Twitter will not kill Google

So John Borthwick (former AOL exec) woke up bored yesterday and thought, you know what, let’s make some noise and see what happens if I predict that Twitter will kill Google … so props to Borthwick, he’s completely off, he knows it, but it got tons of people talking about micro-blogging, real time search, social media, and the future of search … so here’s my take.

Google is not going anywhere … People have been predicting that Google will go down for years, but they’re still the best company out there, in terms of financial stability, innovation, culture, and business strategy … Google has 81.5% of search engine market share:

Msnbc.com debuts innovative video player

Msnbc.com’s brand new inauguration video player features some innovative features: beyond streaming the live event itself, it features inauguration speeches stretching back for decades. Each has a transcript in a sidebar. Click a word or a tag, and you jump instantly to that location in the video. Highlight a sentence or two, and it spits out a little code, letting you embed that exact clip on your blog. Dynamic editing, right from the player… More about the player in the Wall Street Journal .

Akamai Behavioral Targeting

Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

Behavioral Advertising Invades Privacy

Introduction
Imagine a device that scan all internet activity and throttle p2p traffic, reduce spam, protect against hacking attacks, scan against viruses, all done in real time for millions of users. Now imagine the same device can also read all your email, know what sites you visit, see every form post you submit, read every instant message you send, know about every comment you make on social networks, know about your buying habits, know about your searches, know about the videos  you watch, know about the music you listen to, and imagine that this device stores all this information about build a really detailed behavioral profile on you, and partners with advertisers to target the perfect adverb specifically for you.

The Sun UK bets on Air & Sex

Sex in advertising is the use of sexual attraction as a tool of persuasion to draw interest to a particular product, for purpose of sale. Gallup & Robinson, an advertising and marketing research firm reports that in more than 50 years of testing advertising effectiveness, it has found the use of the erotic to be a significantly above-average technique in communicating with the marketplace. 

The Sun, a UK newspaper decided to develop a desktop RSS reader to push their news and highlights; now that’s a boring idea. Why would you download yet another RSS reader? Maybe because this one has Keeley Hazell, a Sun page 3 model that usually involves her appearing topless or on a nice tasteful lingerie.