Last night on "30 Rock," Alec Baldwin's character got lost within New York's subway system, and due to being covered in bedbugs, received no help from his fellow passengers.  But if the same thing happened to him (or a non-fictional person) today, Google Maps could have come to the rescue. A post on the LatLong Blog announced this afternoon, "[Y]ou can now see New York's subway lines drawn out directly on Google Maps as part of the transit layer.  To turn it on, just... Read Full Story

With Thanksgiving just a few weeks' away consumers are already starting to search for deals online. Over the last seven days fifty percent of the top "Black Friday" related search terms include ads, sales and deals, according to Google Insights for Search. The Google Retail Advertising Blog provides more details. "Interestingly, when we look at Black Friday rising searches over the last 7 days, we see that 'Early Black Friday' is the second rising search term, meaning it has ... Read Full Story

On September 15th, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook "now serves 300 million people across the world."  It seems the site's growth hadn't exactly come to a stop, either, as about a month and a half later, stats indicate the number of users has risen to at least 325 million. This isn't a case of comScore versus Hitwise or Compete versus Nielsen discrepancies.  Nick O'Neill reported today, "According to Facebook's own advertising statistics . . . the company is n... Read Full Story

eBay said Friday that the investor group led by Silver Lake has reached a settlement agreement with Joltid Limited and Joost N.V. that gives Skype ownership over all software licensed from Joltid and ends all litigation against the investor group and eBay at the closing of the acquisition. As part of the settlement agreement, Joltid and Skype founders Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis will join the investor group, contributing Joltid software and making a significant capital investment in exc... Read Full Story

Causes is a social networking donation platform that uses MySpace so that people can raise money for causes or issues that they believe in. Generally these kinds of activities help provide a community around issues like Breast Cancer, or stop smoking, or other issues that are part of our daily life. Causes is an excellent application that makes the process of raising and donating money for a specific cause very easy and embeddable into someone’s MySpace page. Last night according to Rea... Read Full Story

Back in July Facebook updated policies for third-party ads on Facebook Platform. The company disabled two entire ad networks and over 100 more apps were suspended or brought into compliance over ad-related violations. Half of those had over a million monthly active users. Facebook has now disabled two more offer and ad networks, which the company says have repeatedly violated its policies. This has all been part of Facebook's continued action against deceptive ads. The company has addressed ... Read Full Story

Google's music service in China hasn't achieved much so far; no one should look for Google's next quarterly financial report to say it's brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue or toppled Baidu.  But neither has it failed, and one person who's close to the service recently indicated that it's picking up steam. Gary Chen is close by merit of being the founder and CEO of Orca Digital.  Orca Digital owns Top100.cn, which is Google's partner in the venture. As for what C... Read Full Story

Google CEO Eric Schmidt while appearing on Fox Business made some interesting comments about Google's emergence as a huge Microsoft-like business power. I thought most interesting was Schmidt's statement about Google becoming like Microsoft, "Hopefully, we won't repeat the mistakes that Microsot made ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that happened with them". Schmidt elaborated: "In our case we see ourselves as a disruptor, and a disruptor because we ar... Read Full Story

I’ll admit that Blogger is becoming more and more appealing to use over the years compared to WordPress. When I first started blogging, I used Blogger but quickly jumped over to WordPress due to my interest in earning money on my blog using contextual based advertising, such as AdSense. Since that time, Blogger has really stepped thing up and things have been made a lot easier towards earning money with Google AdSense. Forward motion continues now that you can manage and utilize AdSens... Read Full Story

I probably don't have to tell you that many businesses are still struggling with the concept of using social media. Many simply can't find a good reason to use it at all, and many more find themselves using it but struggling to validate that use. They can't find the ROI. They feel that too much time is being wasted. Basically, they're just using social networks because they feel like they're supposed to. They just want to keep up. Many businesses are even banning social media from the workp... Read Full Story