Twitter is testing a new feature called “retweets” on a small percentage of accounts currently. I felt lucky to see my account has been included in to this Beta Retweets testing so I can write about it promptly.

New “retweet” button is displayed at the end of each tweet. We only see retweets of the people we follow. Retweet button enables people to forward interesting tweets to their followers. You can undo your retweets from the retweets page and get the message “your followers will no longer see the tweet as retweeted by you” message. There are retweets by you, retweets by others and your tweets, retweeted sections in retweets page. To make retweet easy to spot, they have added an icon at the beginning of retweets.

Retweet button screen shoot

Twitter is planning to see the performance of retweets and release the feature once it is ready. Social media is growing as those guys are leading people to communicate, share and spread the word around. Twitter, as a micro blogging platform became so powerful by just asking people the most simple question “What are you doing?” and today the biggest search engines like Google and Bing are racing to sync with it to use it’s power of “real-time search”. Good job Twitter!

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

All these changes are tangible success of social media. In terms of SEO, companies should socialize, use social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and keep an eye on what others tweet about themselves. I believe there is no better tool on the web that Twitter to monitor the real-time reputation of a company. Both Google and Bing index tweets and updates so it’s our job to explain our clients the importance of each comment and the consequences they might bring. Keep yourselves open to changes….

Google unveiled Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in Google I/O conference last week. Since I was not there I searched on the internet and found out what Google Wave is all about. First of all, it is something we all need to wait and experience to understand how much difference it can make in our business and daily communication needs. It seems to be a combination of email, instant messaging and micro-blogging all under the same interface. There are some terminologies which we all will become familiar with as we use Google Wave. Ok, lets have a look at it.

Above is a screenshot of how Google Wave looks like. On the left, there is your Google Wave folders and your Google contact list with images of your contacts. There is Google wave inbox in the middle of screen where you can click on any wave to open a pane for that wave on the right side of the screen. There users can see everything about that wave, respond to waves, add more people just by simply dragging pictures of people in their contact list in to the wave,  rewind back and see how that wave evolved over time, change the contents in a wave or see the changes made by other users in a wave.

People on a wave can send messages in the real-time where participants see other people’s keyboard clicks letter by letter. You can use the “Draft” mode if you don’t want people to see your words until you send them.You can also private message to someone within a wave. Your message will be kept in the content flow of the wave but that message will be displayed only to you and your private contact.

Another exciting feature of wave is that people can share images by just dragging the image in to the waves. They can also share Google Maps which can be editted, games, event invitations etc.

“Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.”

And we come to the point that mostly interests me. Waves can be used across websites on the net as they can be embedded on any blog or website. The Google Wave Embed API allows us to aggregate conversations on third party websites, anywhere in the web in our website. Visitors will be able to see waves and they can join in and participate to the waves from websites. Those messages will directly be published in the original wave. This can be a great online marketing and communication tool to promote products, get valuable straight feedback from the clients, enable real-time communication, and extend our networks.

Google wave is open-sourced and it will evolve by the help of developers over time and will be a product created by it’s own users.  Developers can build their own apps just like Facebook and iGoogle within waves which will bring new advertising opportunities as well.

Google wave will be available later this year. You can sign up for Google Wave updates and be informed about when it is coming a live.

Here is a long official video of Google wave.  Enjoy it.

Twitter made a deal with major mobile operators Telus, Virgin Mobile, and Koodo Mobile in Canada that enable two-way SMS support for mobile phone users in Canada to send and receive Twitter updates without any additional fees from their mobiles via SMS.

Mobile tweets are treated as standard messages and are charged with standart rates. Twitter says they want to extend real-time networking experience to mobile devices everywhere through the simple technology of SMS and are working on this service on the rest of the world right now.

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Last week Google launced a new gadget for Google Friend Connect called “Get Answers”. The gadget provides community interaction and engagement to websites such as users can ask questions to website’s community, answer questions asked by other community members and vote answers. Also they can see automatic answers by Google for their questions. The good thing is as long as you become a member to any website which is very easy, other community members can see your profile and visit your website so the gadget is helpful in terms of driving traffic to community members websites as well. I have just added Get Answers Gadget on this site and can’t wait for your participation

Furthermore, as a siteowner, you can get feedback about your content, revise your website depending on the expectations of your community by enhancing user engagement with Get Answers. Don’t worry, you have control over the content such as deleting the questions or answers if you don’t find them appropriate.

It takes just a few steps to set up Goggle Friend Connect Gadget for your website. You need to have a Google account, upload 2 files to the server of your website then get the code to paste in to your website. Easy as a pie! Let me know when you start using the widget so I will visit you and maybe ask you some tricky questions

Join in now!

I wanted to find out how other SEO’s prioritize their on-page SEO strategies so I created a poll on my Linkedin Profile.

The topic is: “Which one of the following is the most important factor in on-page SEO?”

If you would like to vote and see results, please go to my Linkedin poll now!

Thank you for your participation in advance. Keep in touch.