Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Facebook and their meteoric rise to the lofty realm of social network kingpins have decided to opt-out of Google’s Friend Connect, a program that would allow users from different social networks to aggregate their info on different sites across the web.

Facebook users are expressing anger, and the problem was stated quite thoughtfully by Techcrunch’s Steve Gillmor: “If Facebook insists on freezing our data as a condition of using their service, the company is essentially recommending we go elsewhere.”
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While this may be a blog about social media, search engine marketing, etc., I couldn’t help but notice today the dominant position Nintendo and their Wii and DS have taken in the battle against more upscale machines like the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, proving that Nintendo’s decision to maintain their niche was a brilliant one.

When the Wii came out around the same time as the other machines, many expected the high-powered X-Box 360 and Blu-Ray capable Playstation 3 would knock the gimmicky-looking Wii out of the water.
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Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider wrote an article today about the potential of the Amazon Kindle to reach iPod-like status and become one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s revenue going forward.

While the current Kindle is not much to look at and is rather overpriced, it’s winning over skeptics who initially thought it wouldn’t work. Attributes like the ease of downloading books and the relatively low price of the books that are downloaded are convincing people that this could really be a phenomenon in the making.

Of course, like early versions of the iPod, people are waiting to see what the next generation Kindle looks like, and how much use early adopters get out of the product. But a healthy number of sales combined with an iTunes-like purchasing model could bring in as much as $750 million a year to Amazon by 2010, according to Mark Mahaney of Citi.
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In the largest anti-spam judgment of all time, “Spam King” Sanford Wallace and partner Walter Rines owe MySpace $230 million for their illegal spam practices on the social networking site after failing to show up for a Los Angeles court hearing.

The pair were prosecuted based on the 2003 federal CAN-SPAM law, which entitles companies $100 for each spam email sent, and the number is tripled if it is done “knowingly and willfully.”
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comScore is reporting that Yahoo Buzz is now receiving more traffic than Digg, and that their traffic is more diverse and thus more attractive to advertisers.

Digg is still doing fine, and much of the success of Yahoo Buzz can be linked to the massive amount of traffic that Yahoo brings in. All Yahoo launches get that added momentum of being promoted by the traffic giant that is Yahoo.com. A lot of Yahoo Buzz’ traffic is probably casual (the most buzzed story right now has about 100 votes, compared to Digg’s 4000+), but it’s traffic nonetheless.

Digg’s metrics give credence to its reputation as attracting young male geeks. While Digg users are 60% male, Yahoo Buzz attracts slightly more females than males. Digg users also have a reputation of not clicking on any ads. The added attraction of possibly being featured on the front page of Yahoo is also drawing attention from publishers.
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