Ever try searching for something on Twitter?  My past experience is it can be hit or miss, at best.  But think of the vast amount of information available on Twitter and how fast it moves.  Without a good search in place much of this info flows right past without ever being seen.  Especially if you’re following lots of people.

Twitter recently announced two pretty important new features; its own version of photo sharing and a new version of Twitter search.

Search is said to be a complete re-write with the aim of making it more relevant or personal.  The Twitter engineering team says this will be accomplished by filtering out tweets that do not receive good interaction from other users.  On the surface at least, this seems like a good idea to me.  Ranking tweets that have high levels of engagement accordingly would seem like the best way to deliver relevance to someone who is using a social search engine to find something.  This is a way to pattern search results after the social importance of an individual tweet.

Twitter will also filter out duplicates so that should take care of the dozens (or even hundreds) of re-tweets that could potentially show up in results.

Twitter claims that currently the network averages more than 2,200 tweets every second.  It also claim that search averages 1.6 billion queries per day.  That’s a lot of information pouring into the network and lots of people trying to sift through it all.  If Twitter can succeed in making search more relevant, this could be a fantastic opportunity to have your content found online.

I am keeping this post short:

Google rolls out +1 Button Internet-wide

Google +1 Comes to YouTube, Android Market, TechCrunch

WordPress Plugin Google +1 Button

Hey, if you like this short post, +1 it in the lower right.

A big question on many people’s lips these days is whether or not college is really worth the money.  College does often allow for people to get higher paying jobs, but many times people who enter into humanities programs often find that their degree, while expensive, yields little in return.

It’s not just those with humanities degrees that are feeling the exorbitant costs and minimal returns associated with a college education, but if you have been checking the news there has been a tremendous amount of articles recently reporting how lawyers are taking massive hits in their salary, if they are able to be employed at all, out of college.  Couple this with the fact that many of the most successful people on the planet are college drop outs: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg…and you will start to see why many people are moving away from the traditional college path.

One businessman has taken the concept to an interesting end.

Cammarata is one of two dozen winners of a scholarship just awarded by San Francisco tech tycoon Peter Thiel that comes with a unique catch: The recipients are being paid not to go to college.

Instead, these teenagers and 20-year-olds are getting $100,000 each to chase their entrepreneurial dreams for the next two years. (Yahoo)

Thiel is looking for these kids to become the 2.0 of the men I previously mentioned.  Is it a smart idea?  Is college a smart idea?  Or do we need to start looking in different directions if we truly want innovative and creative thinkers who are going to provide the jobs of tomorrow?

Did you hear about Google Wallet last week?  We all know that mobile is changing everything.  How and where we work.  Certainly how we communicate. How we search the web.  And more recently, how we shop.

Barcode apps for our phones already allow us to check prices and read reviews in a store while we have a product in our hands.  QR Codes are being used to make expanded marketing pitches at critical points of interaction with consumers.  Location based services like Foursquare let us receive discounts and specials when we “check in.”  Now Google has announced the first digital shopping system that will integrate a payment system and coupons into mobile devices.

Google Wallet will use an NFC (Near Field Communication) chip built into a mobile phone to give consumers a level of convenience and potential savings not possible before.  This will further disrupt print ad type advertising that is used to market to cost conscious consumers.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that any long term internet marketing strategy that includes consumers must contain a mobile component.  Google Places is already effecting SEO for local terms.  As marketing dollars continue to move from print advertising to internet based advertising and society continues to embrace the mobile lifestyle, the most successful marketers will know how to integrate mobile.

Google Wallet is the first of what will surely be many attempts to use mobile technology to gain the attention of consumers in a very noisy advertising space.  Apple is also reportedly working on an NFC equipped iPhone and I’m quite sure a competitive offering to Google Wallet.

A well placed marketing message can eliminate much of the clutter that competes for attention.  What better place than the moment the buying decision is being made?

