Less than two hours ago Google has rolled out their new +1 button for the whole web.

Google’s +1 button is essentially Google’s response to Facebook’s “like” function, with one important difference: the +1 button will also be integrated into Google’s search results.

Here’s what “the big G” wrote about it two days ago:

Our goal … is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That’s why we recently started to include more information from people you know—stuff they’ve shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites — in Google search results.

Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1 — the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” …The beauty of +1′s is their relevance — you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

…and who said social isn’t eventually gonna mean real tangible business?!

Website owners may now get the +1 button code to implement on their sites on Google’s +1 webmaster site. Off to play with it…

…and it is now available for a free download!

Scary, isn’t it? 100 million Facebook users essentially means every fifth account.

A couple hours after the publishing of this database, BBC picked up the news writing:

Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.

Two of the comments under the torrent download page (shown in the above screenshot) belong to Ron Bowes himself who wrote:

This is awesome and a little terrifying.

I hope people see this and look over their privacy settings now, still so many out there not locking down their profiles.

Another commenter pointed out:

…as a developer I already have access to what could be deemed personal and private data through the Facebook API

Facebook itself commented to BBC:

People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want.

In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.

No private data is available or has been compromised

What do you think? Was it the users’ responsibility to make sure they change their default settings to make their information more secure, or did Facebook have to make those default setting more secure a priori?

Between March and June of 2010 we’ve read the news of AOL getting rid of an affiliate network, a popular instant messaging  computer program, and just the day before yesterday they also sold a social network. None of these were AOL’s own developments, but were acquired by the company at some point of time in the past.

Not much fiscal information was disclosed to the public on two of these three acquisitions, but judging by numerous other sources, here is what the situation appears to look like on the financial level:

1. Buy.at (affiliate network) — acquired by AOL in 2008 for $125 million; sold to Digital Window (United Kingdom) in March 2010 for $17 million [source] = $108 million loss
2. ICQ (instant messager) — acquired by AOL in  June 1998 for $407 million; sold to Digital Sky Technologies (Russia) in April 2010 for $187.5 million [source] = $219.5 million loss
3. Bebo (social network) — acquired by AOL  in March 2008 for $850 million [source]; sold to Criterion Capital Partners in on 17 June 2010 for a range of $2.5 to $5 million [source] = ~$845 million loss

The sum total of losses on the above three acquisitions comes to a mind-boggling amount of some $1.2 billion.

Comments?

Not too long ago I have blogged about the 17 types of social media marketing channels. Since then Facebook has acquired FriendFeed [more here], which should enhance the real-time social search on Facebook, making things significantly better than they currently are on Twitter Search. Another reason behind it may be the latest trend of “friends” being replaced by “followers”. Yesterday, eMarketer.com has published some interesting Burson-Marsteller‘s research data which suggests that Twitter is, in fact, a more popular marketing tool than Facebook.

Out of all Fortune 100 companies who have Twitter, Facebook or blog presence:

• 54% are on Twitter
• 32% run their own corporate blog
• 29% have a Facebook fan page
• 20% use only one of the above social media channels

Twitter is being used for the announcement of news and customer-geared promos (i.e. broadcasting), customer service (i.e. as a two-way communication channel), and for employee recruitment. You may read more on this Burson-Marsteller’s research at eMarketer.com.

There is a number of social media channels/types that a company — be it an online-based, or a brick-and-mortar one — can successfully use in their marketing. I could count the following seventeen:

1. Blogging
2. Content aggregation
3. Crowdsourcing
4. Forums
5. Livecasting
6. Microblogging
7. Photosharing
8. Podcasting
9. Presentation sharing
10. Reviews & opinion sites
11. Social bookmarking
12. Social networking
13. Social news
14. Video sharing
15. Virtual worlds
16. Widgets
17. Wikis

Today two excellent lists have been tweeted about by a friend and fellow online marketer, Jim Kukral. They are full of examples of how various businesses are using social media in their marketing. Here are the links to them:

• A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples
• 300+ Cases & Examples of Social Media Marketing

In addition to the above two lists, you may also want to review the following ones:

• 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action
• 110 Ways Retailers are Using Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Business

Both merchants and affiliates — however savvy or new to the world of social media marketing you may be — have something to learn from the five above-quoted articles, papers and websites. I have certainly found more than a dozen of good ideas to borrow.