You heard right, Google Apps is finally out of beta. On the flip side however, there appears to be some differences in landing pages.  Let’s look at each page individually. for a time, Google.com was opening up to one landing page while Google.com was providing a completely different one. And this is where the controversy started.

Apparently one of the landing pages gave the impression that one could now only access either the paid version of Google Apps or settle for the trial version. Clearly, this did not set well with those who already had free accounts.

Thankfully it turned out this was merely Google testing out landing pages with the Apps as they have officially rolled out of beta. So no need to fear, this is a time for celebration. Your free accounts are safe, no need for concern.

As I was reminded from this recent article, Windows users remain in what seems like a constant battle to prevent their search preferences from being changed without permission. And this begs the question - who among the search engine players is trying to change your default search settings?

Clearly when using IE, you are at the mercy of the browser in question. Now it is difficult to say whether this is some third party issue in the instance of the linked article above. But I can tell you this much: I have never had this problem happen when using other browsers. Call it a lack of prompts or whatever, but at the end of the day I have only seen problems like this with IE.

Thankfully no matter which browser you happen to use, resetting your search preferences is pretty darn easy. Again, follow along with the above linked piece and you too will find that any changes to your search engine preferences in your preferred browser, are fairly easy to fix.

No, this article is not about the BlueMan group coming to destroy Affiliate Marketing. We’ll let cash strapped States run by children with too much power kill the industry instead. Yes folks, as jobless numbers continue to push forward, some states are answering the call by making it nearly impossible to earn an honest living through Affiliate Marketing.

Luckily I do not believe it’s hit home for us here in Washington just yet, but it sure looks like other States are giving the thumbs up for a tax that has some Affiliate Marketing programs such as Amazon’s, turning down applications left and right.

Even worse is that this is not going to do ANYTHING to even generate revenue. Why? Because the morons running these States apparently failed Affiliate Marketing 101. The companies providing products and services for Affiliate Marketing are simply not going to deal with you. They will instead find alternative ways of marketing that do not include keeping income flowing to your State’s residents. Classic Big Brother, if I ever saw it.

If there is one thing that drives me nuts, it is the belief that real time search is all that it’s cracked up to be. Let me spell this out for you right now. If you are data mining, looking for a how to, directions, etc. Then clearly this real time search stuff found on FriendFeed amongst others is just not happening.

FriendFeed amongst others is helpful with trends and getting an idea of about the direction a topic is headed in. There is also a real benefit to news being broken in FriendFeed or Twitter as well.

Still, at the end of the day. Real time search is NOT here the way we might like to think it is. While it is cool to watch topics of discussion develop right before our eyes, I have yet to see it solving any relevancy issues whatsoever. And for Joe Casual, that is what matters most about search. Not shiny Ajaxy boxes with real time results.

Gmail on the BlackBerry is really nothing new. And offering yet another software app, again, just not that compelling. So I can only conclude that the Gmail plugin being discussed here is one that works directly with the BlackBerry email app itself.

In short, if I am following this correctly, it would mean having true Gmail functionality over your Gmail accounts without needing to install some extra program that is not even providing worthwhile integration. Because anything less, is a waste of time.

BlackBerry does a lot of things right. One of them is how the mobile device delivers email and calendar alerts. So if I am right and the above link is indeed, speaking of providing a plugin that allows users to mark email as spam, move email into different conversation and so on, then this is indeed a pretty big deal.

Google Australia has kicked it up a notch with the way they are handling Real Estate listings. Rather than simply using maps to merely show what is for sale, it seems that Google Australia is also going to provide data such as real time changes to the property, location, etc.

Where things get dicey is in the fact that there are already resources in Australia said to provide basically the same thing as Google Au is hoping to give Australian users. In short, it would be seen as redudent.

The flip side to this of course, is worth mentioning that some people might just want to have a choice in which resource they end up using. So to this end, perhaps Google offering the advanced Real Estate details is not such a bad thing after all?

Twitter spam is without a doubt, the latest in what some might refer to as forms of comment spam. Worse however, is when this spam becomes a trending topic within Twitter itself. This can be quite annoying, especially if happen to see the spam trending during some kind of crisis like an international incident or a death of someone famous. In either case, it is really low class.

This brings us to the question of finding a way to provide Twitter users with some level of follower control. Clearly, it is not too likely that we can do a lot to block out all of the spammed topics out there. But if we were able to create a blacklist of users who are abusing Twitter, this blocking might prevent individual streams from being polluted in the long term?

