Last week Google changed the Local Business Center to Google Places, and along with that change came some new features for local businesses. We looked at those here.

Among those changes was the addition of Google’s tag advertising. For $25 a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for things like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial.

Google promised that while the offering was starting out in a limited number of cities, that number would be expanding. The expansion process is underway. Google has now announced the addition of 11 new cities.

The new cities are: San Jose, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and Mountain View.

"You’ll notice that we’ve added Mountain View, CA to the list of cities participating in the trial," says Product Manager Shalini Agarwal. "Because we are still tweaking the product a bit, we thought we’d make it available in our hometown so we can get quick feedback as we work on new features."

Businesses in the available cities can sign up for Tags from their Google Places accounts.

In a couple weeks, Google says it will launch a new tag type: "post to your Place Page". This will be a freeform text field that will let business owners highlight custom messages announcing sales or events.

The company did not indicate when more cities will become available, but I would expect the feature to make regular expansions in the not-too-distant future.

A couple weeks ago, we reported that Steve Jobs had quietly stepped out from behind the shadows to send one of his brief, seemingly random email responses to a customer inquiry about whether or not the company would continue “supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future”.

Jobs’ answer, in case you hadn’t heard, was a quick “Sorry, no” and we were left wondering how many people this might affect. According to an article today in Apple Insider, it could be more than you might have first thought.

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According to the article, the number of first-generation iPhones out there, still in use, accounts for a very small percent, but apparently there are a lot of iPhones out there. And before we go any further, let’s just note that the iPhone 1st generation, the “1G” and the “2G” are all synonymous.

Just 2 percent of all iPhone OS handsets still in use are Apple’s first-generation iPhone, but a new calculation estimates that amounts to nearly 30 percent of the 6.1 million iPhones sold between June 2007 and July 2008.

That means that there are nearly 2 million iPhone 2Gs still out there, in the wild and in use, that will soon be unsupported. While we wouldn’t expect Apple to continue releasing full OS updates for these phones, we would hope they would continue basic support for their customers.

The calculations come from Philip Elmer-DeWitt with CNN Money, who says that “If 7% of those iPhone 1Gs are driving 2% of AdMob’s Apple traffic, that suggests that nearly one in three is still ticking — and visiting the Web.”

The data comes from advertising firm AdMob’s monthly report, which shows that the iPhone 3GS has become the dominant device among iPhones and iPod Touches.

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It’s almost a waste of space to state that Google is a good employer; the fact is widely known, and people all over the world apply there on a regular basis.  However, in a move that may speak to how the search giant is faring in China, an important research executive has gone to work for Baidu after quitting Google within the past couple weeks.

Kathrin Hille, who’s based in Beijing, got in contact with both companies and confirmed, "Baidu said Wang Jing had joined the company as a vice-president in charge of engineering.  Google said Mr Wang quit as engineering director earlier this month."

This is bad news for Google.  It would make sense if search people left its Chinese operation, given that everything’s been routed through Hong Kong.  Google’s advertising and research efforts were supposed to continue the same as usual, though, and it’s not as if the company cut anyone’s salary due to its disagreement with the Chinese government.

Wang Jin’s decision to leave would just appear to be a reflection on Google’s worsening reputation in the region, then.

Google will have to hope (and/or take action to ensure) that this doesn’t represent the start of a trend, with more and more employees leaving to work for Baidu or other Chinese competitors.

As online marketing and search engine marketing in particular have evolved over the years, more and more metrics and data sources have become available to marketers. This is a great thing for analyzing campaigns and strategies, learning from them and improving upon them. However, all of this data can get extremely overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have strategies for the analytical process itself.

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York. WebProNews interviewed him shortly after, picking his brain about how online marketers can sort through and maximize the incredible amounts of data they have access to.

Kaushik says a lot of people will open their analytics tool and just look at the top ten or twenty rows of data, but there are strategies to help you see more of the picture. A few specific examples:

- In-line segmentation
- Tag Clouds
- Keyword trees

Basically, these are all things that can take large amounts of keywords and let you visualize the top performers, and understand the data. It can help you look at how strong your brand terms are, compared with different categories, for example. These things are explored further in Avinash’s keynote:

Avinash places great emphasis on quantifying the economic value of things – your different goals. Quantify the "micro-conversions" as he calls them. This could be placing a dollar value on RSS feed subscribers, or on ad clicks, affiliate clicks, number of reviews, number of downloads, number of phone calls that were made to convert offline, etc.

"Quantify the complete impact of a site, otherwise you’re going to be making bad decisions," he says.

The more you can break down your site in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve, and place specific values on these goals, the better you can understand the bigger picture and the vast amount of analytical data that concerns the performance of your online marketing efforts.

