaign or do you have to educate them? I know it probably varies, but what’s the primary response right now?

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Hofstetter: Relative to other forms of media, social media is still new for brand marketers. They know it can help solve their business problems, but some still get distracted by the bright shiny objects — objectives tied to large fans, huge followings and viral apps — so it's up to people like us to demonstrate how this medium can be used to help them based on their brand, their consumer, the competitive environment and the nature of the medium. Sometimes that is a large number of fans because it's clearly aligned with their objectives and they have the right brands and programs for it, and we do that every day for many brands.

Rosenberg: They have goals in mind and it's important that we demonstrate that there are real, meaningful connections between what we can achieve in social media and what they consider traditional goals. Making those attributions is critical so that you can set the stage for proper measurement and prove success when you achieve it.

Bustarde: The most common goal is probably the most honest goal as well: Use social media to drive awareness of my campaign. The part that needs education is the strategic question: How do we do that? The trick then is in demonstrating that social media is successful at building awareness. Do we just look at web analytics numbers like referrals from social media? Well that’s only part of the story. The rest of the story is where clients usually have more challenging questions.

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How do you see social media measurement evolving? Will there be a standard way to measure it soon?

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Hofstetter: Albert Einstein once said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." There is tons of data in social media — and in digital in general — and it's up to us to make sure that what we're counting is aligned with solving the business challenge. The trick with social media measurement is not to get wrapped around the axle trying to compare social media reach with GRPs, but developing proxies for brand measurement that are more aligned with objectives and how these specific programs actually help the business. We’re breaking new ground daily, and benchmarking becomes a challenge when you have nothing to benchmark against because you're officially the standard. Our job is to make sure that we're setting KPIs that are aligned with objectives at the outset of the program and coming up with metrics that are aligned with those KPIs and tracking success from there.

Rosenberg: There are some tried and true standards that need not be thrown away. It's possible to derive multiple attributions from the same metrics. For example, commenting on a Facebook post can be attributed to awareness as well as, potentially, purchase intent if the post was directly correlated to a product offering. There will be an introduction of standards over time, but for now making these attributions will be the right steps to marry some of the older models with the new ones.

Bustarde: In the relative short term, I see social media measurement evolving into more distinct practices. Depending on who you ask, social media measurement could mean anything from PR and reputation management to Twitter reports to broad “engagement” measurement to looking at Facebook Insights day to day. In truth, all of those things should inform a social media measurement program, but at the same time, if we’re talking standardization, it’s a lot of work to get it all under one umbrella.

At a much higher level, I see social media measurement (and web analytics in general) gravitating towards standards that businesses can really get behind. Things like CPM can be applied to social media, but it’s been the extra promise of being able to measure things like sentiment and share of voice that have kept the really smart people from integrating very basic marketing needs in a truly meaningful way. If my message goes out on a TV commercial, a radio spot and my social media presence, we currently have very rough ways of measuring success on two of the platforms (TV and radio) and a hundred and one ways of measuring success on social media. Still, TV and radio measurement tie smoothly to things like ROI and deciding on budgets for a marketing spend and for whatever reason the simpler (and less accurate) measurements end up being more trusted. Social media will get there soon enough.

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Series Supported by IDG


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The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. With the explosion of mobile devices, advertising dollars will begin to shift to mobile for tech marketers this year. Ad networks, ad exchanges and real-time bidding significantly expand marketing options and underscore the importance of data. IDG Global Solutions President Matt Yorke explains why these trends should not be ignored. Read more.

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More About: 360i, digitaria, facebook, JWT, Modern Media Agency Series, ROI, social media, twitter

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Beginning at 2:30 p.m. and running until 11:00 p.m., the Discovery Communications cable network will air all eight episodes of the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant series. In primetime (8:00pm), the channel will also feature tweets from viewers who use the hashtag #AnIdiotAbroad at the bottom of the screen.

An Idiot Abroad is the most successful show in the channel’s history. TV Guide notes that the show has increased the network’s performance in its time frame by 191% in the key 18 to 49 age demographic. In the show, Gervais and Merchant (The Office, Extras) send their friend Karl Pilkington on a trip around the world. Gervais has described Pilkington as a “real-life Homer Simpson” and the description is apt. The program is laugh-out-loud funny and irreverent.

Discovery Communications tells us that they are going to use the Twitter promotion with An Idiot Abroad to see if there is a definitive correlation between on-air Twitter promotions and Twitter activity. Likewise, the company will be looking to see what impact — if any — the promotion has on ratings and audience retention.