Granted, this is not going to immediately solve any real problems. And it is true, that the blacklisting itself would likely need to be followed up by a human in order to prevent abuse from people marking others as spam just to be mean. But nonetheless, this spam issue is fast turning into a scam issue. I say this as more and more Twitter spammers are pitching scams…and no amount of convenience is worth that hassle.

So real time search has come to Bing it would seem. Clearly, this is not going to well for Google I imagine. Yet as this article shows, there is indeed a place for Tweets from Twitter along side of more static sources such as blogs and web pages. Honestly, think Microsoft might be onto something here.

But at the same time, I am finding it difficult to actually get the Twitter results I want to display. Actually, outside of the Al Gore twitter results, I find it difficult for any of the Twitter content to display at all. And this is a bummer, as it could really add value to the Bing results.

Assuming Bing can get its ducks in a row and ensure that this new search option is a bit easier to find within the given results, I think they will end up being masters of the real time search arena should they step up in time.

Google goodness just keeps on coming. Enter Google Blog Search RSS feeds. Seems simple enough, perform a query, subscribe to the relevant RSS feed.

Another thing to note is that even if you are not using an RSS reader, you could always an iGoogle gadget or if you prefer, simply syndicate the RSS feed on your website. In either case, there are options available to you. But perhaps the coolest offering from Google Blog Search is the Hot Queries.

This is without a doubt something that sets this blog search from Google. Using Hot Queries allows you to stay on top of the latest happenings coming out of the blogosphere. So keeping up with the latest, most popular and newest posts is quite simple. This is definitely worth checking this out.

As I read through this article, I found myself a bit shocked at what I was reading. While I expect some level of friction between Google and Bing, I found the comments made by Google about Bing to be a bit antagonizing.

Perhaps there is some substance in what Google has said? Maybe it is possible that Bing’s setup is flawed somehow and that Google’s data centers are superior? Even if this is true, why does Google need to flaunt this unless Google has some fear of Bing. Based on what I am seeing with the previously linked article, I think it is quite possible.

While each of Google’s arguments presented seemed plausible, I personally came away feeling like they were merely whining about Bing and its inept abilities.

I was reading this article of Robert’s today and for the first time in awhile, discovered that he and I agreed on something! Scoble is of the opinion that Twitter has little value in the long-term value arena. I could not agree more.

More over, I would add that the idea of using Twitter as a search engine seems rather premature in any sense. Look, as a communication tool I think that Twitter is top notch. It’s really difficult to come close to the instant access and value that Twitter has provided its users. Sadly, it makes a lousy way to archive information to be referenced later on.

Where I think Scoble and I part ways is he sees Facebook as apparently, making this archived information available for search queries. Eh, yeah…to a degree. But like the posts to any social networking site, it is also filled to the gills with spam. Not sure how sifting through that data is really beneficial to anyone…

Not totally sure I am feeling the value here? How does yet another “localized” search engine help anyone again? Granted, Yahoo Local is pretty lame, but I am just not sure that this is the right approach. Could be wrong, but I have been to the site and found nothing compelling to make me try it at all.

How again is this not Yelp with a different skin? Tried some local searches and for the most part, been there, done that. Reviews, a map and user accounts. Exciting, really. I am blown away at how innovative this truly is. Not.

Despite me not seeing anything new or all that inventive here, it must be something on the back-end. Because some enterprising VC opted to fund this service with a hefty chunk of change. How much? Try about five million. Apparently with these funds, this Yelp-clone is looking to parse data from other sources to make people feel like there might be something of value here over the competition.

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Despite The Pirate Bay’s own legal “challenges”, it looks as if they are still poised to release a Hulu competing service known simply as The Video Bay. Assuming it is able to launch, it could indeed lower the bar for those interested in pirating copyright protected video content with tremendous ease.

But legal concerns aside, what I find most interesting is the support for video via HTML5. This of course for those who do not know, is a cutting edge way for web browsers to eliminate the need for video over Flash, codecs, media players and so on. In other words, it is simply designed to “work” with supported browsers.

This means waiting if you are using Firefox or Opera (or using beta versions). For those folks using Chrome or Safari however, you can try out HTML5 video today via DailyMotion.com. It may not be Hulu or The Video Bay, but it will allow you to see just what this HTML5 technology is all about.

Let’s face it, not everyone in the world has access to the very latest in wifi, notebooks and iPhones. Some folks are frankly feeling pretty fortunate to have access to something as basic as SMS on their mobile phones.

