Though not the first to do it, Intuit’s tax software company TurboTax is using Twitter to help answer questions people may have about their taxes and the Turbotax software. But there is another interesting twist.
Some of TurboTax’s Google AdSense ads are actually displaying the most recent Tweets that have been registered on the TurboTax Twitter account, and the ad clicks through to the account rather than their flagship website. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
TinyURL was around before Twitter. It’s a useful way to shorten very long URLs, and there are a lot of tools and plugins associated with the service to help out.
However, with Twitter’s 140 character limit and the urge for less text on Facebook status postings, the 23 character TinyURL is a vitrual monstrosity compared to other up-and-coming services, such as Bit.ly, which registers at 19 characters, and the tiniest possible 17 character Is.gd (prounounced “Is Good”) ,Tr.im, and Ow.ly. [more..]
Long before Facebook settled its lawsuit with some of Mark Zuckerberg’s old Harvard buddies, West Wing creator and writer Aaron Sorkin had planned a movie about Facebook that would focus on the early moments when the social network was just a gleam in young Zuck’s eye.
Turns out this project is full steam ahead, and the Facebook crew is none too happy about it. In fact, Facebook sent letters asking former employees not to cooperate or comment on anybody that may be doing research for the film. [more..]
After years leading the pack in Europe, Microsoft has lost its title as the number one web browser in Europe. The new leader is Mozilla’s Firefox 3.
Though the move is partly explained by a switch from many have made from Internet Explorer 7 to IE8, and when combining all of the versions of IE together, they still lead Mozilla by about 10%. Still, Firefox is climbing very steadily up the ladder and Microsoft’s browser hegemony may be in trouble. [more..]
Wild Freeborn, an 8-year-old Girl Scout in Asheville, N.C., wanted her scout troop to win a free week of Scout camp. The problem is: they needed to move 12,000 boxes of Thin Crisps and Samoans at $3.50 a pop in a bad economy if they were going to have a shot.
Apparently, Asheville’s business community is very well connected on Twitter, Facebook, and Craigslist. All were utilized, along with mass text messaging, to get people to buy cookies. They even made a YouTube video. [more..]
Not too many people use the Yahoo Directory any more. At least I don’t think they do. But it remains a good SEO choice for some to make in order to build quality standing in search engines. The directory is considered an authoritative source, and a good title and description can give immediate results not just in Yahoo, but Google also as these directory pages often carry a lot of PageRank.
In 2002, Yahoo started charging $299 a year to appear in the directory. However, lately, many are reporting that Yahoo is not charging anything to renew in the directory and yet sites are remaining in it. [more..]
Like many on the web, Twitter fascinates me. Most of my interest centers around leveraging Twitter for search and real-time trend appraisal.
But as Twitter’s rise become more and more regarded by the mainstream, there is an element of echo going on, where brands and companies are more and more using Twitter for no purpose really other than because they’ve heard Twitter is big.
There was a recent example of this done by Skittles. They turned over their homepage to Twitter Search results page. This did not go well. [more..]
Early-stage venture firm Y-Combinator is getting a boost of money from Sequoia Capital and a few angel investors. In these rather tough economic times, stories like this are quite welcome.
Y-Combinator estimates that with the $2 million raised, it will be able to increase the number of startups it seeds from 40 to 60 per year. Typically, Y-Comb puts in $5,000 plus an added $5,000 for each founder in exchange for between 2% and 10% in equity, with the median being 6%. This is how Reddit got its start, along with Disqus and Dropbox. [more..]
TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is reporting a site that could be very useful to California tokers out there: Weedmaps looks like it could become the Yelp of cannabis club sites.
Upon opening the site, I was shocked to learn there are about a dozen cannabis clubs within a mile of my home. Personally, I don’t have a weed card, but if I did, I’d be able to find clubs and dispensaries and rate my experience there. [more..]
Initially, Google recommended this because they could only index a maximum of about 100 kilobytes of a single page. With a boatload of outgoing links, they wouldn’t be able to handle the entire load.
But now Google can index well over 100K per page. So why not load ‘em up? [more..]
Though not the first to do it, Intuit’s tax software company TurboTax is using Twitter to help answer questions people may have about their taxes and the Turbotax software. But there is another interesting twist.