More television networks are actively embracing social media as a way to drive promotion and audience engagement. We look forward to seeing the results from the Science Channel’s experiment.

More About: an idiot abroad, science channel, television, twitter

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But the day when mere mortals master the task might be getting closer. ActiveInbox, a Gmail plugin five years in the making, launched a product this week that organizes emails into manageable projects and tasks.

CEO Andy Mitchell based the product on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) productivity philosophy, which aims to “transform personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity.” Its first iterations were hence named GTDGmail and (after a letter from Google’s legal team) GTDEmail.

The first ActiveInbox product is a free plugin for Firefox and Chrome that adds a to-do list and project manager to the left sidebar of Gmail. Users can add items to the list using a task bar that appears at the top of each email. They can mark e-mails as “action,” “waiting on,” or “some day” and add them to a project, similar to the way that Gmail labels work. The plugin also adds new shortcuts, like the ability to look up previous email conversations by simply right-clicking a contact and a button that simultaneously archives a conversation and sends a reply.

ActiveInbox’s paid version, which costs $25 per year, includes the option to tack notes to emails and attach deadlines to messages. The latter option helps keep track of daily and upcoming tasks in the to-do sidebar.

“It’s actually a completely different way at looking at email,” Mitchell says. “What we’re doing is emails as tasks between you and your colleagues.”

Until 2009, he had been running the inbox as a side project while working with another startup. After more than 700 people donated $20,000 to the project, he decided to start working on the project full time.

Through various beta versions of the product, the startup already has collected about 15,000 users, 1,500 of them paying customers.

More About: ActiveInbox, email, email management, gmail, GTDEmail, GTDGmail

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The app is designed to help users solicit and give real-time feedback to Fashism’s fashion-conscious community on the go. Many users often snap photos of themselves before heading out to school or work, or while trying on clothes in a dressing room, and upload them to Fashism with their iPhones. Users can browse all looks by recency, as well as follow (and be followed by) specific users.

The New York-based startup has cleaned up the app’s interface and added several new features. The app now takes advantage of the iPhone’s GPS capabilities to help users explore looks captured in nearby stores, creating a portable catalog of sorts. Users can do this by browsing a list of nearby locations, selecting pins on a map, or through an augmented reality feature that, in theory, should let users explore uploaded looks in nearby stores by rotating their phones 360 degrees.

In tests, the augmented reality feature was very glitchy; the app also crashed repeatedly when I tried to follow other users (another new feature). Otherwise, the app was functional and largely user-friendly.

In future app updates, I’d like to see a few things:

• The integration of the first few comments directly into the newfeed, a la Instagram. At present, users have to click through to view comments.
• The ability to find out which of my friends are already on Fashism by connecting the app to my Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts.
• The option to tab between updates from everyone, updates only from people I’m following, and updates from nearby users in my newsfeed.
• The ability to edit the text that accompanies uploads cross-shared to Facebook and Twitter. Currently, all tweets are prefaced with the words “Fashion Emergency,” (see below) which my followers don’t particularly appreciate.
• The ability to share uploads to Tumblr. Currently, users can only share uploads to Fashism, Facebook and Twitter.
• The option to share uploads privately with a few friends (something competitor Pose enables seamlessly), rather than the entire Fashism network.

In sum, the update brings a lot of great features to an already strong — and certainly very fun to use — app, but some tweaks are necessary.

More About: fashion, fashism, pose

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On April 18 at 8:30 p.m. EDT, the General Motors brand plans to simultaneously reveal the new model at the Shanghai Auto Show and on Chevrolet’s Facebook Page. The reveal will also be streamed to iPads and iPhones.

During the introduction, Chevrolet is directing consumers to ask questions about the car via Twitter using the hashtag #MalibuReveal. Members of the Chevy team will be on hand to answer those queries. Chevy is also offering a sneak peak at the redesigned Malibu on its website today.

The effort is just the latest social media outreach campaign for GM, which hired New York agency Big Fuel to handle all its social media marketing late last year. Since then, GM and Big Fuel have dabbled in location-based services for a Buick promotion and pre-released its Super Bowl spots on Facebook and YouTube before the big game.

If the idea sounds familiar, you may recall that Ford did the same for its 2011 Explorer last July.

More About: advertising, Big Fuel, chevrolet, facebook, ford, GM, Malibu, MARKETING

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