Engineers of popular networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace released a browser bookmarklet called “Don’t Be Evil,” in response to Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” feature.

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” feature is supposed to integrate social network data into search results, but it only pulls data from Google+ and Picasa at the moment.

Twitter criticized changes, saying they artificially inflate Google+ above its natural position if measured by popularity around the web. Moreover, the changes will result in finding the most relevant information difficult.

External commentators have also accused Google of betraying its original aims – to give the broadest view of the most popular links on the web – in order to boost Google+ artificially.

The new bookmarklet, “Don’t Be Evil” (at jab at Google’s informal motto), alters Google search results to make them more like they were before “Search Plus Your World” was launched.

Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet and other resources can be found at FocusOnTheUser.org. To install, click the button that says “Try a More Relevant Google.” Then, drag the “don’t be evil” button into the browser bar of Firefox or Safari. Chrome users can get the extension over at http://www.focusontheuser.org/extensions.php.

While Google insisted that Facebook and Twitter did not allow sufficient access to their sites for Google to be able to integrate results from them into its search, and that Google+ was not being favoured, search engine analyst Danny Sullivan shows that the new “Don’t be evil” tool offers what seems objectively a far more accurate reflection of the popularity of different pages on the web.

The code was created by Blake Ross, director of product at Facebook, with help from Twitter and MySpace.

Lately, Facebook users has a reason more to officially rejoice since the company has increase the status update limit to 63,206 characters, apparently 400 times more than Twitter.

Facebook has keep increasing its limit. Originally, the limit was restricted to 160 characters. Later in March 2009, the company increase the limit to 420 characters. But in 2011, Facebook has increased the character limit three times. By July 2011, the limit was pumped up to 500 characters and within a couple of months to 5,000 characters in September and now has been boosted by over 10 times.

Bob Baldwin, the software engineer who set the new number, wrote on his Facebook wall “I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) – K … 64206 – 1000 = 63206 ”.

The company explains that the average novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in nine posts by the users.

Twitter as of now has been built around the infamous short, 140-character, however the limit of Google+ appears to be 100,000. We wonder if Facebook will overcome Google+ character limit but if so do,hopefully with reasons.

facebook 1 trillion page-views

Google’s ad subsidiary, DoubleClick on Wednesday reported that Facebook has reached a massive landmark of 1 trillion page-views per month in June and July respectively. No other website comes any close to the social networking giant’number, even the search engine giant, Google itself.

Though Facebook official membership has not reached one billion figure, but the number of unique visitors who flock Facebook every month is much higher, standing at 870 million. So whether users or non users, there are lot of people visiting the top social networking giant in the world thus reaching 46.9 % of all internet users and indeed making it the single most visited website on the internet.

According to the statistics, in July each visitor has an average 1,150 pageviews of the site, which is completely too high as compared to other sites. It accounts for each single view of a photo, profile or each click of a link by a user leading into Facebook- all counts for Facebook ads. To no wonders, Facebook says that its users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site.

Facebook becomes the first to reached this million million milestone. However, this list doesn’t include adult website, other ad networks, domain that don’t have publicly visible contents or don’t load properly and various Google sites. Following are the data of 10 most visited websites published by Google’s Doubleclick ad unit:

doubleclick ad statistics of 10 most visited websites _ june 2011

Google+ has now joined the race of offering online games on its competing social network platform to attract more users. On Thursday, it announced to offer 16 games from 10 game companies including well known games-Zynga Poker, Angry Birds and Bejeweled. Besides, Google+ is hoping for more investment in social games and is expected to roll out more games gradually.

With the two social giants competing to attract more users to their respective online services, Google+ move to add games is a direct hit to the gaming system of Facebook.

In response, Facebook on Thursday evening unveiled a series of changes to its online-gaming and added new features to improve the gaming experience. It will roll out a live real-time game ticker that gives updates on friends’ activity on apps and games as they play, increase the size of its gaming screen and allow users to bookmark their favorite games on the home screen.

The recent move of Facebook is a necessary measures to boost its games platform , because social gaming is an ever-increasing important part of Facebook’s business which accounted for a revenue of more than $500 million from selling virtual goods last year. It has a user-base of 750 million over the world with more than 1 million monthly active users of the 85 games in the site.

One of the challenging contradiction between the two companies will be that Google+ will offer to charge game developers only 5% on transaction as compared to Facebook’s 30%. It is just one factor of consideration, we hope game developers will at the end choose the best platform with higher potential of users and which delivers the best value.

Internet search giant ‘Google’ is now back again on social networking with its new service called Google+. It is an effort from Google to claim its spot in social networking space which is now dominated by Facebook, by aiming to ‘fix’ the broken and ‘awkward’ way in which people interact online at present.

The service is in a ‘field trial’, with limited users which was premiered on Tuesday. It is expected to roll out its full service in the coming months. Google+ features not only allowing users to post photos, videos, messages, comments,etc, but also bring “real-world interaction” and “real-life sharing” online, according to the company.

Some of its cool features which makes users going gaga are like Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Mobile. One major difference between Google+ and Facebook will be that the former will enable users to have video chat with several friends simultaneously.

There is a lot of competition going on between Google and Facebook. While Google controls the search market and has strong presence on Mobile with Android, and also acquired Picasa, Google Videos and YouTube, it is yet to crack the social stream. It needs the highly personal data that Facebook has been so successful at collecting. Social networking has been the company’s central goal and Google+ is its product to challenge in the social networking platform.

The real question on whether Google+ will overtake Facebook and become the new king of social networking or will it just be another luke warm response like Google’s much hyped Buzz or Wave, will depend on the number of original ideas in the service and its ease of accessibility. Generally, the service took some cool ideas from Facebook and Google has been bit late in the ‘social web’ to catch up Facebook.

