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People with an insider’s knowledge of Microsoft say that the company will make an announcement soon that Facebook posts will appear in Bing’s search results in the near future. Microsoft has said that posts from Twitter users have already been integrated into its new search engine’s search results. It’s also possible that posts from other social media sites will also be included in the future.

The president of Microsoft’s online services division, Qi Lu, was expected to make the announcement about the integrated search results at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group, Yusuf Mehdi, is expected to conduct a demonstration of the new capabilities of the Bing search engine.

Microsoft’s deal with Twitter, which is expected to be nonexclusive, has reportedly been included in the company plans for many weeks. Microsoft engineers had already included Twitter posts into Bing in anticipation of the announcement. The terms of Microsoft’s deal are not expected to be disclosed, but a person inside the deal who wished to remain anonymous said that negotiations included a payment from Microsoft to Twitter.

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Many Internet users don’t know that some Internet service providers allow certain sites to load faster than others do. However, the debate over “network neutrality” is gathering momentum again in Washington and e-commerce sites may finally get to compete on a level playing field if legislation is passed to make access to all websites equal. ISPs and Arizona Senator John McCain lead the opposition to this legislation. Whether the debate will favor e-retailers is still very much in doubt.

The Federal Communications Commission recently proposed new rules that would prevent giant Internet service providers, such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others, from allowing the transmittal of web traffic of some websites at faster speeds than others allow. These ISPs claim that they should be able to charge more to send some traffic at higher speeds since streaming content for television shows and videos are chewing up large chunks of bandwidth and straining network capacity.

Many Internet companies and retailers favor network neutrality, arguing that allowing Internet users equal access to all online content promotes innovation and growth of the web, especially smaller companies that can’t afford to pay more for faster transmission.

Continue reading " Online Retailers Wish for Online "Network Neutrality" and May Get It " »

After suffering setbacks due to the recession, Internet advertising appears to be recovering well ahead of predictions. While advertising in traditional media like newspapers and magazines continues to founder, resulting in layoffs and pay cuts, advertising online seems to be gathering steam again. Kent State professor and former media analyst Lauren Rich Fine recently said that advertising in traditional media, classified sections in newspapers in particular, will never recover to pre-recession levels.

This forecast is in sharp contrast to the growing number of advertisers steadily increasing their online advertising budgets where more of their target audience spends their free time. Further worsening conditions for older media outlets, advertising online is less expensive, and an online advertiser’s return on investment is much easier to measure and track. Even companies that have longstanding advertising relationships with television networks and publishers are realizing that they need a strong marketing presence on the Internet, too.

"You can draw a straight line from the time when people hear an ad on the radio or television to when they search for that company on the Internet," said David Karnstedt, chief executive of Efficient Frontier, which helps manage ad campaigns on search engines.

Continue reading " Internet Advertising Regaining Momentum " »

Yahoo’s chief executive has warned investors to expect a steep decline in the company’s business since she took the job in January 2009. Carol Bartz called Yahoo’s results "a solid third quarter" recently, but industry analysts were less impressed with its recovery. The company has cut costs since Bartz became boss and sold some of the company’s assets, but the biggest revenue gains by far have come from better-than-expected cash flow from the company’s display ads. Those three factors led to a tripling of Yahoo’s net income for the third quarter of 2009, much better than industry analysts had predicted.

The positive income report sent shares of Yahoo’s stock sharply higher in after-hours trading. However, the company reported that its revenue dropped 12 percent during the quarter, an indication that many advertisers are skittish about the pace of the country’s economic recovery. An interpretation of the drop in revenue was that Yahoo did not benefit from the nascent economic turnaround as much as its chief rival, Google, did. Some analysts said that the results were encouraging, but tempered their optimism by saying that Ms. Bartz’s plans for recovery remained a work in progress.

“The patient is off life support and back in the recovery ward,” said an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But it is certainly not out playing soccer again.”

Continue reading " Despite Sales Decline, Yahoo Profits Triple " »

After four decades, the Internet heads for the biggest change in its history. Participants in a meeting in Seoul, Korea, are expected to approve the use of international domain names written in languages other than English. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization that monitors domain names around the world, is considering allowing Internet addresses in characters other than Latin letters. In the not too distant future, it may be a common sight to see URLs expressed in lettering as diverse as Greek, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other languages on advertising in sports stadiums and other common advertising outlets.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expected the board to grant approval for the change on the conference's final day.

The birth of the Internet began with a transmission of data from UCLA to Stanford University in 1969. In the early 1990s, its availability and purpose grew from military, scientific and academic applications to the boundless purposes it serves today. If the changes are approved as expected, a spokesperson for ICANN said that the organization would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names very soon, and the first entries of the new URLs would probably be implemented sometime in mid-2010.

Thrush said that the creation of a translation system that allows conversion of multiple scripts to the correct address was the single largest development that enables this change.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

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