• a cleaner simple look
• dozens of new themes including some by Shepard Fairey’s Studio One
• the ability to create a own custom header
• easier navigation
• profile designs carry over to on photo, video and other pages

For musicians. MySpace has increased the total number of songs that can be uploaded to 25. So far, more than 4 million users have upgraded their profiles. Lady Antebellum, Silversun Pickups, Outkast, Thirty Seconds to Mars and Colbie Caillat we’re named as examples by a MySpace spokesperson.

click on image to enlarge

Users can upgrade here.

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“This is a first in a series of changes that you’ll see designed to simplify the organization and display of content to benefit our users,” a MySpace spokeperson told Hypebot. MySpace has been struggling to retain users even as Facebook soars; and rapid innovation is their best chance to reverse thet trend.

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New features on the user home page include:

• A wider activity stream: The stream now spans the first two columns, featuring shared content and status updates from friends across their network.
• My Stuff and Recommendations: A new “My Stuff” module gives offers quick access to photos, videos and music from the homepage; and recommendations (Featured Games, People You May Know, and Recommended Events) have been combined into a single “Recommendations” module.
• New alerts system and address book importer: The new alerts system collects similar alerts and repositions them in a more visible and persistent location, enabling users to browse and interact with their alerts without ever leaving the UHP. A new version of the address book importer will help users find and connect with friends more easily.

What do you think of Myspace and the new front page?

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Dave’s Answer:

In its quest to be all things to every user, Facebook has again tweaked its interface, adding a feature that Yahoo Answers has had for eons, that Google’s experimented with variously, that’s been part of LinkedIn for a while, and that’s obviously near and dear to my heart with Ask Dave Taylor: the ability to ask your followers and fans a question.

On Facebook, it’s called “Ask Question”, ingeniously enough, and it’s actually pretty neat how they’ve integrated it into the newsfeed and interface, though I’m sure not everyone agrees. Maybe we should ask them!

More seriously, I will also say that in the week or two since the feature was released, I haven’t seen a single question show up in my news, so perhaps it’s not getting the widespread adoption that the Facebook team were hoping?

Anyway, on your main page, instead of the status box ready for input, there’s now a little strip of links along the top, one of which is “Ask Question”:

You can see here that I’ve clicked on “Ask Question” and typed in what I believe is a perfectly reasonable question (at least if you’ve seen the daft film Monty Python and the Holy Grail). To submit the question, I click on the “Ask Question” button and, since it’s the first time I’ve asked a question…

Yeah, yeah, I’m good with this. I click on “Ask Question” and it offers the ability for me to add photos, add a further description, even turn it into a poll (that’s cool!). I can also add topics, which are presumably keywords, but I’ll skip it all and just choose “Done”.

Now in my newsfeed – and presumably that of everyone I’m friends with – this shows up:

A short time later my friend Steve pops up with the correct answer:

Notice here that I can vote the answer helpful / not helpful by clicking on the buttons. Nice. In fact, I like Q&A systems that let you vote on the value of an answer, so I have to say that Facebook took its time and did a very nice job implementing the Ask Question feature. Now the real question: is anyone going to use it?

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While I don’t necessarily believe in the “value” of the page calculated by this tool per se, it is a handy way to put a number to a page based on that page’s activity—looking at both post volume and the reaction to those posts. When you analyze the data this way, only three of the largest pages stay in the top 50. (Actually, it’s 51, as I inadvertently left Starburst off the Top 50 list. They are included here.) Here’s the list.

Key findings

As you can see, the list reorders dramatically. Some key findings:

• Passion products (like Oreos, Slurpees and Converse) may be able to grow fan bases quickly, but that does not automatically translate into page value;
• The pages with the highest value posted the most. While this isn’t surprising, it shows the effort required;

• All 5 of the top 5 most valuable pages had posts on Sunday and each one has custom tabs;
• While each of the top 5 have custom tabs, only 3 of the top 5 have set a tab other than the wall as the landing tab. This surprised me a bit.

• Each of the bottom 5 posted quite infrequently, except McDonalds.

• McDonalds (in the bottom 5) had seemingly random posts, each of which links to a different burger.

Value by fan

When you sort by dollar value per fan, the top 50 turns practically upside down. Here are the top 10 by that metric, with their rank by fan count in parenthesis:

1. Xbox, $7.08 (51)
2. Dr. Pepper, $7.04 (30)
3. Monster Energy, $5.30 (43)
4. adidas Originals, $4.57 (14)
5. Walt Disney World, $4.50, (46)
6. Breast Cancer Awareness, $4.28 (48)
7. iTunes, $3.31 (10)
8. YouTube, $3.27 (4)
9. H&M, $3.27 (24)
10. Playstation, $2.98, (49)

Xbox barely made the list in terms of size, coming in at 50th 51st, but they’re motivating their base better than anyone else. Dr. Pepper shares a strange collection of very product-centric updates with their fans, but the fans love them. And adidas Originals has both a partnership with Snoop Dog on their page and exclusive product announcements—a good mix of celebrity and insider info.

