Google’s Blue Dot Marks the Availability Spot
Google has announced that a service that was previewed last December is now live for mobile devices. I’ll call it the “Blue Dot of Availability” which is stupid but it’s the best I can do. This function is just more evidence that Google is making mobile a top priority and it is giving retailers the ability to come along for the ride.
The Google Mobile blog tells us more
We’re happy to announce that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you. You’ll also see how far away the stores are from you — as long as you’ve enabled My Location or manually specified your location.
Here’s a look at it as well.
The initial list of retailers for this offering looks good and it is only going to grow as one would expect. At the end of the blog post Google puts out a request for retailers interested to fill out a form to get in the game.
My only question is why do you have to click on the More tab in order to get to the Shopping tab, which this function is under. For those in the know this will work but for the general searching population they may not know that this option even exists. I know there isn’t much room on mobile screen but a cool function that is buried may never get the exposure to make it truly successful.
But heck, what do I know?! Happy shopping for your blue dot specials.
Express Yourself with Google’s New Blogger Template Designer
Don’t go for second best baby
Put your blog to the test
You know, you know, you’ve got to
Make Blogger express how it feels
And maybe then you’ll know your blog is real!
I used to be a Blogger fan. However, just like my love of Madonna, I stopped liking Blogger when it started looking tired and old. 
Well, Google has announced a new Blogger Template Designer, that might help breathe a little life into the service that arguable plays second-fiddle to WordPress.
With the new Blogger Template Designer you can–you guessed it–completely customize the look and feel of your blog–something my friend Vinny Lingham has being doing for years over at Yola.
Anyway, spam-scrapers bloggers can now enjoy these features:
- Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts and more
This video explains it further:
Google Adds Microdata Support For Rich Snippets
The Google Webmaster Central blog announced a third markup language supported for Rich Snippets. In addition to microformats and RDFa support, Google has added microdata support, which is part of the HTML5 specification.
Here is an example look at Microdata in HTML5 for use in Rich Snippets:
To learn more about Rich Snippet support in Google, [...]
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Google Reader Asks Us to Play
Google Reader Labs is adding a new way to view your feeds—Play. According to the blog announcement, this was conceived as a way to help introduce people to Google Reader—people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up” but are interested in using it. I hope both of you are happy 
.
But really this layout is primarily designed for people who want to view graphics or video—on autoplay, oh joy—and only a couple lines of any accompanying text. The white-on-black layout works well for showing off images, but not so well for that text.
Plus, to read a full article, you have to click on a “read more” link, which opens the full post within Google Reader Play—so still in the white-on-black layout that’s always so popular among people who read things online:
The layout includes many of the social features of Google Reader—the star, the Like button and the share button (the RSS button on its point). It also has a few settings: hide the thumbnail viewer, use magic layout (I only pushed that button when I had an all-text post up, though, so it didn’t do anything), view settings (All items, New items, Starred items, Liked items or Categories (to view top items in select categories)), or view the images in a post in a slideshow.
While it looks slick, I’m not sure this is going to make it any easier for people to overcome their initial aversions to the setup process—and if they want to, I don’t know, read blogs with Google Reader, they may not be a big fan of Play.
If you want to experiment with Play, you can log in to your Google Reader. View a folder and select View in Reader Play from the folder settings (above the items) or from the drop down:
I’ve tried just going to Google Reader Play, but after letting it load for ten minutes, somehow I doubt I’m going to get anything.
What do you think? Would you like to Play?
Twitter Wants Your Trust
Social media or networking or whatever it is you want to call it continues to grow at exponential rates of speed. With the “announcement” of Facebook getting its own location based service in place the concerns over privacy and safety of information continue to grow as well. Twitter realizes this concern and is working to make Twitter free from malicious users especially in light of recent phishing attacks that have created some concern in the Twitter world.
In a Twitter blog post entitled “Trust and Safety” the company says that it is concerned and is working to make the world safer for tweeters of shapes and sizes.
Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.
Sounds good and this comes on the tail of a recent Biz Stone post that described what had been going on in Twitter due to successful phishing attacks.
The new feature will not be something that most will notice and Twitter is focusing on one main area of the service that is most susceptible currently to this kind of attack.
Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.
So Twitter is framing these efforts in trying to earn your trust and improve your safety on a “proactive” basis. I wonder if they are just trying to look like the antithesis of Facebook who throws down tablets off Mt. Facebook and lets the chips fall where they may regarding privacy and other issues. Whatever the reason, it’s the safer way to go in a world where privacy looks to be less available with each passing day.
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Yahoo Updates Desktop Search Marketing Tool
During SMX West this week, Yahoo announced an update to its Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop tool for managing PPC campaigns. If you weren’t at the show to see it yourself, this Yahoo blog post details some of the upgrades that are now available:
Bulk editing: Easily make mass changes to settings such as status, match types [...]
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Google Wants Feedback On Buzz
Google is asking for user feedback and ideas for its Google Buzz product, and has setup an ideas forum using Google Moderator. After signing in with a Google account, users can submit ideas or vote on existing ideas from other users.
According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.
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Bing Adds Search History To Auto-Suggest
Bing has announced that it’s using your search history in its auto-suggest feature. In a post on its Search Blog, Bing says that “44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week,” meaning the inclusion of previous searches in auto-suggest adds to the convenience factor of searching similar topics/queries over time.
Queries from your search [...]
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Admitting Role In Google Anti-Trust Complaints Microsoft Complains Of Google “Lock In”
Responding to Google’s aggressive assertion that Microsoft is behind many of the anti-trust complaints that have been leveled against Google in the recent past, Microsoft in a blog post by Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner essentially says “get over it.”
Google claimed that Microsoft was directly or indirectly responsible for the anti-trust complaints [...]
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Even Google Employees Get Delisted
We all know someone or seen someone who’s gotten kicked out of Google SERPs. It seems like a significant proportion of these people (or at least just the vocal ones) feel this exclusion is as personal as it was in seventh grade—Susan G. didn’t like you, so she wouldn’t let you hang out with their group, and it must be the same thing with Google, right?
Tell that to the Google employee who recently realized his site had been delisted. Jason Morrison of Google Australia had his personal site removed from the index. But don’t worry, he’s not spamming or hiding keywords on a background—he just exceeded the bandwidth quota he’d set for his blog, and the server errors made Google think the site had been shut down.
In the spirit of Googly openness, Jason shares not only what was wrong, but how he discovered it through Webmaster Tools, and how he fixed it.
So the next time someone complains to you about Google being out to get them, maybe you can tell them about Jason’s case. Naturally, as TechDirt notes, this case doesn’t mean that Google never targets specific sites, but it is at least one more piece of evidence that most Google penalties are handled algorithmically.
Or maybe you should just confirm their suspicions. With their paranoia, they probably need that abuse. 
What do you think?
