Web News & Views Roundup #2

Wow, has been a busy week for me here. It’s a holiday here as well (Hannuka in Israel). With the kids at home, I just don’t have enough time to do everything that I need to be doing. Still, having dedicated a couple of hours this morning to going over the webmasters headlines service (aka my Google Reader), I’ll try and share some of the more important ones here.

Facebook To Publish User Updates To Twitter This Week – After trying to get users to get more of their info open to the public, Facebook now wants to help you tweet your updates.

URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook – Google now has its own URL shortening service called Goo.gl. It currently works only from the Google toolbar and through Feedburner. Looks like Facebook is going to launch a similar service of its own real soon.

Google Wants You To Give Chrome For Christmas – a neat little application by Google that lets you virtually wrap a link to download Chrome. Of course, Chrome is free, so basically, a cute marketing trick and not much more. Still, I think it’s cute enough for me to use.

Predictions For The Changing Local Search Landscape In 2010 – I really suck at operating crystal balls, but I like reading other people’s predictions. This one is by Neg Norton, President of the Yellow Pages Association (YPA), a trade association that advocates on behalf of a print and electronic Yellow Pages industry.

Post to WordPress from Tweetie and Other Twitter Apps – Haven’t tried Tweetie myself but heard a lot of good things about it from people who use it regularly. What I find interesting is that people are encouraged to post tweet-long messages on their blogs. I wonder if it’ll catch up?

Ad policies — the year in review – I haven’t used adwords in years, but I thought this article might be of interest to those who do – so including it in this roundup.

Two new features enhance search beyond the results page – this could effect the way your Google traffic sees your page and where it gets to. Worth a read, especially if you’re doing affiliate marketing.

Brace yourself for the real-time Web – a very good concise review of real time web searches – why and how.

That’s it for today – hope you find it useful and if you do – give me a thumbs up on Blog Engage, will ya?

I’ll be resuming normal blogging, hopefully, next week when this holiday is over. Happy Holidays everyone!