Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Microsoft’s new ad push is called the “Mojave Experiment,” and the point is this: due to bad word of mouth, people have poor thoughts about Windows Vista, but when they actually use it (under a different name, Mojave) they think it’s God’s gift to operating systems.

It is true that Vista (which I admit I also have a limited, but largely positive, experience with) gets railed on by a lot of people who aren’t sure why it’s so terrible. But there is a reason for this: when Vista was released and people upgraded their computers from XP, stuff quit working. Hardware, games, everything: kaput.
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China’s government has backtracked on an earlier pledge that journalists would have unfettered Internet access free of censorship by state authorities during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Now, that promise is gone and journalists will be prevented from accessing any information about the occupation of Tibet, Taiwan independence, the Tiananmen Square protests, and other sources of information deemed subversive by Chinese leadership.

China is not doing itself any favors with their explanations for the blockage: initially, a government spokesman blamed the problems on site hosts. Now, they are acknowledging the problem has nothing to do with hosting or technical issues.
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Scrabulous, the Facebook app that has over 500,000 users, has been shut down today in the US and Canada by the Indian brothers that created it. Big, evil Hasbro has put the drop on them and now it’s game over.

But not so fast. What really happened here, and is Hasbro really evil for protecting intellectual property?

Undoubtedly, Hasbro could have handled this situation much better. The best course of action would have been to create their own version of Scrabble for Facebook early on and corner the market. All of these old game makers would be smart to get on their horses because there is money to be made. The brothers that created Scrabulous are making a lot of money.
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First, to get it out of the way, it’s pronounced “cool” (in my head, though, I pronounce it “kewl”). Second, don’t accidentally type in “culi.com” or you will see some very naughty things that may get you fired.

Now that we have that out of the way, what is Cuil and can it compete? Do we need another search engine?

So far, in various queries I’ve tested, the results are rather poor. However, that is to be expected on the first day of a search engine. I doubt Google had it all figured out from day one. But I also read that Cuil has one trait that a lot of people are scratching their heads over: they do not take incoming links into consideration when posting search results.
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Peter Kafka at SAI has a good report on the fortunes of MySpace and Fox Interactive Media (FIM).

Growth for MySpace has leveled out while it increases for competitors like Facebook. That is the bad news, certainly. However, engagement by those who are still on the site is going up. What’s the point of having a ton of new users if they don’t spend any time on the site? The fact of the matter is that while Facebook has taken the worldwide unique visitor lead, MySpace is slaughtering them on engagement with about 50% more average minutes per visitor.
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