Google’s widget ads announced

Suddenly, a lot of major players have started announcing widget advertising initiatives. This time, it’s google announcing the launch of their widget gadget ads, which will now be available to select adwords advertisers.

Google Gadget Ads have been spotted before, but now Google made them official with a press release – albeit they’re still only available to some select AdWords advertisers. Gadget Ads, as opposed to normal text link or image ads, contain interactive content such as Flash or HTML connected to a potentially updating data source… as they’re part of the iGoogle gadgets API. Google presents a gadget ad example (a small Flash game, basically) saying that of the 94.5 million impressions the ad got, it was interacted with 0.3% of the time.

Google Gadget Ads - Google Blogoscoped

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BTW, In other (bigger) google news that I just read (I’m catching up with the RSS feeds after almost a week of social media inactivity), Adsense for Mobile was also announced yesterday!

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Amazon 2.0s it’s affiliate program even more, launches (monetizable) Widgets

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

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Amazon adds NBC shows to Unbox

In a Press release Amazon posted a few moments ago (and only a few days after Apple decided to stop selling NBC shows on iTunes), they announce the availability of NBC shows for download at Amazon Unbox - the (unfortunately DRMed) Tivo-compatible video download service.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and NBC Universal today announced that a wealth of quality TV content from NBC Universal is now available on Amazon Unbox (http://unbox.amazon.com), Amazon.com’s digital video download service. Amazon Unbox and NBC Universal are offering customers a variety of content packages, including up to 30 percent off when purchasing full seasons of their favorite TV series.

Popular NBC shows now available on Amazon Unbox include the Emmy(R) Award-winning series The Office, the critically acclaimed drama Heroes, and Emmy(R)-nominated comedy 30 Rock. Beginning on September 10, Amazon Unbox customers can download for free — in advance of their network premieres — the pilot episodes of NBC’s new shows Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. New episodes will be available on Amazon Unbox the day after they air on TV.

NBC Universal Television Content Now Available on Amazon Unbox

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mylivesearch beta goes live, doesn’t even support Firefox!

Just got my beta invite from my live search - a search engine startup that claims to be the “first true live search engine”.

I’d been looking forward for this beta launch for some time, and was pretty excited upon getting the email with a username and password to test out the brand new SE. I logged in from an ubuntu desktop with firefox that I use as my primary computer at work. What do I see upon logging in? not a search engine, but this:

Your browser/operating system is not currently supported by Mylivesearch.

Wow! a search engine is supposed to be the most basic of web-apps. heh, what are these guys thinking by not supporting, of all things, the firefox browser?!

Update: Just checked again from a kubuntu laptop with firefox, looks like they are supporting firefox now, but I still can’t search from the linux OS - Mac and Linux support, is coming soon, states the page I am shown in place of any search results.

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The Official eBay facebook App goes live

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

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Twitter goes the No-Follow route

Apparently, This happened at least as early as 8th of this month.

Folks, remove Twitter from your list of PageRank sources and drop links for fun and traffic only. I wonder whether particular people change their linking behavior on Twitter or not. I won’t.

Just another victim of the nofollow plague (Sebastian’s Pamphlets)

[via Robert Scoble’s Link blog]

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Amazon Flexible Payments Service is US only

So, Amazon just launched the Flexible Payments Service as a part of their webservices offering - what looks like, from the pricing and other details on the page to be something very useful except for the fact that they are only offering the service to those with a credit card issued by a US bank.

Translated for me and my company, this means that paypal and the international merchant account with CCavenue are the only two ways a business physically not located in the US but doing business there can accept payments.

I was totally hoping that this would be an international service not just limited to the US when this was first announced. Nevermind though, paypal still rocks! (Yes, I read all the negative comments about paypal, but it’s just a question of using the service wisely and not falling for phishing, etc. attempts, while also offering consumers a second option other than paypal to pay for their purchases. Paypal IS secure and protects from fraud as long as the sellers and buyers take the standard common-sense fraud-prevention measures themselves first, and leave the rest on the payment service)

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Amazon.com - THE Web 2.0 success story

Not Google, not Facebook, I nominate Amazon for the best Web 2.x Success story award.

The betting before Amazon.com posted second-quarter earnings was that it couldn’t live up to the 80% uptick in its stock price so far this year. But the rising number of short-sellers who have been hoping for Amazon’s comeuppance took it in the shorts instead. Amazon’s stunning 257% jump in profits on a 35% rise in sales surprised even the bulls. Its stock is up more than 8% almost 12% in the initial minutes after the market closed.

Amazon Blows ‘Em Away Again - BusinessWeek

Of course, the reason Amazon is my favorite web 2.x -enabled company because it adapted itself so quickly and so perfectly to the changing internet, that it would have gone unnoticed if their earnings didn’t reflect all this growth. They have been into open web services, affiliate marketing, user generated content, and all the web 2.x buzzword things since even before those words were first used.

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Shoppero.com - A Social Shopping Network that Pays Back

This is the new PPC - Pay Per Contribution.

I talked about NuVy.com here a few days ago, a social shopping network that pays users to upload video product reviews. Mashable, Today announced the launch of another social shopping network with a similar concept - to reward it’s users for contributing to the network - with cash.

Shoppero enables its users to write product reviews which get centrally bundled through the platform and can be advertised by users implementing adgets [widgets] in their own sites[and social network profiles, blogs, etc]. The resulting advertising revenues are being split among Shoppero.de and the users — The latter receiving 20% of the ad-revenues from the pages created by themselves and 60% of the ad-revenues generated by linking to the Shoppero portal. Reaching the minimum total of 25 Euros will trigger a payout to the user via PayPal at the end of the month.

This is (maybe not these particular websites, but the concept in general) the future of social networking - The basis of any economy, including what is being called the “Attention Economy” is, ultimately, Money. If users of a social network help them make money, the users MUST have a share in the revenues of the network.

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Affiliate marketing 2.0 needs innovation - not clones

TechCrunch Reports that a web 2.0 digg clone for deals - Trezr.com is selling on eBay.

Trezr has a rather clever way of making money, by monetizing outbound links through affiliate programs with Commission Junction, Linkshare, Amazon, and Performics. However, the site hasn’t generated significant traffic since launch at the end of last year.

The reason why they haven’t generated traffic enough to be able to run the website - is because there are TONS of such similar websites on the internet. There’s dealigg, chitika just launched a website that does exactly the same thing, there are at least 4 or 5 such other “digg clones for deals” that I won’t even try and remember the names of - have come and gone in the last two years. These things can’t work - certainly can’t be superhit ventures unless something that is very unique and very useful that is being offered.

Web 2.0 success is based on one rule - Innovate, don’t clone.

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