It's getting harder to even tell if the news from Google is scary anymore...

Some of the options that come up in the Ad Innovations are very interesting indeed, offering advertisers a “remarketing” option, which sees their content served up to any users who have, at some stage in the past, visited the advertiser’s site. Users will note that they start seeing ads for services they’ve previously considered availing themselves of, it’s an interesting direction to take, and one that could well result in users being served with ads that are more relevant to their interests. For those who think that the whole transaction sounds a little scary, then the following probably won’t do too much to help.

The other feature that Google is currently showing off is a set of AdWords reports that it calls Search Funnels. Essentially, according to Google, these are reports to the advertiser that give some indication of what else you’ve been searching for in the past that served your ads, before you eventually saw some conversion. The word from Google on it is that,

“A set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behaviour leading up to a conversion. These reports can provide you with data on how your ‘upper-funnel’ keywords assist conversions beyond just the last click.”

Certainly this much is good news for advertisers using Google Ads and strangely interesting news for those of us with an interest in analytics. Still, the combination of remarketing and search funnels is an interesting one, and could well lead to more effective web-based advertising.

If you’re curious about it, you can read more in the Google blog post on the new features.

Certainly it seems as though Twitter's growth isn't going to die on it anytime soon...

According to a posting on the Twitter blog, the number of tweets per day is very fast approaching the 50 million mark. That may sound fairly impressive, but it’s only moreso when you consider the rate at which Twitter has grown to achieve that figure. Indeed, back when the service was relatively new, in 2007, the average number of tweets per day was around the 5,000 mark…

Moreover, the folks at Twitter take some pain to point out that these figures don’t include the tweets originating at accounts that have been identified as spam, but given the sheer number of spam Twitter a ccountsin operation it seems unlikely that they’ve caught all of them.

The breakdown also isn’t too specific when it comes to retweets, nor does it specify if there was any pronounced impact on the number of tweets when it rolled out the new retweet functionality, but judging by the graph it seems as though not very much at all has had too pronounced an impact on Twitter’s usage… though you can pick the downtimes out of the graph without too much effort at all.

The breakdown, for those curious, is pretty impressive, with the Twitter blog saying that,

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000 and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day – that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)”

People in open relationships are WAY down there...

The Facebook data team has posted some very interesting details to its blog about the current state of those users in Facebook who are in relationships, compared with both those users who are single, and the general average. It’s interesting stuff, and certainly some of the graphs lead to very curious conclusions, if you’re the kind to trust data provided by a social network on relationships.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, as the Facebook blog points out, it seems that an awful lot of people aren’t into disclosing their relationship status. Most interesting about that is that, because they’re all labelled under the heading “undisclosed,” they’ve been measured too, meaning that even not disclosing anything has made you part of the graph… both interesting and a little scary.

Of course, we imagine there’ll be a fairly solid, ‘I told you so’ vibe around the results for some of the categories. The “open relationship” option seems to precipitate a raft of negative feeling, with users listing themselves as in an open relationship having significantly less positivity in their various status updates and significantly more negative… indeed, it seems that from a purely maths-based point of view, you’d be better off being single… or widowed.

There are some fantastic point to take home from the whole piece, with simple observations like,

“Guys are more positive than girls when in a relationship or married, but they are more negative when married or engaged … people who do not disclose their relationship status are about 50% more negative than everyone else. What can their actual relationship status be that makes them so bitter about it?”

Google always seems to have a tremendous number of projects on the go at once, but from time to time those projects become something that could genuinely change the way we work with and use the web. The basic principle behind Sidewiki is one of those ideas that’s been floating around for a long time, but it takes a company the size of Google to really push it.

Sidewiki is basically just a sidebar that sits in your browser (soon to be installed by default in Google’s Chrome) and lets you leave comments on whatever page you’re viewing when you invoke it. It could well prove particularly useful for users looking for a way to comment on pages that don’t normally allow comments.

Naturally, there are going to be some users who’s input will be more or less useful than others, and Google has built in features to reflect the usefulness of various comments. Google describes the setup Sidewiki uses,

“In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we’ve developed.”

It’s interesting to consider the idea that a Google user’s general reputation could well contribute to the placement of their comments even on articles outside their field of expertise.

If you’re at all interested, you should have a look at Google Sidewiki itself. If you’d like to read more before you check it out, have a look at the Sidewiki post on Google’s blog.