Google has decided to stop posting review snippets from third party sites on their Places page. Prior to this move, Google would automatically collect reviews, ratings, businesses info from third party websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Urban Spoon and CitySearch, as well as their own and then place it all under one web page.
BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, has released its July 2011 SocialShare Site Analysis on the adoption of links and social sharing plugins of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The report, which is an analysis of the front pages of the Web’s 10,000 largest sites, shows that - Facebook plugins are still the most popular; there’s been a 33% increase in placement of the Google+1 button. The report compared data between the month of June 2011 and July2011.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, announced the introduction of features like video calling, group chat and a redesigned chat on Wednesday during a press conference at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters. Also at the event Facebook updated its user count to 750 million users worldwide.
Google has launched a demo version of its new social network product called Google+ which aims to “fix” the “broken” and “awkward way” people interact and share things online. The “subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools,” Vic Gundotra, senior vice-president of engineering, wrote in Google’s official blog post. “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software.
Google had earlier talked about its release on authorship markup that lets content creators claim the articles they’ve written. In an official Google blog post dated 7 June, 2011, the company said “The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web.