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This Week In Social Media: Dec. 11, 2009

This Week In Social Media: December 11, 2009 from iePlexus on Vimeo.

From Google’s new search features, to AOL relaunching their site, Kyle Aevermann from iePlexus takes a look at some of the stories that made headlines this week in the world of social media and on the world wide web.

On Monday, Google enabled Real-Time search results, showing live updates from Twitter, Facebook, news articles and much more.  The company announced in October at the Web 2.0 Summit that they would be adding this feature.  Bing.com also released a similar feature immediately following their announcement at the Summit. Since then millions have used Bing to find out the latest trending topics on Twitter.  Google says that all features aren’t available to everyone just quite yet, but should be by the end of next week. 

Google also rolled out  personalized search results this week. Those are results based on your experience through the search engine.  For example, if you frequently search for “recipes” and have clicked on epicurious.com a number of times Google will start ranking their site higher the next time you search for recipes.  While this is a nice feature for many searchers, lots of companies are worried that it will knock them out of their current Google ranking.  To see what some experts are saying, make sure to check out our blog at ieplexus.com/blog.

Last weekend, news swirled that Amazon.com, the world’s largest online marketplace, was in the process of secretly searching locations to build a few brick and mortar stores in the UK.  The Sunday Times reported a few sources indicating that Amazon officials had scowered locations, however an Amazon spokesperson said that Amazon was not looking to build any physical stores anywhere in the world.

On Monday, Facebook announced they are in the process of forming the Global Advisory Board, to keep up to date on the latest safety and privacy news. The group consists of five organizations including Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute. Facebook plans on regularly meeting with the group to get up to date information on security issues, to help protect user information. Facebook started asking all 350 million of its users to review and update their settings as they roll out a new simplified privacy interface.

And finally, on Thursday AOL relaunched their site, getting rid of the old triangle logo replacing it with 20 customizable logos including a gold fish, a monster, and different color inks.  You may also notice that AOL is not all capitalized anymore and actually ends with a period.  The company is no longer owned by Time Warner, and wanted to make the site as user friendly and as customizable as possible.  Users can even submit their own feature articles and actually get paid for it.  Aol hopes to soon dominate the internet again.