We realize that today people are increasingly connecting with one another on the web. But the ways in which we connect online are limited and don’t mimic our real-life relationships. The Google+ project is our attempt to make online sharing even better. We aren’t trying to replace what’s currently available; we just want to introduce a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.

Sounds pretty cool, huh? And it is. There are 5 main features to Google+: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks and Huddle.

Circles
While most social networks are about sharing with a wide audience, Google has gone in the other direction. Circles allows you to group friends, family, and various associates into groups and optimizing the flow of information to each one. This is a great way to keep your professional and private life separate and something which Facebook doesn’t easily provide.

Hangouts
In my opinion, this is the coolest feature of the project and it’s what sets Google+ apart from Facebook. Hangouts lets up to 10 users simultaneously video chat with each other face-to-face.

Instant Upload
This is a simple way to ensure that all the photos you take on your phone are easily accessible. While you’re snapping pictures, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they’re always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.

Sparks
Think of it as anything that is meant to “spark” a conversation. Google+ will keep a feed of content that is based on your interests which you can view at any time and then share with your friends who have the same interests.

Huddle
Huddle is a group text-chat tool within Google+ for having private conversations within a Circle. You can use this feature directly from your phone – that’s if you use an Android 2.0+ or iPhone 4.0+ phone.

There are some great videos explaining each feature in more depth here.

Other things you should know about Google+:

• An Android app is currently available for Google+
• Google has submitted to Apple’s App Store an iOS app for using Google+ and it is awaiting approval
• Businesses looking to market on Google+ won’t be left out. “Pages” similar to Facebook “fan pages” will be coming soon, according to Google’s Jeff Huber
• Google has already been forced to tweak its privacy setting on Google+ by completely eliminating the ability to share certain semiprivate posts to your wider network of friends
• You still own everything you put on Google+ (unlike Facebook which takes co-ownership”). The Google+ Terms of Service state “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
• Rumors of games in Google+ are already doing the rounds in the blogosphere
• Facebook has responded to the launch of Google+ with the announcement of “something awesome” tomorrow (Wednesday 6th July). We hear it is a deal with Skype to launch a video chat service
• Mashable have already provided instructions on how to import your Facebook contacts into Google+. Now that’s keen!

How can I get into Google+?
That’s the hard part. Unless you have already scored yourself an invite, then you’re going to be waiting a while. As of late last week, Google closed any new sign-ups for invitations as it was overwhelmed with the number of people who had joined already. So for the time being all you can do is sign-up to receive notifications of when new invites will be available. You can do so here.

In April of last year, Google released a Google Twitter directory which contains a browsable directory of all the official Google accounts.

You can filter the directory by category, language and region.

In 2009, Google tried to simply list them all in a blog post, but soon found it wasn’t the most efficient method of documenting their Twitter accounts.

Then on April 14, 2010, they released the directory.

Does your law firm have a twitter presence yet? It should!

Google’s mobile ad network AdMob is releasing a number of staggering statistics today as the network begins its first full year under the Google umbrella. Google says that AdMob is receiving 2 billion ad requests per day, a data point which has quadrupled over the past year. To put that in perspective, as of May of 2010, AdMob was receiving 10 million monthly mobile ad requests.

To give you a picture of the current pace of mobile advertising, Google receives more ad requests in a single day than AdMob received for the entire month of December 2007 (a growth rate of 30 times in just over three years).

AdMob says that more than 100 million unique Android and iOS devices requested an ad each month, which is double the rate over the last six months. Google says that AdMob is seeing a significant amount of growth in international markets. Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from just one country a year ago. In fact, the strongest regional growth in monthly ad requests over the past year has come from Asia (564%), Western Europe (471%) and Oceania (363%).

We know that AdMob has been steadily growing within Google, most recently serving its 300 billionth mobile ad since 2007 at a record-breaking fast pace for the company.

source

“About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content. Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities. This work has allowed us to index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, from Flash buttons and menus to self-contained Flash technology based websites. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

While we’ve made great progress indexing SWF content over the past few years, we’re not done yet. We are continuing to work on our ability to index deep linking (content within a Flash technology based application that is linked to from the same application) as well as further improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript. You can help us improve these capabilities by creating unique links for each page that is linked from within a single Flash object and by submitting a Sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

Yea this sounds good but I still wouldn’t suggest that you create an all flash site!  Yet it’s good to know that they are improving the way they index all files.

Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?” Here’s an video I did last year, but it still applies:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQArUFRb4Is

Well that’s nice of him to say and I do agree with him. SEO will be around for a long time because it’s always changing.  Obviously Google believes in SEO and realizes its importance.   Having your site optimized for the search engines is important but its just one of many things you need to do now.   You need to optimize for Local SEO, you should have a facebook page, a twitter account, a wordpress blog and the list goes on!

From the GOOGLE INSTANT page:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

**************************************

There are a lot of different things that come up here related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google adwords Pay Per Click marketing.  One thing is that your search rankings wont change at all because of this. Some people are saying that this is not good for SEO but that doesnt really seem to be the case at all and Matt Cutts has some comments on that question on his Google blog.

