For years the complaints about Yelp's "sales" tactics have been heard. Maybe I am just not paying attention but I thought that had gone away to some extent. Now with Yelp going public and all the positive vibes flying around about the company as an investment it may get even harder to find the reality. That is until I read this article at SFGate.com entitled "A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp". It's written by restauranteur, Bob Larive,

It's nice to see when a product adds features or services that are truly something to talk about rather than just filler for another lame press release. The folks at YouTube have added three new features to the video viewing service that are truly improvements and will make the service more efficient and useful. Amen. From the YouTube blog we get the following Years ago we created a way to link to a certain moment on a video, which let you find,

Google continues its quest to integrate and consolidate the disparate parts that once made up the company. Now the Android Market has been rebranded Google Play and it is the new home for Android Market apps, Google Music and Google ebookstore. The post at Google states Entertainment is supposed to be fun. But in reality, getting everything to work can be the exact opposite"moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires'lots of wires.

I talk a lot about my awful habit of publishing typos. I say this mainly to remind myself that I must think about it more seriously thus avoiding the embarrassment of being called out by readers. Typos don't reflect well on a writer or a blog. It's that simple. Another area that is butchered in the online space, especially in social media, is grammar. While you may not think it is important in the larger scheme of things I would beg to differ.

It's a bit of a slow news day so let's take a look at something from the "This is not a good business model" file. It seems that that Perfect 10 which is a former publisher of smut has decided that they will try to sue everyone. Hey, it keeps the overhead down )since your only employee is a low life lawyer or two( and if you hit it big )pathetic pun completely unintended( you can hit the jackpot and ride off into the sunset with your unearned earnings. Nice story, huh?

Google is working real hard to make sure you are logged into your Google account when you do anything with the company. Of course, that is the secret to Google getting as much data about you to use for advertising so it makes sense. The latest entry into this is a service that allows desktop searches you conduct about local questions to be viewed on your mobile device when you are logged in and doing a search from Google.com.

Sen. Chuck Schumer )D-NY( has never met a chance to get in the headlines that he didn't like. His latest effort comes in the form of a letter to the FTC chair and wants the agency to look into mobile phone privacy in general.

If you were to look at growth rate for number of users you would think that the Facebook freight train was slowing down a bit. According to eMarketer the rate of growth for the leading social network is falling into the single digits while Twitter's growth stays in double digit territory. Here are the growth numbers and projections for the next few years. These numbers, however, are not anything that should signal trouble for Facebook.

The following post was written by our SEO Channel sponsor Link-Assistant. It amazes me how many online optimizers ignore Universal Search. I've come across site owners who ask, "Hey, we are a flower retailer, how do we rank in the top 10?" And I'm like, "Jeez, you're not even on Google Places". Years ago, whether you owned a hotel, a newspaper or an insurance company, the way you optimized your site for Google was more or less the same.

This week we got the news that both Twitter and Facebook will be offering similar advertising approaches to their mobile offerings. Marketers love the idea but are we approaching a kind of breaking point where consumers might start to react negatively to the sheer volume of ads? A recent report by Upstream and YouGov gives us a lot of data which they were nice enough to put into a neat infographic.

There is a lot of talk about Google and privacy. The new privacy policy which has taken some 60 different policies and put them into one policy that addresses privacy across Google's ever expanding universe of products and service. In this attempt to simplify things Google has created the usual turmoil that accompanies any discussion of online privacy.

We are constantly fed a steady diet of stories of the success of businesses on Facebook. The talk is always of how interacting with customers has garnered benefits that range from the general "warm fuzzy" feeling about the brand to the ultimate goal for most which is revenue created by that interaction. I often wonder just how representative of the total environment those kinds of stories are. I suspect that it is lower than we even know becasue, let's face it,

Every year the CMO Survey is produced by Christine Moorman who is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. I put the credentials at the top of this post to indicate that this information is coming from one of the most respected business schools in the world. This hopefully keeps the likelihood of "research as PR syndrome" to a minimum. That said,

Facebook is preparing for its IPO and that will create more pressure to generate more revenue from their primary source of income: ads. Facebook has made known its plan to have mobile ads in addition to logout page ads. There is a fair amount of coverage around these new ads . In a nutshell, this is a significant increase in advertising and it makes business sense, however, the question remains whether it will interfere with user experience enough to make people upset. Well,

Twitter search is a frustrating thing. It sticks to the overall mantra of the social media outlet which is to manage what is current. What is now is now and what has passed is, well, in the past. Having historical access to Twitter data has simply been elusive. Now Twitter has partnered with a UK firm, DataSift to provide marketers with Twitter historical data going back to January of 2010.

I rarely, if ever, write about other blogs. As you know, if it weren't for those blogs we wouldn't have much to write about so for that I am very grateful. What is interesting though is watching TechCrunch as it goes from Silicon Valley powerhouse to an era of the great exodus of familiar faces. The latest change is at the top )yet again( as Erick Schonfeld is gone as editor-in-chief and replaced by Eric Eldon.

Ok, this one comes from the "I know, that you know, that I know" file. We are all pretty much aware that we are being tracked online. What we don't fully know is just how much information different online and offline entities have and what their intentions are with that data. I believe that in the vast majority of cases the tracking is INTENDED to be completely harmless and is used for marketing purposes.

If you have a business page on Facebook you have been officially put on the clock to make sure it presents well in the new Timeline format that all personal pages now have. Facebook has set a March 30th deadline for all business pages going live in the Timeline format. TechCrunch reports Overall, Timeline should inspire users to spend more time browsing Pages and reading their feed stories. However, it removes the ability to set an app as a default landing page,

Google+ is not doing well if you listen to this report from the Wall Street Journal . Average time spent per month on Google+ is 3 minutes )not a typo( while on Facebook it is 6 to 7 hours. The one thing that is talked about, however, is how the Google+ play is as much a way to unify other Google services as much as it is a way to compete against Facebook. It is a layer on top of the rest of the Google world.

It is likely to come as little surprise that marketers are still finding inbound marketing lead sources increasingly important in their business. It certainly makes sense. SO much so that you don't really think about it and the implications. That is until you read something like HubSpot's State of Inbound Marketing 2012. You can download the full report here .