As online marketing and search engine marketing in particular have evolved over the years, more and more metrics and data sources have become available to marketers. This is a great thing for analyzing campaigns and strategies, learning from them and improving upon them. However, all of this data can get extremely overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have strategies for the analytical process itself.

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York. WebProNews interviewed him shortly after, picking his brain about how online marketers can sort through and maximize the incredible amounts of data they have access to.

Kaushik says a lot of people will open their analytics tool and just look at the top ten or twenty rows of data, but there are strategies to help you see more of the picture. A few specific examples:

- In-line segmentation
- Tag Clouds
- Keyword trees

Basically, these are all things that can take large amounts of keywords and let you visualize the top performers, and understand the data. It can help you look at how strong your brand terms are, compared with different categories, for example. These things are explored further in Avinash’s keynote:

Avinash places great emphasis on quantifying the economic value of things – your different goals. Quantify the "micro-conversions" as he calls them. This could be placing a dollar value on RSS feed subscribers, or on ad clicks, affiliate clicks, number of reviews, number of downloads, number of phone calls that were made to convert offline, etc.

"Quantify the complete impact of a site, otherwise you’re going to be making bad decisions," he says.

The more you can break down your site in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve, and place specific values on these goals, the better you can understand the bigger picture and the vast amount of analytical data that concerns the performance of your online marketing efforts.

A recent study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping, and you best believe that will only continue, as people continue to spend more of their web time on their phones. So as everybody reaches for their mobile devices to make payments, which platforms are they going to use?

PayPal hopes to stay in the drivers seat in this area. WebProNews interviewed Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile at SXSW a couple weeks ago, who talked a bit about PayPal’s vision for mobile.

PayPal is certainly not the only player in this space though.

O’Reilly Media Founder Tim O’Reilly has posted a fascinating piece on the "State of the Internet Operating System," which explores in depth, just what the phrase operating system means in the age of the cloud, and the mobile web. While he talks about this with regards to search, media access, communications, identity, advertising, location, and a slew of other categories, one section of this lengthy article talks specifically about payments.

"Payment is another key subsystem of the Internet Operating System," he says. "Companies like Apple that have 150 million credit cards on file and a huge population of users accustomed to using their phones to buy songs, videos, applications, and now ebooks, are going to be in a prime position to turn today’s phone into tomorrow’s wallet. (And as anyone who reaches into a wallet not for payment but for ID knows, payment systems are also powerful, authenticated identity stores – a fact that won’t always be lost on payment providers looking for their lock on a piece of the Internet future.)"

"PayPal obviously plays an important role as an internet payment subsystem that’s already in wide use by developers," he continues. "It operates in 190 countries, in 19 different currencies (not counting in-game micro-currencies) and it has over 185 million accounts. What’s fascinating is the rich developer ecosystem they’ve built around payment – their recent developer conference had over 2000 attendees. Their challenge is to make the transition from the web to mobile."

UPDATE: PayPal contacted me, pointing out errors in O’Reilly’s numbers. "We now have 81 mil active registered accounts and 210 million accounts, in 190 markets and we support 24 currencies."

O’Reilly also mentions Google and Amazon as key players in the mobile payments space, with the Android Market giving Google Checkout a boost, and Amazon having only recently opened theirs up a bit to developers.

Then you have Facebook, who last year started letting users buy physical goods with virtual currency. As business sell more products through Facebook, which is happening more and more, Facebook may play an increasingly bigger role in mobile payments. Mobile Facebook users are usually signed into their accounts all the time.

Which of these payment services do you see yourself using most a year or two from now? Something else? Share your thoughts.

A recent study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping, and you best believe that will only continue, as people continue to spend more of their web time on their phones. So as everybody reaches for their mobile devices to make payments, which platforms are they going to use?

PayPal hopes to stay in the drivers seat in this area. WebProNews interviewed Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile at SXSW a couple weeks ago, who talked a bit about PayPal’s vision for mobile.

PayPal is certainly not the only player in this space though.

O’Reilly Media Founder Tim O’Reilly has posted a fascinating piece on the "State of the Internet Operating System," which explores in depth, just what the phrase operating system means in the age of the cloud, and the mobile web. While he talks about this with regards to search, media access, communications, identity, advertising, location, and a slew of other categories, one section of this lengthy article talks specifically about payments.

"Payment is another key subsystem of the Internet Operating System," he says. "Companies like Apple that have 150 million credit cards on file and a huge population of users accustomed to using their phones to buy songs, videos, applications, and now ebooks, are going to be in a prime position to turn today’s phone into tomorrow’s wallet. (And as anyone who reaches into a wallet not for payment but for ID knows, payment systems are also powerful, authenticated identity stores – a fact that won’t always be lost on payment providers looking for their lock on a piece of the Internet future.)"

