Google product manager Christian Oestlien wrote a Google+ blog post on Thursday night indicating that the new social media platform has slightly accelerated the timeframe for business profiles and promises “to have an initial version of business profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months.” Presently, a “tiny handful” of business profiles exist on Google+ “solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.” The Ford Motor Company is one such account that Google+ selected from tens of thousands of businesses applying to take part in the test. Accelerating the process of getting business profiles…more»

Google has announced in a blog post that the company has acquired the g.co domain as its new URL shortener for official Google products and services. The move was made to create URLs that are easier for users to remember and more easily distributed across the social Web. Google’s vice president of consumer marketing Gary Briggs writes in the post: In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will only link to official Google…more»

Google announced several important changes to its product search feed specification this week. If you’re an Internet retailer and use Google Product Search as a channel to promote products, the developments should be top of mind. The changes relate primarily to providing shoppers with more accurate and “fresher” information. Google is now requiring merchants to show availability of products, include the appropriate Google product category, and is making the image link mandatory as well. For retailers selling apparel, merchants will need to include information such as size and color as well as for whom the product is designed (age and…more»

Last week was a busy one for Google, and summer vacationing Webmasters may have missed the global release of +1 buttons to Google search sites, as well as the introduction of the Google+ project. Both are key elements to Google’s social networking initiative, designed to compete directly with Facebook by making it easier for users to connect with friends and colleagues online. The +1 button aims to bring recommendations from friends and trusted contacts into actual Google searches – potentially giving it similar weight for marketers as the Facebook Like button. Google may make up for being late to the…more»

Web recommendation site StumbleUpon has created a new widget designed to help keep users on the websites they visit. Called StumbleUpon Widgets, the new tool involves embedding a small box on a page that will include links to other content on the same site. The company claims that the service refers more traffic to external websites than any other social media organization outside of Facebook. “The widget is a way for us to offer people a better way to see curated content on a specific website that other users have surfaced,” explains Marc Leibowitz, vice president of business development at StumbleUpon. “The…more»

Google has released the first version of Swiffy, a Google Labs product that converts SWF files (Flash) to HTML5. Users only need to upload a SWF file and Swiffy produces an HTML5 version which runs in modern browsers with lots of SVG support such as Chrom and Safari. While Swiffy won’t convert all Flash content, it seems to work well for ads and basic animations. Google provides several example of SWF files converted through Swiffy. Check out the Google Chrome ad and Symphony Orchestra ad for examples. According to Google, Swiffy uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which…more»

DesignPax is a new on-demand design model that creates websites, banner ads and social media designs such as Facebook and Twitter landing pages for Web marketers in less than 48 hours. Founded by former Advertising.com executive Ayal Ebert, DesignPax is experiencing significant growth in its first year and includes Adroll, Retargeter and MyBuys as clients. The fastest-growing service provided by DesignPax is the company’s seamless creation of Facebook pages for Web marketers, accounting for 15 to 20 percent of the firm’s overall business since launching in June 2010. DesignPax is creating an interface that will allow customers to order the…more»

The people behind location-based shopping application Shopkick are offering local merchants in select cities free installation of Shopkick signal boxes that integrate with its revolutionary walk-in rewards loyalty program. Interested merchants in Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, Seattle and Washington D.C. should apply before July 1. In particular, Shopkick is looking for new retail stores, coffee shops, bakeries and yogurt shops to join its growing network of partners. Sponsored by Citi, the promotion will welcome the first 1,000 small local businesses into a program already being utilized by major retailers such as…more»

LinkedIn, the Web’s largest social network for business professionals, today announced the launch of a new integration with SlideShare which will enable content marketers to share presentations (e.g. slideshows, documents and videos) on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Share button has been added to SlideShare content, facilitating sharing throughout the LinkedIn network. The content that is shared is then visible to connections in their update stream and across the LinkedIn site, including through LinkedIn Signal. SlideShare has had a formal relationship with LinkedIn for a long time, but this feature certainly carries the potential a great deal of immediate value to users…more»

HTML5 is revolutionizing nearly every facet of Web work – from applications to layout/design. It’s importance to search engine optimization is also something to note. Website Magazine’s upcoming August issue tackles the subject of structured data but what we quickly found was that there’s much more going on that Web workers (particularly those in SEO) should definitely be aware of – for example, the meta charset tag in HTML5. Character encoding tells the browser what character set the web page is written in. Failure to specify a character set forces the browser to assume that the web page uses a…more»