5 for Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend
July 8th, 2011 by
The Future of Mobile Payments — Mashable
Online monetary transfer giant PayPal has boldly announced that wallets will be obsolete by 2015, aiming to replace traditional credit cards with mobile phone payments. With Paypal gearing up for focus on mobile payments, as well as Google’s recently launched Google Wallet service and Visa’s new interest in the mobile payment platform Square, the claim might not be so grandiose as it seems. This handy infographic presents some data on where mobile payments might go from here.
Can’t Get Enough Of Facebook’s News Feed? — All Facebook
Facebook has been revving its engine at full throttle lately, implementing a new chat setup, a Facebook Video collaboration with Skype and now a new data-intensive news feed that can be scrolled through without shuffling any ads, application bookmarks and the navigation bar off-screen. While the aforementioned new features have been generating a lot of buzz, this marks the first redesign of the home page in over a year. Is it just time for some late spring cleaning, or are they feeling the pressure in competition with Google+?
Study: Local businesses ‘like’ social media for marketing — B to B Online
According to a recent Roost poll, small business owners show strong approval for social media marketing, with nearly three-quarters indicating that it is more effective than paid search. While many cited positives such as ease of use, cost-effectiveness and ability to keep them on their toes, they also reported downsides such as not being able to get concrete indications of the success of their endeavors.
Facebook Blocks Friend Export to Google Plus — SEOChat
A third-party application designed to allow a Facebook user to export their friends’ data such as name, email address, birthday and so on has been blocked from Facebook. While this application does have legitimate conflicts with Facebook’s TOS (specifically the privacy and information-gathering clauses) (I’ll leave this comment up to your imagination), the fact that FB officials chose to go after it only after the announcement of Google+ speaks volumes.
What is the Best Time of Day to Tweet — Graywolf SEO
So you’ve established your online identity, accumulated the appropriate number of followers and are ready to start writing attention-grabbing, informative tweets. When to post so they get the maximum number of eyeballs possible? Tweriod.com will analyze your last 5,000 followers and ascertain when they were online. While this isn’t a one-way ticket to permanent broadcast mode, this tool (especially when combined with other reporting utilities such as those that come with Hootsuite and Bufferapp) can be significantly handy for scheduling.
