Twitter’s Social Graph Is About To Get Pumped Up. “Who To Follow” Is Social Steroids

Last week, Twitter started testing out a “Who to follow” feature. Basically, it’s a recommendation engine for who you should follow, similar to ones that Facebook and others use. At the time, I noted it was a good idea and should bulk up their social graph. But today I actually got the feature activated on my account — I believe I vastly understated what this feature could mean.

The main way most users will interact with this new feature is in the sidebar. There, right below your tweet stats, you’ll see the two users that Twitter is suggesting that you might like to follow. How do they determine this? If you click the “view all” link (or go to the Find People area) you’ll notice this is all based on the people you’re already connected and who they follow. Again, this is like the feature Facebook has.

How SEO companies Improve Page Ranking in Google?

• Social Media Bowling.  Get content on high-profile social media entities to "knock-out" out others on SERPs on certain keywords
• Choosing the right content/topics - High KEI
• Social Media Bowling.  Get content on high-profile social media entities to "knock-out" out others on SERPs on certain keywords
• Choosing the right content/topics - High KEI.  Or in other words, not focusing on the head-terms, nor the long-tail, but somewhere in the fat-middle.
• PR/Media - (link-backs from authoritative sources)
• Developing user generated content schemes/mechanics that is relevant and have value-add (Q&A systems, "knowledgebase", digg-like features, comment moderating/monitoring, forums, user-profiles, etc) 
• Internal cross-linking keywords to spread Page rank

The Google design, turned up a notch

This week we introduced our latest update to search, and I wanted to share a bit of our thinking on the design team. In short, we tried to take all the things we strive for at Google and make them better: powerful technology, snappy results, simplicity and a fun and quirky personality. Our goal was to take a design known by millions of people and make it better. As a designer, it’s hard to think of a more exciting challenge.

During our process we focused on people’s rising expectations for search. As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialized search tools to match. To keep pace with rapid change online, we have teams of engineers working across Google to develop new ways to present and refine search results. Our central challenge with our latest redesign was to figure out how to squeeze all these tools and technologies into a single page.

Twitter is the Most Popular Social Sharing Option

Twitter is the most popular social sharing option on the 100 top blogs in the blogosphere. So says a recent report from Royal Pingdom that studied how common dedicated buttons, for different means of sharing web content, were on top blogs. The study found that dedicated Twitter buttons existed on 66 of the top 100 blogs (as per Technorati’s Top 100 list). Facebook buttons were only on 58 blogs, and Digg only on 43. Poor old Google Buzz is at the bottom of sharing choices.

Google Xistence Offers to Live Your Life For You [PARODY]

It’s fake but funny: Google Xistence is a new type of social aggregator whose goal is to “live your life for you.” It does this through “randomly generated status updates, picture uploads and tweets,” so you can spend your real life doing more of exactly what you secretly want to do: playing World of Warcraft and Tower Defense.

The prank site’s spoof YouTube instructional video is below, letting you know that Xistence “even sends you weekly e-mails, so you know what happened in your real life, should anyone ask.” The tagline leaves us with, “Because life is too short for social interaction.”

Free Microsoft SEO Toolkit Optimized for Google, Bing, Yahoo

Looking for a free search engine optimization toolkit tailored to all the major search engines? Than look no further than Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit, which is designed to allow webmasters and web administrators to adapt their sites to not just Bing, but also Google and Yahoo. In fact, the promise from the Redmond company is that its free SEO toolkit is optimized for Bing, Yahoo and Google. In all fairness, users have already been able to read as well as download the SEO toolkit from Microsoft right here on Softpedia.

Google Gets 72% of Searches in December 2009 (Hitwise)

Following up Nielsen search market share data, Hitwise has also released their search metrics for December 2009. And just like Nielsen’s stats, Google is also leading the pack, getting 72.5% of all searches conducted in the U.S. during the said period. This is equivalent to 1% growth rate from November 2009.

Google Doesn’t Want Searchers To Find SEOs & Web Designers

If you go to Google.com and type “hamburgers,” “shoes,” “candy,” “grills,” “beer,” and hundreds of other terms of ambiguous local intent, Google will almost always show you local results on a map that’s tied to your IP address.

But type in “seo,” “seo company,” “web design company” and several terms related to these two types of businesses — heck, go ahead and specifically add in a city name like “seattle” or “houston” or wherever, and even include the state abbreviation like “wa” or “tx” — and Google will almost never show you local results on a map.

FeedBurner Socialize: Add Your Feed to Twitter

If you've used TwitterFeed to post updates from a blog to your Twitter account, you'll like FeedBurner Socialize. It's a new FeedBurner feature that distributes the content from a feed on Twitter.

"To get started, go to the Socialize service on FeedBurner's Publicize tab and add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your feed. You can take the default settings and click [Save] to start socializing immediately, or use the options we offer to customize exactly which feed items are sent to Twitter and how exactly you would like them to look. The next time you post a new item to your feed it will be sent to Twitter," mentions FeedBurner's blog.

SEO Christmas Wishlist : Perfect Presents for an SEO

Every year as the holiday shopping season ramps up, people ask me the same question over and over again “What do you want for Christmas this year?”

I consider myself a pretty simple fellow, and always have a difficult time answering this question for a couple of reasons : one because I’m not used to getting gifts, and two because most of the gifts I receive I never use, and they end up in my misfit toy chest, packed away somewhere with my mini-DVD camcorder, PSP, iPod Shuffle, collection of hats too small for my enormous head and other stuff I just do not use
or is outdated.

Then I think about the stuff I really want, like the new Rolls Royce Ghost or a HAL Robot Suit, and as those items are just way too over the top, I keep my mouth shut, go into “aww shucks” mode, and end up with a giftcard or something.