Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Barack Obama’s support online is the stuff of legend, and most of it is positive. His netroots fundraising efforts have resulted in his campaign being the richest in history, and the mature realization of the Howard Dean phenomenon. His Internet advertising far outpaces his rivals, and he is the favorite amongst much of the Internet upper-crust. His site’s social network does a fantastic job of keeping his supporters connected and his campaigns overall grasp of the technology available far outpaces his rival, John McCain.

However, rumors are swirling that some of his supporters may be abusing their technological advantage. Several anti-Obama blogs, many of them by Hillary Clinton supporters, have been shut down on Google’s Blogger network after being identified as spam.

But there is no concrete evidence of foul play, and Google’s explanation for the shutdown scotches speculation by the conspiracy theorists.
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While Google is getting accustomed to being beaten in the search engine battles raging in China and Korea, Russia is proving to be a difficult market as well.

Russia’s biggest search engine is Yandex, and while Google is increasing its share at a rapid rate of speed, Yandex currently holds 44% of the market share in Russia, which is more than ten points ahead of Google. Yandex also has some share in other European countries like the Ukraine, making it the second biggest search engine on the continent.
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While Twitter has been functional for a pretty long while, for almost a week, users have been unable to reply directly to tweets. Understandably, non-functionality of this feature has caused yet more Twitter users to abandon it and move on to Friendfeed.

As Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reports, Twitter’s latest attempt at keeping its service up is to disable certain features. This way, they are able to maintain the ability of users to send and receive tweets, but at the expense of tools that compose integral parts of the service.

Arrington is dead-on when he points out that disabling replies is just about the worst move Twitter could make. Cutting out the ability to coalesce long, spontaneous conversations on Twitter is driving a lot of users, Arrington included, to the conversation feature on Friendfeed.
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Facebook has a problem.

Grammar geeks will have noticed that Facebook has a lot of made up words in its system, such as “themself” and moments where it has to say “Larry has changed their profile.”

A lot of this comes from people not specifying their gender in their profiles, and this is creating quite a significant headache for Facebook’s translators.

With Facebook now the world’s number one social network, and with expansion to Russia and China among other nations part of the reach, language difficulties are popping up as one of the obstacles to a more united Facebook. In languages like French, where gender is important in determining what words to use, some rather garbled looking results are popping out.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a plan that will open up top-level domain names to just about anything possible–so long as you’re willing to pay the price.

Early estimates put the price tag for the TLD’s at anywhere between $100,000 and $500,000, which means the .francis domain will be available for a good time yet to come.
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