EQUTE — Google and Facebook have jumped into the URL shortener ring in a move that could crush other services like Bit.ly and Ow.ly.

The move could finally be an answer to all those Twitter links that you don’t want to go anywhere near. Seeing these shortened URLs will give readers an additional layer of security by knowing that their clicks aren’t going to some phishery or virus-laden site.

Google’s goo.gl has a very, very short page describing their new service.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

Stability — ensuring that the service has very good uptime

Security — protecting users from malware and phishing pages

Speed — fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google toolbar now features a new share button that shortens the URLs, and Blogger now allows users to syndicate their feeds to Twitter using the shortened URLs.

Facebook’s shortener seems more designed to bring outside users to Facebook, or the new FB.me. It also features a neat trick to direct readers to the site with an easy to understand link. Say the Facebook name for your blog’s fan site is StarTrekPlanet, it can be truncated to FB.me/startrekplanet, making it easy for people to see where they are going.

These URL services also leave the window open for things similar to Digg’s approach where each site found through the shortener features a toolbar header. If Google and Facebook did the same it could mean greater reach for their sharing services.

This is a great stride in the field, it will certainly be interesting to see how third-party services weather the storm.

Facebook and PayPal have teamed up, making it easier for confused parents trying to navigate social networks to send money to their kids.

It’s another interesting development on Facebook, and could open the door to more Facebook stores, micropayments etc.

Heinz Waelchli, director of product marketing, at PayPal explained it in a blog post.

Here’s how it works. Visit our send money application page and click on the “Get Started” button to install the application.

Next just fill in the fields in the form and click the “Continue to PayPal” button. You’ll be taken to the PayPal site to log-in (if you don’t already have an account, you can create a new account in minutes).

You’ll then choose your method of payment, if you use your PayPal balance or bank account to send money to friends and family within the U.S., it’s free.

You can enter a personal message to your recipient if you like. Finally, click on the “send” button and that’s it! Your recipient will be notified by email right away. The receiver can then log-in to PayPal to claim the money or quickly sign up for a new account.

Wonderful, now everyone can hit you up for money in person AND online.

EQUTE — There are so, so many different software packages designed to help keep tabs of social media, and many are quite pricey.

Even if the general public could sign on, CoTweet runs $1,500 a month — just for Twitter — and other services charge monthly fees and huge start up fees just to sign on. So how can one keep tabs on their brand, their site, their product or their business leaders within the social media landscape?

Well one option is Yahoo!

Yahoo! you say?

Yes.

I had never personally used much before, but the Yahoo! Pipes are pretty interesting and are something I will surely use in the future. Just type in your business, brand, CEO etc and see what people are saying across all of social media. Since you can drop in several keywords and really get an eye on what people are saying. And instead of going to all the hundreds of sites and searching internally the “social media fire hose” checks them all and gives you a handy list and map.

Play around with it, there are scores of other interesting Yahoo! Pipes for just about anything.

EQUTE — New Comscore numbers show that Microsoft sites still account for nearly 15 percent of time spent on the Internet.

This is interesting because even with Google News, Google Reader, Gmail, etc. the slew of Google products doesn’t come close to Microsoft. It’s also interesting that Facebook is slowly creeping up on these one-stop organizations to take 5 percent of the time spent on the Internet.

In September 2009, nearly 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally by a record online population of 1.2 billion Internet users age 15 and older. Microsoft Sites accounted for 14.5 percent of total minutes spent online in September, making it the most engaging global property, with Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month. Google Sites captured 9.3 percent of total minutes (2.5 billion hours), with YouTube accounting for nearly half of total time spent (1.2 billion hours) at the property. Yahoo! Sites ranked as the third most engaging Web property at 1.7 billion hours, followed by Facebook.com at 1.4 billion hours.

The numbers are staggering every time a new round of numbers comes out for the entire Internet, 27 billion hours spent online. That is almost 40,000 lifetimes (if you live to 80) spent online in just September — nearly 2,000 lifetimes spent on Facebook alone.

EQUTE — A new roadmap for Facebook updates will hopefully take the surprise out of future updates that have been a hassle for developers (and users) in the past.

This is quite a change from the typical way Facebook has done things — namely in the middle of the night in secret.

For the first time in this level of detail, we will provide a roadmap to help you anticipate future changes and opportunities. Like all roadmaps, it may shift slightly, but we will share insight into what is happening as these details are available. We’ll keep you posted about the progress of these changes and what they mean for you over the next two quarters.

According to the roadmap, Facebook will continue to shake things up in the coming months. The ability for applications to communicate directly to a user inbox will be going away, but developers will soon have the ability to contact users at their primary e-mail address (after opting in of course).

Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow attended the announcement and spoke with members of the platform team, called this aspect “enormous.”

“[We] will be able to create strategies around giving Facebook users ways to opt-in to share their primary email addresses with the brands,” he told Adotas. “E-mail is still the number one digital marketing technology and bridging e-mail marketing and social media is a huge opportunity.”

Another big update will give developers the ability to turn any Web site the ability to tap into the Facebook API, letting users use apps, share links and communicate from nearly anywhere on the Web.

Advertisers should bookmark the roadmap so they know what is going on in the dominant social media getaway. And advertisers with apps should be squealing with delight at the new transparency and the peace of mind that their apps aren’t dying during the secret midnight machinations of Facebook.

EQUTE — Netlog, sometimes known as the “European MySpace” got a fancy, Web 2.0 makeover as it looks to draw more users and prepare for the eminent rollout in the United States.

Techcrunch has a good write-up of the new Netlog changes, mostly the changes are designed to streamline the social network and add more interactivity through new games.

Techcrunch said the new changes aim to make it a more visually stimulating experience for its demographic.

Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered.

Along with those superficial changes, the new design — expected before 2010 begins — also makes it easier for advertisers to tap into their user base.

The redesigned profile page that offers personalized and custom themes, including branded advertisements.
Any advertisers looking to make some headway into the gamer demographic should keep an eye on Netlog and how the new changes are received.

EQUTE — What exactly happens to our social network pages when we die? It’s an interesting and seasonally morbid question of our digital age.

Max Kelly, of Facebook, wrote a post on the topic recently, unveiling so-called memorialized profiles pages. The pages allow only accepted friends to see and comment on profiles of the deceased. Kelly also mentioned that the deceased will no longer appear in the “suggested friend” box as a haunting digital ghost.

Far from deleting the profile, Kelly sees the memorialized posts as a virtual gravestone at which people can come and remember the good times. But should these profiles be kept alive when the person behind them has died?

Say the deceased didn’t take Facebook all that seriously (I know, blasphemy) and turned their personal page into a personal gag. Is it a good thing that their cheeky sense of humor lasts forever, or their last drunken status update be burned into the annals of internet history?

The entire topic serves as a good reminder not to embarrass yourself on the Internet — what you say online could be there long after you die.

EQUTE — There is an interesting post over at WebProNews that shows just how popular Facebook has become.

Data showing that 1 in 7 UK page views went to Facebook prompted marketing researcher Perry Drake to take a look at the US numbers, and it was pretty interesting, Facebook has actually outpaced Google in page views — by quite a large margin.

Drake’s research showed that 1 in 4 pages accessed in the US were Facebook, while only 1 in 12 were Google.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, people like to socialize, but it’s amazing just how much we like to socialize.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that more advertisers are likely to gamble on Facebook ads and possibly cut their Google ad budgets. While it might lead to more visibility, advertisers should be wary about reallocating their money. Google (and Bing) is still the place people turn to most when they are looking to buy something, research something and click on ads.

Drake postulates that Facebook could become a big information player, but notes that it’s not there yet.

Facebook has the potential to become a major search portal and source of relevant and timely information. Of course this is assuming that Facebook has the appropriate tools and people in place to mine that data and make it useful. But of course that is a topic for a future discussion.

They are certainly interesting numbers, and maybe a little more, but it’s more a topic for the water cooler, not one that should drastically change advertising budgets or strategies.

EQUTE — A new survey shows that 54 percent of employers completely prohibit the use of social networking sites completely.

CIOs were asked in the survey: Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, while at work?” Here is how they responded:

“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes.”

So what does this mean for marketers? If you’re targeting a big company with your Facebook ads, make sure employees can see them. Perhaps turn them off until after the work day ends to get the most efficient use of your money.

An now some information on the study from Robert Half Technology:

The national survey was developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of IT professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm. The survey is based on more than 1,400 telephone interviews with CIOs from a random sample of U.S. companies with 100 or more employees. In order for the survey to be statistically representative, the sample was stratified by geographic region, industry and number of employees. The results were then weighted to reflect the proper proportions of the number of employees within each region. The margin of error for this study is +/- 2.6 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence.

EQUTE — The Facebook team took a stab at figure out just how happy we are, and their results are pretty interesting.

By aggregating all the words from status updates, the team judged each update as positive or negative and used the numbers to make a graph showing our Gross National Happiness.

This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!

No surprise to me: Thanksgiving is the happiest day, I’m happy just thinking about stuffing slathered in gravy.