Which one is right for you?

Everyone knows that if you own a business, these days you need a website. In fact, people will go further and say you need a website plus various other online presences like Facebook and Twitter.

One of the major reasons it is essential to have some sort of online presence is because you need your business to be found. And where do people go when they need to find something? Google of course! Personally, when I am looking for some type of business I usually head to Google Maps and run a search including the city and state (or even nearest address).

Google Maps is fast becoming the ‘Yellow Pages of the Internet’ — especially with Google Maps standard on the iPhone and Android mobile operating systems and a great downloadable version for BlackBerry. Taking control of your presence on Google Maps is one of the smartest things a business owner can do and it’s FREE. Follow the ‘via’ link to learn how…

On Sunday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised simplified privacy settings “in coming weeks.” It now looks like that timetable has been bumped up, with an executive at the social network revealing at an event in New York that new features will launch tomorrow.

What those features might look like is still anyone’s guess, but we’d expect to see an alternative (or outright replacement) to the granular controls that Facebook currently offers.

While that may appease some of those who think the site confuses users into sharing more information, the biggest question is whether or not recent feature additions –- specifically instant personalization and a series of social plugins -– will move from automatic opt-in to manual (a.k.a. –- default opt-out).

We see that as unlikely given the rapid adoption of the tools by web publishers, but we should have answers within the next day or so. Stay tuned.

h/t Kelly Neuville of Envano…

While most of the Facebook’s generation kids who populate the Internet nowadays have no idea about what RSS feeds are (but likely “follow” CNN on Twitter), there is still some percentage of tech-savvy people (me included) who take a look to their favorites feeds every morning before starting their day.

Not many RSS feeds reader product exists, and the few are pretty much all the same. The most widely used online RSS aggregators are probably Google Reader and Bloglines.

While Bloglines is clearly supported by online advertising, why do you think Google created its own for free? Yes, you guessed it: to get your traffic information.

They probably use the number of people subscribed to each RSS feed and the frequency of their visits to Google Reader to optimize the frequency of refresh (i.e., when and how often they should recrawl it) for that particular feed/domain. Then, they look at how many people open each post/link and use that information to make decisions on its priority in the crawling queue or ranking of those pages.