UPDATE, March 2, 2010: After experimenting with a plugin for Google Buzz, I have decided not to use on at this time. All available plugins as of now offer to ad comments to Google Reader items- this potentially can scatter the discussion all over places. Hopefully a better solution will be implemented soon.

With the arrival of Google Buzz, I began to question whether or not I should continue to concentrate on Twitter. I hope I am not the only one. Two days ago Twitter decided to intruduce even more “nofollow” attributes this time to their internal linking structure. I understood (but did not agree) when they introduced the first round of nofollow attributes to their links, I guess as young startup you needed to do what you needed to do.

So today I have replaced the Tweetmeme button (courtesy of Tweetmeme ) with new and shiny Google Buzz button (courtesy of Hameedullah Khan). The Tweetmeme button was moved to the button of each post. This is just a symbolic gesture of my personal dissatisfaction of the way Twitter is “innovating”, I have nothing but love for Tweetmeme.

Twitter has bigger issues to deal with….

For Twitter trying to manipulating the flow of the Google juice at this stage of the game is really childish, and if that is the reason for the latest change I just feel sorry for Twitter. Really guys, is this the best you’ve got? Now if the recent change was made as a further attempt to eliminate spam my question is the same, is this the best you’ve got? There are ways to eliminate spam without punishing your users.

There is also another factor, and I maybe completely wrong about it… I appears to me that many of my online are starving for a more meaningful way to keep the conversation going (which in my opinion is impossible to have on Twitter). So if you compare Twitter and Google Buzz from that perspective, Google Buzz wins hands down, and if you thought Google Buzz is no threat to Twitter you should really think again.

Now back to the new and shiny Google Buzz button- you need to use your GMail/Google Reader to interact with it. You can also follow Go Beyond MLS on Google.

UPDATE Feb. 5, 2010: It appears LeapFish is no longer showing the link in the footer of their website to their “directory” I wrote about bellow:

This change must have been implemented today as Bing.com’s cached page of LeapFish from yesterday February 4, 2010 still has the link:

LeapFish has also implemented robots.txt file on their website disallowing web crawlers from indexing the directory:

Few days ago I tried to to get attention of Google’s Anti-Spam Czar – Matt Cutts via his FriendFeed account. I wanted Matt to comment about LeapFish’s latest directory- but I realize, it may not be Google’s practice to comment on these sort of things publicly. That or you need to be Michael Gray, Aaron Wall or Andy Beard to get some one like Matt Cutts to listen to you.

So what is my latest beef with LeapFish? Their spammy directory located at http://www.leapfish.com/dr/ – my apologies for not providing a live link, I consider LeapFish to be an unsafe website. It also appears by my estimates that Google is indexing this new directory at the rate of about 50 pages a day- there are about 200 pages in Google’s index from this “directory” as of this writing.

So I invite those who are still with me to explore some of the pages from the above mentioned directory. One of the first pages from the directory that jump at me was “Shopping”:

Clicking through to the page on LeapFish.com you are given opportunity to “narrow” your search- so I decide to narrow mine to “Death Care”:

What do you know?!!! Now you can narrow your search geographically- naturally I selected New Jersey the state I live in:

How about that?!! LeapFish knows all the counties in the state of New Jersey- naturally my next selection would be the county I live in:

How about that?!!! Turns out LeapFish is so intuitive it knows about every city in my state- so just for the heck of it I decided to check and see what kind of death care shopping I can do in Jackson, NJ:

And the relevancy of my final destination in LeapFish directory? Google search results associated with the death of Michael Jackson?

What can I say? I am extremely disappointed. I am sure few results of local funeral directors or even a local WalMart with the line of their latest caskets would not be as disappointing. Since LeapFish is using some APIs from Google, they could have really impress me by showing me a few relevant products using Google Base API.

So yeah, I am desperate for the attention from Matt Cutts. Matt could you please explain to me how this sort of “directories” improve the State of The Index? In my opinion the LeapFish Directory does just the opposite- LeapFish pollute the Internet.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

This is something many web-masters struggle with. You create a new website that is going to knock every one socks off, but now you need Google and other search engines to notice it. The quickest way is to slap a few links on other websites you have that may already rank well and are well indexed by the search engines. But is it good idea? As Matt Cutts of Google explains in the video bellow, it all depends. If you have few minutes it is well worth watching:

If you are using Google Local Business Center, you may have already noticed a new feature which allows you to post messages (limited to 160 characters) to you place page:

Each message will expire in 30 days from the time it is published. If you decide to include a specific link inside the message, it will be converted into an HTML (click-able) link on your listing page see example bellow of first message from The Chocolate Belles:

You can see Chocolate Belles live listing here.

This new feature offers you an additional options to promote specific events, services or products via Google Local Business Center.

According to Post to Your Place Page FAQ – you can only have one message at a time posted to your place page.

Disclosure: I currently advise The Chocolate Belles on Internet marketing.

Yesterday, Google announced that they are testing new ad formats that among other things will include video. This is how they explained:

Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we’ve blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

While I have seen many Google video ads on different websites and blog I have yet to see one of these ads in the search results. But according to Official Google Blog US residents have seen these ads:

AdWords advertisers had an option to create video ad for quiet some times. It would be however difficult for real estate agents to benefit from these video ads in the search results because the longest ad that you can create for your AdWords campaign cannot exceed 120 seconds. Hardly enough time to make a quick video tour of your listing! I am sure however that many creative and innovative real estate agents can use these video ads to promote their real estate business.