Real winners

The real winners on this list, then, are the pages that combine both high fan count and high value, as they are doing the best job of converting those fans into action. (Of course, we don’t have insight into the impact this is having on their business objectives, but if you can consistently motivate your fans, I have to think your opportunity to impact your business is enhanced.)

From that angle, the pages that have impressed me so far are:

• YouTube (#4 in size, #1 in value, #8 in value/fan)
• Skittles (#5 in size, #6 in value, #14 in value/fan)
• iTunes (#10 in size, #4 in value, #7 in value/fan)
• Facebook (#1 in size, #2 in value, #19 in value/fan)
• Victoria’s Secret (#9 in size, #11 in value, #18 in value/fan)

Of all of these, I’m most impressed with Skittles. YouTube, iTunes and Facebook have the advantage of a near limitless supply of content. Victoria’s Secret has, well, other advantages. But Skittles does not.

Little blobs of coated sugar, they got heckled a bit for their Skittles.com social takeover in early 2009. But it’s clear from this that they have not taken those fans for granted. They’ve found a way to keep them entertained.

Not the 50 most valuable

Keep in mind, this is a rank of the 50 largest branded Facebook pages, by value. It’s not the 50 most valuable branded Facebook pages. If it were, it would look a lot different, but it would require analyzing hundreds more pages individually.

For example, one of our clients, Windows, has 626,197 fans (as of Sunday, 7/11) and a value of $2,296,080. That would rank it 7th in value per fan ($3.67) and 28th in total value. But since it’s not big enough to be on the current Top 50 list, it’s also not on the “value” list. (But I think we’ll let them know nevertheless.)

What surprised you when you saw how the Top 50 re-ranked by value?

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Well in the book you will find all kind of knowledge and the guidelines regarding the writing styles that are prevailing in the present day world and are usually adopted by big online content writers. From the content page, it is understood that the book is all about the basic standards of writing styles and guidelines used in for web.

In the book, yahoo has recommended some points about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). They have stressed on the importance of keyword research in order to know the volume of the traffic on the web and with regard to this, they have advised :

• “Search engines, to understand what the subject of a page is, look for keywords throughout that page, including at the top (the introduction) and the bottom (the conclusion). But don’t just shove keywords into the top or the bottom of your page distribute them evenly throughout.”
• “To a search engine, good writing means using variations of your keywords, including those with different endings.”
• “Like a muffin with the right amount of blueberries, it [the page] should have juicy keywords distributed evenly throughout, but not so many that they overwhelm the whole.”
• “Strategically seed your copy with keywords”

Despite having so many features, experts have said that the book contains no such feature that could make it distinguished or unique in itself. Because there number of books and manuals available that have proved better in the past times and are followed even today. So to what extent,Yahoo’s style guide would serve the needy people is still uncertain.

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Tweetshare Tweetshare as the site says is the Facebook fan page taken to the next level. Certainly it moves beyond Facebook to blogs, YouTube and so on where users can share content and receive feedback on their work by creating Twitter Pages around their content or brand. It works in a very simple way.

Tweetshare turns every comment about your content into a tagged Tweet that is shared with the Twitter community, virally promoting your content.   Tweetshare thus integrates your content directly into the Twitter stream.

ComTweets is like Linkedin in Twitter. More precisely, it is a community for businesses on Twitter where companies and organizations come together under one hood to interact and communicate amongst the coworkers. Sign in with your company email address and soon you will be connected to your co-employees. You may then share messages, comment on other’s posts, also interact with customers and use the tool for marketing your brand or products.

TheCadmus Cadmus gives relevance the prime spot in its service model. To elaborate, Cadmus is a real time service that can be used to manage the Twitter stream (also Friendfeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you logged in to your account. It therefore removes the clutter of the old posts clogging up the streams and also draws out the trending topics that are hot amongst the people you follow keeping you updated all the time eliminating the chances of missing out any conversation.

Twaitter One of the most widely used Twitter apps for business is used by companies to promote their products and interact with their customers. With a number of features like tweet calendar, managing multiple accounts through Ping.fm integration, forming groups, multi-account management and so on, TwAitter is a potential player in the business app market. They even offer a translator to post tweets in any language of your choice.

Twitterfeed Almost all of us are well aware of this app, as TwitterFeed offers the most seamless way of automatically managing the feeds from your website posting them directly to social networks. It also keeps track of these feeds providing real time stats to analyze the performance of your Twitter marketing.

Twitterlive Twitterlive falls along the along same lines as Twitterfeed and allows users to post the feeds automatically to Twitter, track the clicks and collect real-time traffic data.