“Thirty years of scientific research has put the answers to these questions within our reach. We have learned not only how to distinguish those who will grow after failure from those who will collapse, but also how to build the skills of people in the latter category.”

Sound interesting?

The above quotation comes from an article from the Harvard Business Review which can be found at this link.  Seligman is a noted practitioner of positive psychology and has long touted how positivity can make the difference between becoming a success or a failure.

In another portion of the article Seligman says the following about how people can be expected to react to crisis:

In November 2008, when the legendary General George W. Casey, Jr., the army chief of staff and former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, asked me what positive psychology had to say about soldiers’ problems, I offered a simple answer: How human beings react to extreme adversity is normally distributed. On one end are the people who fall apart into PTSD, depression, and even suicide. In the middle are most people, who at first react with symptoms of depression and anxiety but within a month or so are, by physical and psychological measures, back where they were before the trauma. That is resilience. On the other end are people who show post-traumatic growth. They, too, first experience depression and anxiety, often exhibiting full-blown PTSD, but within a year they are better off than they were before the trauma. These are the people of whom Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

So when it comes to all things in life we have to decide what kind of people we want to be: Those who fall apart, those who flow along with the situation, or those who actively grow from each setback. In relation to business, almost everyone you know who is a massive success had trials and tribulations to overcome, and it was overcoming those events and growing from them that helped to make them a success. If you can adopt some of Seligman’s positive psychology in your own life, you might just find that your business is better because of it.

Have you noticed all the peculiar, square images like the one at the right showing up everywhere?  Those are called QR Codes (QR stands for Quick Response) and they are beginning to play an important role in marketing campaigns.

In the past marketers placed URLs in online and offline ads to direct consumers to additional information on their websites.  Maybe a free offer, a discount coupon, or an opportunity to sign up to a list to get some useful information.

Of course the person responding to the call to action had to type in the URL.  If someone is sitting at their keyboard, then this might be the way to go.  But what if they saw the ad and were nowhere near their computer?

With the sharp increase in the number of smartphones in consumers’ hands, and our tendency towards more mobile lifestyles, QR Codes hold lots of promise for marketers looking to increase responses to their calls to action.

All iPhones, Android phones, and Blackberry devices have apps available that will read these codes and direct consumers to any browser based destination that a marketer desires.  Are the wheels spinning?  Think of all the uses for QR Codes in the marketing world.

How about linking to a short video that communicates your message?  An offer to sign up via email to receive discounts or valuable information?  A time sensitive and location based discount at a restaurant?  A link to a page with application data for a product in a home improvement store?  The possibilities are endless.

And right now there is a huge coolness factor as consumers are anxious to try out their futuristic apps on their mobile devices.  What ways can you think of to put QR Codes to work in your business?

According to the recent news, Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com extends their commitment with Facebook by using Facebook in order to increase and widen Bing’s search engine features and capabilities. They made this improvement in order to excel among their competitors, most specifically Google. They believe that by doing this, they can make every search experience of every online visitor a fun and exciting one.

The following areas are included in the agreement between Facebook and Microsoft: It is agreed between the two companies that the search engine of Microsoft’s Bing.com will have an automatic access to all the data and information, including the personal information as well as pictures, of all the users of Facebook. They said that by doing this, they can make every search result in Bing come have a personal touch such as when searching for places, information, movies, people, and many other things.

The actual details about this plan have not been fully disclosed by both parties, saying that they will just surprise people with this new feature. This seems to be good on the surface, but many people have concerns about it such as what if their personal details show on the search engine and what if someone takes their information and uses it in the wrong way. Facebook officials are addressing this issue by saying that the Facebook user can either choose whether they agree with this or not.

Bing will show the file of the person once it is searched. With this, Facebook users can easily search for their old friends, lost loved ones, and people that they know as long as they are a Facebook user.

There is a whole lot more to watch out for in this joint venture with these two great companies. Be sure to look for more in the coming weeks as this unfolds.