As we mentioned a few days back, the iPhone and Android aren’t the only game in town when it comes to handheld devices. Twitter for Blackberry was released on last Thursday and today comes news that Harbinger Capital has purchased almost 10% of Palm’s stock. The news might not be as good as it seems, however.

Palm’s SEC disclosure indicates Harbinger, a New York-based private hedge fund, has purchased 16 million shares of Palm common stock.

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This purchase totals “9.48% (of total Palm stock) based on 168,755,045 shares outstanding as of March 26, 2010.”

Because it was a common stock purchase, it does not come with voting rights, and the purchase did not have a significant effect on Palm stock, which was up 3.1% at the end of trading.

Palm has reportedly secured Goldman Sachs in order to lure a buyer for the struggling company.

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Local business review site Yelp held a press phone call this morning to discuss major changes it’s making to its site and business. Faced with class action lawsuits by business owners alleging they’ve been extorted by Yelp, the service has decided to make filtered-out reviews publicly visible and has removed the option for advertisers to push their favorite review to the top of their business’s page.

Did Yelp just cry Uncle? Is this the beginning of the end for its most important revenue stream, as some have argued? Here’s what we found most interesting about the call today.

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Yelp Gets Hit Hard With Questionable Reviews

Surprise, surprise – there are a lot of people out there who appear to be trying to game Yelp. This morning the company added a link at the bottom of each business’s page to “filtered reviews.” Those are the ones that the Yelp algorithm determined weren’t trustworthy enough to display on the site. They used to just disappear into a mysterious black hole, something many people found suspicious. Now you can look at them, and most of the time you can see why the reviews were yanked. There are a lot of them, too.

CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said he hoped exposing these buried reviews would put to rest the “myth” that the company buries positive reviews if companies don’t buy advertising and will give site users a chance to see the “unique challenge we face.”

Did Yelp Just Kill The Golden Goose?

Some critics have alleged that the ability to put favorite reviews on top of the page was the most compelling thing Yelp had to offer advertisers. The new video slideshows aren’t nearly as compelling as highlighting the good news and pushing down the bad news, they say.

Stoppelman offered a relatively convincing response to that when we asked him about it. He said that search placement is actually the biggest thing advertisers are paying for. “Favorite reviews” have limited draw, he said, because the site’s natural Yelp Sort algorithm already displays reviews with a businesses’s average rating or better at the top of the page automatically. He also said that round tables of business owners across multiple cities identified video advertising as the best possible substitute for the feature. Consider me convinced.

Complainers Are Just Complaining

Are businesses that complain about Yelp just upset that Stoppelman has built such a compelling site they feel obligated to advertise there, we asked? The Yelp CEO said in response that many small businesses are used to advertising in the newspaper and on radio and that the traditional local advertising market has been disrupted by Yelp. “Yelp represents a shift in the local business landscape,” Stoppelman said. “When those shifts happen, you’ll see some people lose out and then they’ll register their complaints.”

Do Yelp sales people pressure local business owners into advertising on the site? Do they wield the relative placement of positive and negative reviews like a weapon? It’s hard to know what goes on in those conversations, but there are certainly countless business owners who are accustomed to paying for pure positivity in the form of traditional advertising and for whom the presence or risk of negative feedback on a site like Yelp is alarming to the core. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said in a blog post today, “By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power.” That’s where Yelp operates and it represents a change in the world.

Yelp’s changes today seem like wise ones to me. This kind of transparency is likely to be helpful as the world of local business becomes more complicated thanks to the internet.

Discuss

Google’s term as a search provider in China may at last be coming to an end.  Reports from all over the country indicate that would-be users are only getting error messages when they conduct searches, even if their queries cover completely bland and innocent terms.

Aaron Back, who’s based in Beijing, wrote earlier, "Internet users reported new disruptions to Google Inc. Internet search services in China on Tuesday afternoon, with many saying they are unable to search for any term on the Google site."  Test words included "happy" and "the," not just things like "Tiananmen Square massacre."

This could be the result of a mistake; a number of Chinese Twitter users have suggested that the problem’s been caused by an automated program noticing the letters "RFA" (as in Radio Free Asia) in results pages’ URLs.

Still, since the error messages are appearing just one day after Google found that its mobile service had been partially blocked, the development appears rather ominous.

Google’s supposed to be looking into the matter.  The Chinese government hasn’t yet issued an official statement.  We’ll be sure to report any additional information as it becomes available.

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year’s SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling “fresh” and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it’s list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It’s boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a “Places” view that supports categories, a history view of places you’ve been and a “pull-to-refresh” feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends’ photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it’s bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don’t need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With “spot details”, including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing – real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, “Hot Spots”, tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven’t had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think – who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we’re calling it for Gowalla.

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Facebook looks to be partnering with event marketplace Eventbrite, a move may have been foreshadowed by recent design changes on the site. The announcement of a partnership was first noticed by a Facebook user who sent in a screenshot to TechCrunch this morning.

Facebook’s recent redesign has showed a much more public events page, a feature that would go along with selling tickets to events quite perfectly.