I have been playing around with the SMS search service from this link. And considering what the limitations of SMS happen to be, I think that Google is offering a fairly decent solution for a rather heavy handed technology shortcoming.

The search functionality however, is very limited and not all that helpful when compared to what you can get from a traditional mobile browser. This being said, I did find the SMS Tips that Google offers, to be an outstanding option for those looking for health, medical or weather related tips.

The idea that Google is somehow a monopoly is a bit of a stretch. After all, until the search engine comes bundled on PCs and mobile phones, I don’t see the point of view gaining a lot of traction. Popular, yes. But now with Bing, in addition to all of the human indexed options out there providing competition, I don’t think Google has much to worry about here.

But there is one other aspect to this that is worth noting. While it is true that Google is not really a “huge” company in the people sense, it does have a tremendous market share. So even though it does not employ half of a city, the traction it has been given with their market share clearly has regulators circling as they are in dire need of something to “regulate”. Job security and all.

At the end of the day, the search market is something that can be disrupted fairly easily with the right tools. So if a search engine comes along that clearly provides vastly better and more accurate results than Google, the monopoly idea quickly goes away. Some have said that Bing might be the one to do this. I tend to shake my head at this idea as Bing provides good results comparable to Google, but hardly would I define them as “more accurate” by any stretch.

A UK furniture firm known as Habitat ended up in some deeply troubling PR trouble all due to one intern not being supervised well. Apparently the intern was spamming Twitter with off-topic hash tags that related to the Iran elections, amongst other stuff such as the iPhone along with anything else that was popular at the moment.

As you might suspect, Habitat has taking a real beating from the social media scape and is going to have to work very hard to correct this problem. It is unclear at the moment as to how long the seething frustration will remain against Habitat. But one thing is quite clear - sorry is not enough.

If I was Habitat, I would be looking at what social good deeds can be done to regain the good graces of the masses. Because as they have learned by now. Actions do indeed, speak much louder than words.

People are beginning to speculate that Google’s need for power could very well cost us San Francisco, California in a potential earthquake. As to whether or not this will actually happen of course, remains to be seen.

The idea is simple enough: tap the Earth for some of that wondrous geo-thermal energy rather than continuing to tap the existing grid. Bundle this in with a similar situation that did cause an Earthquake in Switzerland, you can imagine just how skeptical people are about being able to tap this new found energy safely.

On the bright side, I guess that if Google did end up underwater. They would be able to take a SeaQuest approach to underwater fish indexing while leaving land-loving search queries to their competition. Namely, Bing.

When I first heard about Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com talking about how everything with computing will look like Twitter, I thought surely I must be misreading something someplace? Alas, I was not misreading anything and he was serious in stating that real time search results is where things are at.

Now I might be willing to agree with the idea that real time data is critical for those trying to connect with their customers. I mean, this is pretty much a given at this point. But I also think that people are placing too much blanket importance on real time data. Like it is some sort of holy grail.

I maintain the firm belief that Twitter and other options like it, are merely a double edged sword. In short, its sustainability has yet to be fully explored in my opinion. Let’s not forget, Twitter is not profitable yet. So I would limit my thoughts on real time connectivity to the likes of options such as Presently. Solutions such as that, are the only ones I see with any long term value. Twitter, Facebook and others, while useful, are also fads that will eventually fall into their norm. And that norm will be a whole lot less impressive than it is now.

The contents of this article should not really come as a terribly big surprise. Google and Bing both agree that slow pages lose users. Now as obvious as this might seem on the surface, it is worth noting that both Bing and Google came to the same result. Yet they did so independently of one another.

Some other interesting goodies from the above article, include “how” both search engines went about testing what works and what fails with page loads. The key in each case was creating delays in the results provided some interested data.

Both search engines also made some interesting strides in seeing which parts of a page needs to load first before the user is totally turned off. And what is great about the results found here is that they in many ways relate to both casual websites and search engines themselves.

Google being blocked for a time in China? Gee, who didn’t see this one coming? Apparently due to some latency with Google following through on its promise to block adult content from Chinese eyes, Google was blocked for a couple of hours.

I for one, believe this is merely Chinese censors flexing their muscle in hopes of making sure that anyone else thinking of not going along with the government gets the message. Clearly, China means business when it comes to limited what is available over their ISP’s access.

It seems that this is not even the first time this sort of thing has happened. As described in the article linked above, Google has been blocked on a number of occasions as the Chinese censors often find what they deem to be rightful cause.