FROM MATT CUTTS BLOG:

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Ben Gomes mentioned this during the Q&A, but with Google Instant I find myself digging into a query more. Take a query like [roth ira v]. That brings up Autocomplete suggestions like [roth ira vs traditional ira], [roth ira vanguard], and [roth ira vs 401k]. Suddenly I’m able to explore those queries more just by pressing the up/down arrow key. I can get a preview of what the results will be, add or subtract words to modify my query, and hit enter at any time. The ability to explore the query space and find out new things will inevitably lead to changes for SEO. When I was in grad school, I had a professor who mentioned that peoples’ information need often change over the course of a search session. Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little work.

***

The first thing is that this will change how people do searches and you might have a lot of people who don’t finish typing the whole search they were going to type. Instead of typing the full phrase of  Chicago Tax Lawyers, they might stop at Chicago tax and click on one of the results.  Yet some people might not even notice and just  type in the whole search and a lot of people might just turn it off.  So its hard to say how much of an impact this will have.  

The bottom line though is that if your site is not optimized for the organic or local results, then your not going to appear on Google Instant or Google regular for any keywords related to your geographic location and practice areas.

Contact us today if we can help your law firm with creating a new legal site, redesigning an existing site or using your site to get new clients via Internet Marketing.

According to AFP, court documents filed today show that seven plaintiffs will get no more than $2,500 each, lawyers that filed the case get 30% of the settlement money to cover their fees, and the remainder will be put in a fund for organizations that are focused on Internet privacy issues and education. The settlement also “requires that Google undertake wider public education about the privacy aspects of Buzz,” according to Reuters.

The case represents several similar lawsuits that were consolidated earlier this summer. The plaintiffs, in general, contended that Google violated their privacy when it launched Buzz in February and created a social network out of Gmail users’ personal contacts.

Public backlash was almost immediate: Google apologized, while government agencies reviewed Buzz and an FTC commissioner said the Buzz launch was a case of “irresponsible conduct” by Google.

The proposed settlement still needs to be approved by a federal judge in San Francisco.

source

FROM GOOGLE:

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

*** Here Google is saying its a good idea to visit other blogs and forums and contribute to them by leaving comments and also a link to your site.  They are also saying that if you have good quality content, that people will visit your site and LINK to it. So as always, the key is CONTENT. ***

A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way.
** Giving away quality information  for free is a good way to get people to link to your site and to establish yourself as an expert in your practice area.  Creating videos is a good way to engage  your audience. **

Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.

It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.

** This is important. Google is saying you should not buy links or do random link exchanges and saying it won’t have much positive effect in the long run.  Any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort.  There are many ways to generate links to your site but creating quality content and videos for your site and blog are among the best ways to generate links in the long run.

Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.

** They are addressing the issue of getting links from directories and are basically saying that yes there are some directories that make sense and would offer a high  quality link to your site BUT that there’s mostly a lot of junk directories that don’t really do much for your site.  So for a legal site, it doesn’t make sense to have your site listed in 100′s of different general business directories or non legal directories.  Usually you want to have your site listed in Yahoo, Open Directory (Dmoz.org), Best of the Web Directory and a few others, as well as any legal directories that match your firms practice and location.  If your a dui lawyer, then it makes sense to get listed in a DUI Lawyer directory.  Yet you want to get listed in a DUI legal directory that has been around awhile and its also important that the link you get from that directory is a FOLLOW link and not a NO FOLLOW link, otherwise it wont count.  **

It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.

All of this is important because the bottom line is that the more quality links you get, the better your search engine rankings will be.  Creating high quality content on  a regular basis will help and is very important, yet there are many different things you must do and it all takes time. Yet getting top SEO rankings can be a great source of new clients, so its all worth it!

As we work to provide more support for SSL across our products, today we’re introducing the ability to search with Google over SSL. We still have some testing to do, but you can try out the new encrypted version of Google search at https://www.google.com and read more about it on the Official Google Blog.

We’re excited to work with Omar Hamoui and his talented team at AdMob to develop new mobile advertising solutions for marketers, mobile app developers and mobile publishers.

The decision is great news for the mobile advertising ecosystem as a whole. This was reflected in the widespread industry support for our acquisition.

Throughout the FTC’s review process, it’s been clear that mobile advertising is growing rapidly.

As mobile phone usage increases, growth in mobile advertising is only going to accelerate. This benefits mobile developers and publishers who will get better advertising solutions, marketers who will find new ways to reach consumers, and users who will get better ads and more free content.

We’re very excited about the possibilities in this field. As an immediate matter, we’re now moving to close this acquisition in coming weeks. We’ll then start work right away on bringing AdMob’s and Google’s teams and products together. This industry is moving fast, and we’re excited to be part of the race!

Mobile advertising is going to be HUGE and its a good idea to start looking into creating a mobile version of your law firm site and also into advertising via mobile device. Who doesnt have a web enabled phone these days, everyone!