Facebook Overtook Yahoo to become the second biggest video viewing site in the United States.

The figures for August 2010 online video viewing provided by ComScore suggests Google Sites tops the list, driven by its video sharing website YouTube, with 146.3 million unique viewers. Facebook with 58.6 million Unique viewers, for a total of 243 million viewing sessions came second. Yahoo! Sites ranked third with 53.9 million, followed by VEVO with 45.4 million.

Facebook still lost out to Yahoo! in terms of how long people spent watching video with an average of 20.5 minutes per viewer compared to the 31.6 minutes per view for Yahoo!

It was a different story when it came to video ads. Hulu, which did not figured in the top 10 list of unique viewers was number one for Video advertising. The site served 789,859 ads with a frequency of 30.2 per viewer, and reaching out to 8.8% of the total population. Google Sites came fifth, while Facebook and Yahoo! did not even figured in the list.

Facebook is fast gaining ground as one of the top video referral site, but it will be difficult for it to monitize the videos. Most of the contents shared/viewed on Facebook are hosted on third-party site like YouTube.

Other notable findings of the comScore Video Metrix includes:

• • The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: Break Media at 46.4 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 45.0 percent, and ScanScout Network at 44.5 percent.
  • 85.1 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  • The duration of the average online content video was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
  • Video ads accounted for 10.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.0 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

The now-old rumored Google Me might be launched this fall, not as a fully-loaded, Facebook-killer service, but as a series of small steps according to Reuters.

Google pulled the plug off its high-profile communication tool Google Waves few weeks back. Orkut also failed to make it big in many countries. In India where Orkut ruled, Facebook is slowly dethroning it.

Google is losing out big time to Facebook in the social media scene and as we all know Google is trying to bridge this gap, with a flurry of acquisitions and the rumored Google Me.

Google’s CEO Eric Smith says “we’re trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component,”

“Everybody has convinced themselves that there’s some huge project about to get announced next week. And I can assure you that’s not the case,” Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said.

The name of the project Google Me, is also more of an internal code according to Schmidt’s comments.

According to a new study, Facebook is receiving more time from American web surfers than Google Inc or Yahoo Inc.

ComScore revealed Thursday that in August 2010, U.S. web surfers spend a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, or about 9.9 percent of the total web-surfing time in the month of August. Google managed to get around 39.8 million minutes of the web surfers’ time from all its services including YouTube, Gmail, Google news and other content sites.

Yahoo Inc came third with users spending around 37.7 million minutes of their time on its services.

Just a year back, Facebook managed to get the attention of only 5 percent of the people web surfing time, while Yahoo Inc enjoyed almost 12 percent of the total time spend by the U.S. web surfers.

In July 2010, Facebook overtook Yahoo for the first time as well as announced crossing the ’500 million users’ mark. The latest report just confirm the inevietable truth – Facebook is the new king of the Web.

Things are really heating up between Google and Facebook,  both showing interest in acquiring search-related businesses.

Facebook’s latest acquisition is Chai Labs, reportedly for around $10 million.

This Mountain View, California-based start-up was founded by former Google (GooG) adsense exec Gokul Rajaram.

On its website, Chai Labs says that the company is able to “bring a unique blend of skills and perspectives which help us reinvent the way content is created, stored, and delivered, to drive user and revenue growth for our customers.” The website also says that it specializes in “Structured Content Extraction” and “Semantic Search Platform.”

The ability to help publishers create, store and deliver content is something that makes sense for Facebook, given the powerful social networking site has been trying to work with media companies rather than compete with them.

According to VentureBeat, it isn’t exactly clear why Facebook is buying Chai Labs, but many people thinks it is more of a talent-acquisition than Chai Labs’ technology.

Meanwhile, Google is in the final stages of acquiring Like.com for $100 million, according to TechCrunch citing multiple sources about the information.

Like.com started as Riya, a tool for organizing photos, in April 2006. It re-launched as Like.com in November 2006 as the first visual search engine for products.

The co-founder and CTO, Burak Goturk, is a specialist in computer vision technology is said to have filed for two-dozen facial-recognition patents.

Google goes shopping yet again while Facebook decided to stay home.

The face-off between Google and Facebook seems inevitable and can be expected very soon going by the urgency shown by both the giants.

With Orkut a passé, Google wave gone, and Google Buzz failing to make a ‘Pop,’ Google is going all out to launch it’s rumored  Social gaming network dubbed “Google Me” with such ingredients that it remains hot for a long, long time (or will it sizzle out again?)

Techcrunch reported that Google has acquired San Francisco-based start-up Jambool and its gaming product Social Gold.

Jambool’s Social Gold is an online virtual payment platform which can be incorporated in virtual worlds, social games and applications, MMOs, and other online games portal.

The deal amount is reportedly $70 – $75 million – $55 million for Jambool and another $15 – $20 million in an earnout.

This deal comes even before the news of Google’s acquisition of social app developer Slide for $280 million have died. Apart from that, if you remember, Google had also invested around $100 million to $200 million in Facebook leading game developer Zynga. There are also rumors in the air that the company is also under negotiations with other top social gaming companies like EA’s Playfish and Disney’s Playdom to establish games-friendly network.

With it’s hand on social gaming companies, social app developer and a virtual currency payment platform, does it mean “Google Me” is almost out?

While Google is busy shopping, as told earlier, Facebook has decided to stay at home for the next 60 days. During this period, the company’s office will remain open 24×7 to revamp some of it’s products.

We will see if working from the inside or outside is a better approach when the final show down happens…or will it happen?