Facebook will add friend location information starting next month, according to a report in The New York Times. To be introduced at the F8 developer conference in April, Facebook status geolocation will enable you to share with your friends the location from where you submitted your update.

via Facebook, Twitter Ready Location-Based Features – PCWorld.

Not many companies could get away with defending controversial data retention practices by saying that the data is needed to “learn from good guys, fight off bad guys, [and] invent the future.” But that’s how Google sees itself and its practices—not surprising from a company that would give itself an unofficial motto like “don’t be evil.”

I had the chance recently to sit down with two of Google’s top privacy people: deputy general counsel Nicole Wong and security/privacy engineer Alma Whitten. While the “good guy/bad guy” and “don’t be evil” quotes may seem too cute by half to some, Wong and Whitten made a strong pitch for the truth of both slogans. In their view, Google really is fighting the good fight when it comes to your online privacy.

Why Google keeps your data forever, tracks you with ads.

BBC News has a very cool interactive chart up, showing how Internet had grown from 1998 to 2008 in various parts of the world.

In 1998., the only countries with significant Internet usage were USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. Of course, I remember using the Internet in Croatia every day back then, but it’s true: for most people, it was “this new thing” and it didn’t play a very important part of our everyday lives.

Moving the slider below the charts forward into future, you can see how quickly Western Europe adopted the Internet, with over 31% of people being online in most European countries by 2005. In Africa, however, the numbers are dismal, even today. Check out the interactive chart over at the BBC News website.

via Growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2008 [INFOGRAPHIC].

CHICAGO (TheStreet) — Glance at a company’s Web site, and you’ll get a quick insight into its soul. Businesses that strive to be hip invest in the latest bells and whistles, while others put up just-the-facts homepages that value clarity more than cleverness.

In recent years, small-business owners outside the tech industry have become more comfortable putting a personal stamp on their sites, posting blogs and adding comment sections. But they often overlook a critical element of their site’s design: Can people find it online?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the cornerstones of 21st-century marketing for large corporations and tech-savvy companies. “Optimizing” a Web site means tailoring its layout and content to make sure it shows up near the top of the results for related searches.

How to Bring Customers to Your Web Site | Small Business Solutions | Financial Articles & Investing News | TheStreet.com.

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We all make common web design mistakes. You must have read a lot about how to create an interesting website, or a good design or a user friendly design. But not all of them focus on one major aspect that is equally important.

Just as how important it is to drive traffic to your website, it is equally important to see to it that there is a minimum level of traffic that is driven away from your website. In short, it is important to reduce the bounce rate of your website. Here are a few points that will help you understand what you should not be doing when creating a website.

via Top 5 Web Design Mistakes.

This would be a dramatic change from Internet Explorer 8, which is not known for its HTML5 compliance for a reason. Thar reason? It has nearly none. This is hardly surprising, Microsoft browsers have for time immemorial lagged behind the market on adoption of the current standards of the internet.

Even worse, given the pervasive use of Internet Explorer 6 (a browser so old it does not support tabbed browsing), Internet Explorer users are often stuck in 2001, when the browser came out. Microsoft seems to be out to finally catch up with the rest of the world’s browsers, and perhaps run past them in certain areas.

via Internet Explorer 9 To Be HTML5 Compatible – Microsoft Joining The Anti-Flash Movement?.

All he wanted to do was buy some flowers for his grandmother and his sweetheart.

Now a North Side man is suing Groupon — the company behind the wildly popular website offering daily deals at everything from eateries to retail outlets — alleging the discounted gift certificates he purchased to a local florist weren’t quite the deal he thought they were.

Specifically, Daniel Keeler purchased three $40 gift certificates, each valued at $80, for Grow Flower Shop in the NBC Tower, but when he attempted to redeem them earlier this year, he was told he’d have to pony up $20 for each of the three arrangements he wanted to send, according to the lawsuit filed in Cook County Circuit Court.

The suit not only alleges breach of contract, but accuses the company of violating Illinois law by offering non-food gift certificates with expiration periods shorter than five years. In Keeler’s case he purchased the gift certificates in July 2009, and they expire in July 2010.

“All he agreed to when he bought the gift certificate was that he would give them ‘X’ amount of money for ‘X’ amount of goods,” attorney William Gray said, noting that there no mention of an additional delivery fee. “And at no time did he agree to the illegal expiration date, instead they added these illegal terms.”

Gray, a Chicago attorney, filed the class action lawsuit on Keeler’s and other customers behalf.

via North Side man sues Groupon over alleged raw deal :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Lifestyles.

via Google Index to Go Real Time.

- Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village 08.11.09

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

Google expressed regret to some of its third-generation Irish-American users on Smithwood between Barlow and Lake.

Added Schmidt, “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

via Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

via 45 Creative Resumes to Seize Attention | Inspiration.

Can You Guess Them All?

