Facebook‘s strategy in acquiring friendfeed is very interesting. Look at the lineup of the people involved in the friendfeed project, who are mostly ex-Googlers: Paul Buchheit,Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. With an arsenal of lethal talent, where can we expect to see future of the facebook go. Only time will tell. Here are some hot quotes from other sources:

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. “Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,”We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.” -cnet.com

“But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.” -TechCrunch.com

However twitter has just recently changed there whole brand image from “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” This is twitter now saying” Hey World! I’m a real-time search engine. So the next wave search is coming to be. These are Real time conversations where users must learn to lead, engage, and influence. Stay tuned to see how this impacts small businesses who want to use twitter as part of there Internet Marketing Strategy.

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eLocal Listing continues to grow even in these challenging economic times.  In gratitude to all of our loyal customers and dedicated employees, we are pleased to announce that it’s Senior Management Team will donate $1 to feed the children on behalf of each new follower we have to our new eLocal Rocks Twitter account .. follow us at @elocalrocks, just say “feed the children for me!”

Tim Judd, CEO and President comments,

Feed the Children is doing terrific work both overseas and right here in the US. It’s amazing and really quite depressing that a country as rich and powerful as ours has millions of children who are under nourished or just plain starving. Their approach is very practical, they feed many thousands of kids every day and are often first on the scene when disaster strikes. eLocal Listing is proud to support their excellent efforts.

Check back at the end of August and we will let you know how much we have donated on behalf of our Twitter followers.

**eLocal Listing is not affiliated with or endorsed by Feed the Children.

Our very own Steve Espinosa had some some interesting thoughts on how Twitter could monetize it’s traffic.

Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetize their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding AdSense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetize it successfully, and create more user generated content.
When you think about it almost everything that is on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local, whether that is local to you or to someone else. The obvious example of this is when you go out to a restaurant and write about that on Twitter, whether you say “Going out to [insert name here] with @stevemcstud” or “Just had a great dinner with @stevemcstud at [insert name here]“. If you simply perform a search on Twitter for “restaurant in”, the point being to see how many people tweet “I am going to restaurant in [insert city]” or “Anybody know of a good restaurant in [insert city name]?” you can see that with just that one phrasing there are tons of results of people talking about local restaurants.

Read This Article in it’s entirety here

The Nielsen Online research guys have just come up with some very interesting data on the growth of social media.Last year 67% of online users visited social media sites which makes those sites more popular than personal email.

Anybody with a college age kid will be painfully familiar with Facebook, but in 2008 it went mainstream with 30% of online users visiting it at least once per month. The social space appears to be maturing; the parents of the early adopters are getting in on the act, the fastest growing sector is the 35-49 group. The trend appears to be global with strong growth across Europe, many Asian countries such as South Korea have been heavy users for many years.

Figuring out how we can plug into this rapid growth to help drive customers for local businesses is firmly on our agenda and we’ll keep you posted on these initiatives as they progress.

Meantime even an old dog like me can learn new tricks, and (if you really want to) you can follow me on Twitter or swing by www.timjudd.com.

You can read the full Nielsen report here

I found this good read on Twitter and it’s effects on Local Marketing by Chris Smith over at Search Engine Land it is definitely worth taking the time to read.

The Twitter social networking and micro-blogging service was launched only two years ago, but it’s rocketing up in usage numbers quickly, and it seems likely to turn red-hot. Many companies are rapidly cluing into the promotional value, but smaller businesses appear slow to hop on the bandwagon. Here are a few tips on leveraging Twitter to help your locally-oriented business.

As oft pointed-out among search marketers, Twitter links do not pass “link juice”—that is, they don’t transfer PageRank value from Twitter to linked-to sites. Even though links in Twitter are nofollowed, there still could be some small value in real ranking terms, according to the theory that “citations” or “references” appear to sometimes help improve rankings in local search.  So, at the very least, it’s a good idea to claim a profile in Twitter and link back to your business site.

But, the larger value of Twitter to your company may be in terms of audience engagement and as a communication vehicle, if you learn to use Twitter effectively…

…Even better, if they endorse the business to their followers, this becomes an online species of word-of-mouth-marketing. So, how do you encourage this to happen?

Twitter is full of word of mouth Marketing opportunities. Here’s a sample of just a few tweets I saw that came up in the last week for people seeking NYC restaurants:

• “I need a good reco for a restaurant in NYC with fried chicken. Anyone have suggestions?”
• “looking for inexpensive restaurant options in NYC. Anyone want to help? I’ll be in Soho, but all around the island”
• “I’m seeking NYC Mexican restaurant recommendations, any thoughts?”
• “looking for a NYC restaurant recommendation for me and my lady friends…”

To read the complete article Click Here

Then head on over to twitter and follow eLocal Listing for updates on blog posts, products and not to mention the fact that we would love to hear what you are up to.