SpokenTwit Why write updates when you can speak and tweet? That’s exactly what this Twitter app allows users to do. All you need to do is register your phone number that will be used for tweeting and chirp around. The spoken tweets will display in your twitter stream.

Nsyght This app allows users to aggregate, share, and search their twittersocial graph in real time. Nsyght also supports threaded discussions, email alerts, inline video and photo display, and support for other services like Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Vimeo, Delicous, and Last.fm.

Buzzom Buzzom is a one stop solution for all your needs giving the best of features to manage your Twitter account in the most efficient way. Finding people from the gigantic list of Twitter users could have never been made so seamless. Buzzom is the only known Twitter app to offer people search based follow. Automatically grow your network by following the people that match your interests, follow back those who follow you or flush ones who don’t.

The premium version takes the Twitter experience a step ahead by allowing users to view their twitter performance through stats, scheduling tweets to stay active on Twitter even when they are not available, managing the direct messages and spam easily and posting updates to different social networks from one place. 

A very new feature of the brand management gives businesses an opportunity to launch their Twitter campaigns and monitor their performance amongst their target audience.

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To see for yourself, go on over to Google and search for something like this:

site:facebook.com “Do you want to stop receiving Facebook emails”

Or, you can simply go to Google.com and search for the page itself:
site:www.facebook.com/o.php

Google is not alone in indexing personal email addresses of Facebook users. In fact, Yahoo! Site Explorer reveals over 5700 email addresses:

Bing.com, on the other hand, has been very slow at indexing these web pages, and that’s probably due to the fact that Microsoft has been very slow at indexing ANY web page on the internet. In fact, there are websites that are actually complaining about the fact that Bing has not indexed their entire website. (For those of you who want their pages indexed more quickly by Bing, I recommend that you start getting more links to your web pages, the deep links).

I have yet to figure out exactly how the search engines are indexing these web pages, as they actually contain people’s personal email addresses. If this were a really bad problem, there would be a lot more than 5000 email addresses from Facebook being indexed in the search engines. We already know that there are a lot more than 5000 Facebook users, so it doesn’t seem to be a really big issue. There are, though, a few ways that the search engines could be picking up on this:

- A Facebook application gone awry. Perhaps these users all have a certain common Facebook application that they’re using that is causing this data to be indexed. Perhaps the URLs are being recorded somewhere, on another server, and the search engines have started indexing those URLs.

- There’s some issue with the real-time feed data that is causing Google and Yahoo! to index those URLs. I have seen this happen before with other sites like Twitter. My main Twitter ID, @bhartzer, for a while had a source code (parameters) associated with it. I had a feeling Google was picking it up somehow, but couldn’t narrow down exactly where they were picking up the URL. It’s just recently that a search for “bhartzer” on Google has been showing http://www.twitter.com/bhartzer

So, what can you do to combat issues like this?
One of the best things you can do is start using a social media monitoring tool to start tracking mentions of you, your company, and your brand online. If there’s an issue like this, if you’ve set up a tracking tool properly, you will be notified if your brand, your company name, your domain name, or even your email address shows up.

You can also set up a Google alert for something like “billhartzer.com”. Whenever that’s mentioned, and if there is a new mention of it, most likely you’ll be notified. Setting up the alert to track the ‘keyword’ your domain name without the www part of it will most likely help in notifying you in the event that your email address shows up online. Certainly that won’t work for “@gmail.com” or other generic emails, but you get my point.

Certainly, Facebook has been plaugued by all sorts of privacy issues, and the fact that email addresses from an opt out web page on their own website are being indexed is not a good thing. ALL Facebook had to do was to make sure that their “opt out” page, the one that contains email addresses, isn’t allowed to be indexed by the search engines.

A hat tip goes out to Cory Watilo for finding this gem.

Update: June 4, 2010 – Apparently Facebook has taken care of this issue. The way they did it, though, was to add a directive in their robots.txt file to disallow the search engines from spidering the o.php file like this:

Disallow: /o.php

Apparently, this was enough, as both Yahoo! and Google have stop indexing that file and they have stopped indexing the o.php file.

Via Google Buzz, I have found an “official” response by Matt Cutts who posted it here. He says that they found those email addresses by crawling publicly-available web pages:

We found those pages by crawling normal links on public web pages. It also would have been nice if the author of that blog post had asked us before claiming that the “only way” Google could have possibly found pages was by following links in emails. We could have saved him the trouble of making up a new conspiracy theory.

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Why should the music industry care? Just as Apples iTunes App Store opened up new avenues to  deliver and monetize music, the Chrome Web Store will offers a new opportunity to reach a much larger set of potential customers – anyone with a computer or web enabled device.

For example, an artist or label could sell a web app with music plus bonus content. Another could sell access to a complete audio and video catalog or a regularly updated stream of content.  The possibilities are endless. Google has just provided a music bigger sandbox to experiment in and a much clearer path to monetization.

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