Gamification - Is it the era of website check-in ?

One True Fan is a new social media start-up that use social gaming technique to make users part of the single social graph. Social gaming is expected to be the next biggest thing as it integrates with social media. The game theory used in the website makes it stand out from other networks. The check-in’s you perform on every website you visit to achieve points.

You can increase your points with more check-in’s. Social sharing and other activities done increases your social score. The current leader is named as “One True Fan”. An email is send to the person who lost the position when someone else grab his position to become the leader.



The One True Fan website have lot of features which enable users to check out pages that are shared by other users. There is a player log option which helps the players to check what all activities they have done. The player log feature also let the players know how many points they earned, which level they have reached and what all awards they have one. The next feature is fanned site which helps to track which all websites have been fanned by each player. The website also have a feature to add friends.

If you would like to automatically update the pages shared then you can download the browser addon and install that. This will be much useful as you won’t have to log in each time you want to become a fan of that page. You can now start browsing the web and see OneTrueFan in action. There is also an option to install One True Widget on other website. Copy and paste the script before the close of tag of your website and you are well to go.

One True Fan allows to stay connected with your social circle. It shows allows you to see your social circle live on the websites that you visit. I hope that lot of publishers start to realize the benefits of the website. It is really interesting to know what type of website other people in your social circle are visiting. If you haven’t tried out One True Fan then you are missing what’s hot topic among your social circle.

Read my originally posted on Sexy Social Media

Cochin Tweetup

Cochin Twestival 2010 will be held on 25 March, 2010 from 5 PM to 8 PM at Somewhere Else Cafe. Cochin Twestival is, in short, a Twitter Festival.

RSVP for Cochin Twestival

Hearing the word 'Twestival' for the first time?

It is a mega tweet-up with lots of things added. In short, it is a Twitter Festival. Twitter Festivals or Twestivals happen all around the globe once a year. There are basically two types of Twestivals: Twestival Global & Twestival Local. Twestival Global is one day, one cause all around the world and Twestival Local takes place over a weekend where cities are encouraged to support a local cause. Both versions have international momentum, but the real power of Twestival is when everything comes together on one day, giving focus to an important cause, the cause being different every year.
Cochin Twestival

Venue

Twestival Cochin 2010 will be held at Somewhere Else Cafe. For more details, go here

Registration

You can register for the event in the Facebook Event Page.

Search Engines and Micro Links

The are lot of speculations going on in the SEO world. There have been a lot of predictions for 2010. The big question now is will the microlinks gain importance in the eyes of Search Engines ?. Blogging has changed from Megablogging to Microblogging. Twitter and Plurk are the most famous microblogging sites. While twitter has build up a strong presence in the Internet social media world, plurk has build a strong presence among Asia social media users especially users from Taiwan. My answer to the question is that there is high chance that Google starts giving more weightage to twitter microlinks as Google has already started to track the real time mentions. They have started showing the title as well as homepage of the website that is tweeted as microlink using bit.ly or using URL's shortened by other microlinking websites.This is a great sign that the tweets might pass some significant data that might be taken into consideration while search engines compute SERP changes.


Now the most important question comes up as how Google will determine which tweets are more relavant and which are not that relavant?. I would have to say that Google will use a similar meterics which they have been using for website relavance. Google has been using a concept like a webpage becomes important as more and more external webpages links of which more authority webpages are giving the links which have more number of backlinks. The same principal might be applied in the case of twitter profile. A twitter profile will get more authority if a lot of twitter profiles link to the particular twitter profile of which some of them are most famous twitter who have lot of followers and who follow a few. This will really make search engine conisered the twitter profile as a priorirty one and the tweets will get more importance.

Here is supporting view.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well".

My original post appeared in www.gseo.net - Will Search Engines give importance to Micro Links ?

The History of SEO from 2000-2010 - Cijo Abraham Mani

This is my first post in 2010.I hope you would all have been waiting for my post on this blog. I was a little busy as I had become a Guest Blogger in GSEO Blog.

Today I am going to blog about how SEO changed over the decade. This has been a topic of discussion among a lot of SEO experts as well as webmasters. The major changes that evolved in SEO after 2000 will be discussed in this blogpost. In 2000 Yahoo directory listing for $199 as well as link popularity was an important element for Search Engine Optimization. In 2001 the Pay-for-placement concept concept became more popular in 2001. Google launched AdWords way back in 2001.Google started penalizing websites for selling PR on the same year. In 2003 Google started thinking about Spam. Yahoo purchased Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST in 2003. The year 2004 was a great year in SEO world as professional SEO started in 2004. Google introduced Google Analytics and "no follow" link attribute in 2005. In 2006 Google came up with minus 30 penalty. The year 2007 made SEO think more about ways on getting "targeted traffic" to the websites. In 2008 most of the real time social media websites got evolved. Twitter was started in 2008. In 2009 Bing became the new search engine released by Microsoft.

I am grateful to Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings a Boston SEO Consulting Agency for collecting so many facts about SEO evolution through the past decade.

Source of information: Experienced People

Navigate around locations using Google landmarks feature

Google India launches landmarks a new feature that will enable driving directions for users of Google Maps. Google map users can now navigate around locations using landmarks feature on their desktops and mobile phones to locate petrol pumps, colleges and schools, bus and railway stations,local businesses and much more. India is the first country in the world to get this feature on Google Maps.

This will be an helpful feature for all Indians as they can easily locate the places they want to travel. Google India has collected good landmark data through Google Map Maker to which users have added "points of interest" information. Googles uses a navigation algorithm determines the data based on importance, and closeness to the turns the user is making and other available informations. Google users can also enrich the current Google landmarks data with additional resources using Google Map Maker.

Read my post on GSEO.net - Google India launches landmarks 

Mobile Search - The top 10 websites in India

According to Opera, Google.com and other services by Google are popular on the mobile web in India. In addition, a report from the company shows a 208.4% unique user growth in Opera Mini users in India compared to November 2008.

Opera Mini has already got more than 41.7 million users worldwide showing a 5.3 percent increase as compared to the previous month, according to the report. The number of page views in November also went up 9.5% and the data consumption increased about 8.3% compared to October.

1.Google.com

2.Orkut.com

3.Gmail.com

4.Facebook.com

5.Wikipedia.org

6.Songs.pk

7.Youtube.com

8.Yahoo.com

9. Wap.in

10. Zedge.net

Read my post on GSEO.net - Mobile Web - The top 10 websites in India

Latest SEO Industry News 2010

The latest SEO news for 2010 would be the inclusion of Real Time Search by all major search engines. Google has started their efforts to make the Internet much faster. Google plan to buy Yelp will make them popular in customer review as well as social front. Twitter has made their plans clear as they are going to introduce contribute feature for business profile. Many businesses are using twitter for customer support as well as branding. The year 2010 seems to be more promising one as compared to 2009. The big thing about 2010 would be that it will make clear if the social networking sites are going to lead the race or the search engines are going to push their position's further ahead. Microsoft tried to dominate in China by introducing a Microblogging service like Plurk but the service was soon brought down because many users started to share the service was exactly a copycat of Plurk. Plurk is still ahead of twitter in the Taiwan and plans to dominate in Asia. Twitter have got huge plans as they announced that they will support business profiles. Google has started to show status updates from Twitter, Facebook etc. The new real time wave will be in its peak in 2010. There are also a lot of SEO Contests to come in 2010. SEO contest are great way to develop your SEO Skills and SEO knowledge. I look forward to participate in a lot of SEO Contest especially the once from Promo Junkie Forum.