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The text of the announcement, which was hosted at facebook.eventbrite.com but has since been removed, read as follows:

Collect money for your event with Eventbrite

Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing.

Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell yours and put some delightful cash in your pocket.

Until recently, the Facebook events page was primarily focused on one thing – the events you had specifically been invited to. That’s no longer the case. Now, clicking on the “Events” link in the left column brings you to a page that lists not only all the events you’re invited to, but any public events that any of your friends are attending.

This seems like a definite shift in focus toward becoming more of a go-to place for finding what’s going on around you instead of just keeping track of invites. And if companies can get in on the game and start offering events that users can purchase tickets for through Facebook, then we’re talking.

Eventbrite had already made it easy for its users to share events they created on the Eventbrite website on Facebook. This announcement would not only be sharing events, but allowing Facebook users to buy tickets through the site.

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Facebook announced this morning that its wildly popular Instant Messaging service now supports the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber. That means that 3rd party developers will be able to build support for Facebook Chat into their websites and chat applications with ease.

Standards are great like this for making development simpler but the other promise of technical standards so far remains unrealized. Interoperability is the big promise of open standards in general and XMPP chat specifically, but at launch Facebook Chat by XMPP does not federate with other XMPP servers. So this isn’t about interoperability, it’s about further extending Facebook around the web.

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Does Facebook have plans for the future to federate with, say Google Talk, the other leading XMPP chat service online? Or with people using Jabber directly? We haven’t gotten a response from the company yet, but we really doubt it. Facebook could change the game in a big way around IM interoperability if it did so. Unfortunately, this is much more likely to be a case of an open technical standard being used to extend the dominance of a closed market leader.

Update: Facebook’s Malorie Lucich responded and told us that interoperability “isn’t something we’re announcing today, but we are looking into it.” Lucich is the same Facebook team member who advised users last month about how to use Facebook to subscribe to syndicated news sources, so she’s cool. Looking into it? We sure hope so.

Facebook is supporting the open standard, though! And thus it will be much easier for outside developers to build on top of it. That’s great. The open standard of XMPP now has all the more support behind it, all the more reason for developers to implement on it – now it offers access to 400 million Facebook users. That’s nothing to underestimate the importance of.

We sure would love to see someone step up and use open standards to support interoperability between people on different IM platforms, though. It would be great if it was Facebook that did it.

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In the words of legendary investor Mark Suster, “Entrepreneurs don’t noodle, they do.” While it’s important to be analytical in your decision making, it’s also important to act when opportunities arise. Yesterday over drinks with some investors and entrepreneurs, I marveled at the difference between the life of a startup founder and the life of an investor. Founders manage multiple staff and stakeholders with heavy emphasis on operational issues. Meanwhile, investors manage multiple portfolio companies across a number of industries. The common trait amongst both is decisiveness.

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Suster’s recent blog post speaks to the value of being able to make a quick decision. For investors, not only are most investment pitches met with the answer “no”, but investors recognize that some of their portfolio companies will not offer the anticipated returns. The ability to be decisive while also factoring in a margin of error is exactly what keeps both worlds running smoothly.

Says Suster, ” The best entrepreneurs have a bias for making quick decisions and accept that at best 70% of them will be right.  They acknowledge that some decisions will be bad and they’ll have to recover from them.  Building a startup might be a game of inches but you don’t get timeouts to pause and analyze all of your decisions.”

While it’s important to lay out a product plan, create a good business strategy and study your competition, don’t expect to be perfect. Leave room for a margin of error and don’t be afraid to pivot quickly if your company needs it. You can’t be a startup founder without taking any risks – if you were really that safe you’d be working for someone else.

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InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

Michael Jackson was launched way ahead after he died. Currently, the Michael Jackson page has 10,006,304 fans. Before he died, he only had over 800,000. At that point, President Obama was the leader, but now he sits in 2nd place with 6,487,191. Here’s a look at the top 30 according to InsideFacebook’s data:

Then there are the current biggest gainers:

And the current biggest losers:

It’s interesting to see that Pop Tarts are on their way up, while the guy that successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River is losing fans. It makes you wonder what Toaster Strudels are working on to up their game.

The information here may seem like the results of a popularity contest, but InsideFacebook’s data is worth keeping an eye on simply to see what brands are making it in the popular categories. If you are still looking for successful ways to utilize Facebook for marketing your business, you can see what brands are successfully gaining fans, and look at what they’re doing right.

As you may know, YouTube has a new channels design in the works. It was actually supposed to be out on July 15th, but was postponed (not for the first time). WebProNews recently ran down a nice sized list of new features that YouTube will be including in this new design here.

Last week, YouTube updated users about the delay, as well as some more features. "So when’s the new date? That part’s a little trickier – rather than try to predict it, we’d rather focus our time on taking care of the above list. But we’ll announce the new date no less than 2 weeks before it happens – and yes, it’s still coming this summer," the company says.