"PayPal obviously plays an important role as an internet payment subsystem that’s already in wide use by developers," he continues. "It operates in 190 countries, in 19 different currencies (not counting in-game micro-currencies) and it has over 185 million accounts. What’s fascinating is the rich developer ecosystem they’ve built around payment – their recent developer conference had over 2000 attendees. Their challenge is to make the transition from the web to mobile."

O’Reilly also mentions Google and Amazon as key players in the mobile payments space, with the Android Market giving Google Checkout a boost, and Amazon having only recently opened theirs up a bit to developers.

Then you have Facebook, who last year started letting users buy physical goods with virtual currency. As business sell more products through Facebook, which is happening more and more, Facebook may play an increasingly bigger role in mobile payments. Mobile Facebook users are usually signed into their accounts all the time.

Which of these payment services do you see yourself using most a year or two from now? Something else? Share your thoughts.

Google has launched a YouTube channel for its recently released Google Apps Marketplace. The Apps marketplace is a place where developers can create apps that integrate with Google Apps and sell them to users. According to Google, they can reach over 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

The YouTube channel should be a good place to checkout some of the apps that are available in the marketplace, and see what they can do.

"The Apps Marketplace YouTube channel showcases videos from Marketplace vendors," says YouTube’s Chris Kelly. "Ranging from funny to informative, from cartoons to screencasts, these videos are meant to convey the benefits of extending Google Apps with integrated apps that work seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more. We’re happy to already have more than a dozen videos in the channel and over 60 integrated app vendors in the Marketplace, and look forward to more great things as the Marketplace grows."

Here are a few sample videos:

The Apps marketplace is still young. It was only announced a couple weeks ago. Expect it to grow significantly, and hopefully this YouTube channel will continue to make for a good destination to check out some useful apps.

A couple weeks ago, Google acquired reMail, a popular iPone app, and pulled it from Apple’s App Store. Now, Google has made it open source.

"After looking at a number of options to make reMail available in some form, we decided to open source the code, which is now available on Google Code as remail-iphone under the Apache 2.0 License," Google Communications tells WebProNews.

reMail was created by a Gabor Cselle, who used to work as a software engineer on Gmail. On the reMail blog, Cselle says, "As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail’s source code helpful in your quest."

Cselle has documented the source code so developers can quickly start on any ideas they have. "If you like reMail and want to improve it, I have also listed some potential projects with implementation tips," he says. "Most of these projects are features that users have requested in the past. I encourage you to contribute improvements back to the project. I’ve also created the group remail-iphone on Google Groups, which is a great place to ask questions."

This page will tell you how to build using the code, let you see some project ideas, and show you how the datastore and UI work.

For the past couple weeks, we’ve been following some interesting developments with Twitter – things that most end users probably would not know or care about.

As we suspected, the quickly-growing company is putting more emphasis on engineering, taking “steps… to make our engineering division more open and transparent,” according to the team’s infrastructure manager, Evan Weaver. “Much of Twitter’s success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back,” he continues. And there’s a lot of giving back going on, from a new blog to new recruiting efforts.

Read on, and let us know your opinions in the comments.

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An Open Source Directory

This new directory lists all the public software that twitter’s in-house developers have created or contributed to. “Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects,” Weaver wrote, “and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.”

The Official Twitter Engineering Blog

For those interested in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day challenges of developing and maintaining Twitter’s products and features, this blog will keep them up-to-date. Current posts include information on local trends, capacity issues and uses for Twitter’s translation libraries.

They’re Hiring!

The icing on the cake is Twitter’s new recruitment methods. “We’ve updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we’re looking for” wrote Weaver. “My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.” Twitter also recently launched a recruitment Twitter account with updates on blog posts and new openings.

Finally, you can follow Twitter Engineering on Twitter – duh.

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Google has quietly announced that Google Docs documents that are published will soon be crawlable. This means if you have published documents as web pages, or used the publish/embed option for a document, and it has been linked to on the web, it can be indexed by Google and other search engines.

"This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people," says Google Employee "Marie F," on the Google Docs Help Forum.

The change does not apply to documents that are set to "allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)." Any concerned users, who do not wish for their published documents to be indexed can un-publish them by:

- going to the "share tab"

- For documents and spreadsheets, choosing "publish as web page". For presentations choosing "publish/embed"

- Clicking the button that says "stop publishing".

Google notes that Google Apps users may find that they’re unable publish documents to the world if the admin of the domain has disallowed publishing outside the domain.

The company said they will be launching the change in a couple weeks. Keep an eye on the help forum for an update on when the change goes live.