Not only is “influential” difficult to measure, but “design” is also nigh on impossible to define neatly. Nonetheless, we decided to put together a list of some of the design world’s most influential movers and shakers. From design thinkers to hands-on design doers in industries from graphics to industrial to auto design, our chosen 27 luminaries represent a diverse cross-section of design disciplines. But all those selected have one thing in common: They are in some way responsible for shaping the world around us.

via World’s Most Influential Designers: Can You Guess Them All? – BusinessWeek.

He also touches on the reason Google typically doesn’t penalize your website for spammy in-bounds links. If Google penalized websites for any type of in-bound link(s), then competitors would be building the worst links possible to each other attempting to remove competition from the search results.

via How Comments Impact Search Engine Rank.

BOTW Internet Web Directory organized by category, offers content rich and well designed web sites. Submit URL for editor review and have your site listed within the Best of the Web Directory.

Submit to BOTW

2. Show Old Work

3. Lower Your Rates

4. Offer Discounts

5. Be Shy

6. Do Spec Work

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8. Say Yes to Everything

Read the details here:

8 Ways to Get Shitty Clients | Fringe Focus.

Google (Google) launched real-time search in December, providing a real-time feed of information from Yahoo Answers, Twitter (Twitter), blogs, news websites, and other sources for hot or trending search results.

Two integrations have lagged though: MySpace (MySpace) and Facebook (Facebook). Eight days ago, Google added MySpace updates to its stream. And now Google has added Facebook Pages to the mix.

Still, Google’s stream doesn’t include public Facebook profiles, something only rival search engine Bing (Bing) can access. This limits the usefulness of today’s update, but we still welcome the addition.

via Google Adds Facebook Pages to Real-time Search.

The problem: Apple believes that Flash shouldn’t be part of the web’s future. Instead, the company believes that HTML5 is what will define the web and would love to see more developers adopt it instead of Flash. Now that big video sites such as YouTube (YouTube) are testing support for HTML5, Steve could be getting his wish.

via HTML5 Knocks Out Adobe Flash in Reader Vote.

In recent years, small-business owners outside the tech industry have become more comfortable putting a personal stamp on their sites, posting blogs and adding comment sections. But they often overlook a critical element of their site’s design: Can people find it online?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the cornerstones of 21st-century marketing for large corporations and tech-savvy companies. “Optimizing” a Web site means tailoring its layout and content to make sure it shows up near the top of the results for related searches.

via How to Bring Customers to Your Web Site | Small Business Solutions | Financial Articles & Investing News | TheStreet.com.

This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects.

So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. While one could apply many approaches, techniques and principles to UI design in general, our focus here will be on business Web applications.

via Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications – Smashing Magazine.

While it’s important to know and practice the basics principles of SEO in the way you set up your blogs structure and in the writing of your posts – I find it can be very worthwhile periodically going back through key old posts to optimize them even further. I’ve used the following process for a while now and in most cases where I do it I find I’m able to increase my ranking for different posts.

I’m not the world’s best SEO but here’s the process that I use in doing this (I invite you to share yours in comments if you do this type of thing) – I hope you find it useful:

via Optimize a Single Post On Your Blog for SEO.

Slide deck from Thomas Fuchs’s presentation at Webstock 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand, with him ranting about Flash (just a little!), and showing all sorts of up- and coming awesome web technologies (like HTML5 video, Canvas, SVG/VML and WebGL). Plus you can’t go wrong with a JavaScript-based C64 emulator.

Note that it’s really full of videos, something you regrettably can’t see when viewing the deck

via mir.aculo.us with Thomas Fuchs » Blog Archive » I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!.

Google has been testing a new local ad feature. You know when you search something local on Google and it presents a map with local businesses listed to the right? Well, the new feature is hanging out in there.

Look at the screenshot below, from the Google LatLong blog. You’ll notice one of the listings has a yellow box with the words “View Photos” next to it. The word “Sponsored” appears at the end, indicating the presence of an ad.

So far, this new ad feature has been tested in San Jose and Houston. There’s a flat fee of $25 a month in the Local Business Center dashboard to access the feature.

Google says that purchasing these ads has no influence on rankings, despite their inclusion right along there with them. The feature will be rolled out to additional cities, but there is no timeline planned. Enhanced ads can link to photos, video, coupons, directions, reservation sign-ups, or menus.

Link

After an initial outcry, Google agreed to change “awesome” to “rad,” and to only send out the message to people who are, according to the company’s top-secret online research, not too worried about privacy.

via Alt Text: Google Knows You’re Buzzing About Buzz | Underwire | Wired.com.

After a couple years of false starts, aborted mergers, and other behind-the-scenes mishaps, Microsoft and Yahoo are ready to form a search partnership to better compete against Google, which continues to blow away its competitors in online search. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s Bing engine will power both the Bing and Yahoo search sites, with any differentiation coming at a more superficial level.

It’s not exactly clear yet how Yahoo will add value to Bing’s search results. According to the companies’ press release, “Yahoo will innovate around those listings by integrating rich Yahoo content, enhanced listings with conveniently organized information about key topics, and tools to tailor the experience for Yahoo users.”

via Search Engine Wars: Is Yahoo Doomed to be the Next Alta Vista? – PCWorld.