They also ran down some goals to accomplish before launch:

- Fix some browser-specific layout bugs – in particular, IE6 has a few issues right now

- Allow you to default your channel to "grid" view

- Allow you to re-order your uploads & playlists

- Some other small things, including fixes for some of the other bugs you’ve helped find (such as grid view not always working in IE)

Yesterday, YouTube issued another update, citing the following as new things released:

- Module transparency can now go all the way to 100% (though we cry just a little bit inside whenever someone puts fully transparent, hard to read text on a crazy background)

- You can now right (or middle)-click on videos to open them in new tabs, or in new windows

- Playlist titles were getting truncated a little too soon before – should be longer now

- Grid view should now always work in IE

- And a few other bugfixes

The new channels have of course been available in "secret" beta. This is where the feedback has come from so far. The new design has got to be close to going mainstream now, and is just one example of how YouTube has really been stepping up its game.

Let’s review a few other pieces of YouTube news from the last several weeks:

1. YouTube is working on 3D Video.

2. YouTube has doubled the size of what users are now able to upload at once. This means we will see longer and higher quality videos.

3. YouTube is becoming more of a resource for news content

4. YouTube has launched a destination for movie trailers

5. YouTube has expanded advertising options and is "closer than ever" to profits.

As you can see, lots of things are happening at YouTube. The site is already far and away the most popular video site on the Internet, and it appears that it will only continue to improve.

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

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Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Heaven help Google’s competitors if the search giant ever figures out how to consistently make money off individual YouTube videos.  According to a new report, a stunning number of clips are streamed worldwide each day: over 1 billion.

That works out to about 41.7 million clips per hour, or 694,000 clips per minute.  Or as Michael Arrington, who confirmed the billion-per-day streaming rate with Google, noted, "That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day."

 

Not everything in YouTube’s world is sunshine and roses, though.  New Compete numbers are out, and it seems that the video-sharing site saw 1.75 percent fewer visitors in May than in April.

Other social media sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, all experienced month-over-month increases in this respect, which makes the YouTube development something of an anomaly.

Plus, if you stop to remember that YouTube isn’t making money off of every video it streams, the billion-per-day rate sounds a lot less impressive.

On the bright side (as far as Google’s bank accounts are concerned), there’s a gigantic ad for a game called Prototype on the YouTube homepage at the moment.

One of the best ways to get free advertising and links back to your site is to write good articles and publish them on blogs and websites around the Internet with a link back to your site.  Doing this in a systematic way is usually called “article marketing.” I have done it for years and believe me it works!  However, my enthusiasm for article marketing is started to wane due to an avalanche of poorly written articles which do not provide end users with useful information.

In the same way that reciprocal linking was destroyed by misguided users trying to “game” the search engines, article marketing stands in a precarious position today. I publish three article directories and I can assure you that most of the articles submitted should be consigned to the recycle bin because they go against the basic idea of providing good useful information in an easy-to-read fashion. In case you are writing articles, or about to have some articles written for you, here are three important tips for doing it properly.

1. Provide Information and Not a Sales Pitch

It is futile to write directly about your product and explain how great it is. If this is what you want to do, it is better to write a press release and explain the newsworthy features of your work.  An article for publication on another website should be related to your area of expertise, but should not be bragging about you or your product.

For example, if you operate a garden supply business, then write “how-to” articles helping people to solve some of the gardening and landscaping problems that they might be facing. You don’t have to say how great your garden supply business is. If you write well and provide useful tips, then the readers will be impressed and they will want to click through on your link and find out more about you and your business

People who visit your website after reading a good article are high quality visitors, because they have been “pre-sold” on you. They already regard you as an “expert” and will be more inclined to buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters than someone who clicks through on just any old link.

2. Write the article properly or get the article written by someone who can write!

If you were to submit an article to your English teacher in high school or college, would you want to hand in something with obvious grammatical mistakes even in the title itself?  Of course you wouldn’t but that doesn’t stop people from hiring unqualified ghostwriters to write tons of sub-standard articles for them at $5 per article.

Try writing an intelligent 500 word article. Can you do it in ten minutes or even twenty minutes? Probably not. Take the time to write your article well and if you are hiring someone then you should opt for a native English speaker who will give it a reasonable amount of time. You may have to pay more for it, but you will gain in the end.

How will you gain? Well written and informative articles get reprinted at a much greater frequency than the junk or filler articles.  You will gain with more links and most importantly you will get more credibility as an expert in your field.

3. Format Your Articles Properly

One of the keys to effectiveness is the readability of your article.  Do you like looking at a long block of printed words without any paragraph breaks? Take the time to divide your articles into short paragraphs punctuated by sub-heads.  It will give your readers a chance to assimilate your message more easily.

The reason why I am particular on this point is that many people use automated article submission systems which push all the paragraphs together. Editors have no time to make these corrections for you and may delete the articles.  Alternatively, your article may be published, but in a way that turns off the reader, rather than inspiring her to read the whole article. Submit your articles in a proper format and make sure that your submission system sends a well formatted version to the publishers.

If you follow these three tips then you will be “adding value” to the Internet rather than clogging it with useless filler. You will be doing a service to the public, and in the end it will work to your benefit too.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Three Tips for Effective Article Marketing

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.