Maybe Walmart is finally getting the idea that they need to be a local company despite their mega-corporation status. For years they have let their Google Place pages languish in the territory of "unclaimed" but that appears to have changed. Now they have gone social in their local attempts by creating a Facebook Page for every one of their more than 3,500 stores.

Google gets a lot of heat from a lot of people for a lot of reasons. Some of it is very warranted while some of it is simply grousing. The feelings for Google as a company run the gamut from anti-competitive )ask Yelp for their thoughts on this one( to simply being better than the rest )check out this post from Mike Grehan for his take on Google and competition(.

Not sure there is much else to really say here. Most would give this a snarky "It's about f'in time!" so I'll leave that to those folks. It does seem odd that this has taken so long to happen but stranger things have happened in the tech space. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it offers the stuff that Facebook does but optimized for the iPad. Was that safe enough?

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is one of those guys that lives a high profile business existence. He's the CEO and chief promoter of Netflix, he is on the board of Facebok and more. You would think it might be lonely at the top like you hear. What he has experienced recently shows, however, is that there is plenty of room at the top these days for people to push and shove to try to knock someone down a few notches. Hastings knows.

A great gauge of just how deeply anything is being adopted in the Internet space is how much it is used during the holiday buying season. We come into this year's holiday season with enough concern and trepidation due to the current economic status of just about everyone on the planet but as Internet marketers we have to overlook these things and see if something is working despite these concerns.

In marketing, practitioners are tasked with taking a company's message )usually in the form of a product( and putting it in front of the right people )their defined target market( in the right place )where they may be more likely to buy(, at the right time )when they are ready to buy( so the target prospect has the best chance to become a lead which grows up to be a paying customer. That's how it has been done for quite some time.

While this is an admittedly small sample size and may not be representative of antitrust lawyers on a more widespread basis, a poll taken at an American Bar Association event at Stanford University reveals that nearly 3/4 of the antitrust lawyers present didn't feel that Google was hurting competition. The event was a debate and polling before the debate had attendees of the debate set at 61% not feeling that Google has hurt competition.

As Facebook evolves it continues to ride the fine line of telling users that what is being developed )Timeline, Ticker etc( is for their benefit while creating a more effective advertising vehicle to get to Facebook's real end game: cash. I appreciate all the "world changing" rhetoric that comes from Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, but whenever I hear that I go back to his true feelings about people who hand over information to him .

The opportunities for a career in Internet and social media marketing outpace most other business sectors at this particular time in history. Whether you are looking for your next job in the industry or are looking to make a career change into the ever changing world of Internet and social media marketing, the Marketing Pilgrim Job Board is a great place to look. Of course,

Facebook and Bing are getting into a deeper relationship as Facebook announced the incorporation of Bing Translate into the service. Any public page that is not in your native language can be translated inline by hitting the "Translate" button on the post. You will also have the option to improve the translation as well.

This is certainly a big if. There is a fair amount of speculation out there that Microsoft is looking at buying Yahoo. A 10 percent jump in Yahoo's stock yesterday was one result. There is, however, an equal amount of talk that is denying it . So it's all speculation. Welcome to the world of the Internet.

Google can be surprising at times. We are all used to Google offering ridiculous amounts of free stuff and things. Sometimes, however, what they give away isn't what you would expect. This week Google has offered its " Our Mobile Planet " data for users like you and me to generate our own charts like the one you see below. The idea is to be able to use this data gathered by Google earlier this year to give some credence to mobile arguments and more.

Let's keep this one short and sweet. The chart below was put together by Michael Degusta who blogs at The Understatement . What this shows though is no understatement at all. In fact, it could be one of the most interesting points about social networking you can make. Is it really just for the commoners? Look at how little Google's own team uses what appears to be a linch pin service for the company moving forward. What does this say about Google's commitment to Google+?

In an effort to continue to differentiate itself from Facebook, Google+ has turned its attention to giving users more freedom with regard to just how public their posts are. As Facebook keeps moving itself in the direction of Mark Zuckerberg's "share everything" mantra, Google+ is taking what might be considered the privacy and user rights high road. Here is a video that was embedded in a post )a public one of course( by one of the engineers on this team,

How many years have we been talking about the death of the newspaper? In fact, we used to talk about it a lot more because we were watching the industry die. That talk has been replaced by practically ignoring the medium altogether because I suppose it has slipped into the irrelevant phase of its slow and painful demise?

Our fascination with social media and anything other than search seems to give the impression that search marketing is losing its influence. The desire to continually move forward )which actually is a relative term since many things we chase after don't move anything forward except a VC's wallet( makes the Internet industry look like the spoiled kid at Christmas. We rip open a new present,

The iPhone 5 is just around the corner. Sprint is betting the farm on the new device . Some are reporting that Sprint may have an exclusive on the new smartphone for a while )rumor alert(. All that said, the chart below from Business Insider )data supplied by Michael DeGusta ( says that by October 20 there could be 1 million new Android activations each and every day. So whose got whom by the "you know whats"?

Google has opened its first retail location. As reported by The Telegraph Google has opened its first physical shop. The 'Chromezone' is a shop within a branch of Currys and PC World on London's Tottenham Court Road, and is being used by Google to trial a new way of selling its own 'Chromebook' laptops.

In yet another example of where the legal barriers that pop up are often more disruptive than technology itself, Facebook's rollout of its Timeline service may be delayed until a court gives them the all clear. paidContent reports A federal judge refused late on Friday to grant a temporary restraining order to Timelines.com, a Chicago company that says Facebook's timeline service may "eliminate" it. In return,

I often wonder where services like Facebook do their research to make moves like the recent overhaul of the service. I wonder if they are speaking to truly representative cross-sections of ALL users or if the service is really being built for the youngest users. Is Facebook simply ignoring the social habits and desires of a rather larger portion of their user base for the foreseeable future? Why am I bothering even asking these questions? Well,