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This week, regulators in the United States and Europe approved the deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft. If you aren’t aware, Yahoo will soon get out of the search engine business to concentrate on their other cash centers. Instead, they will display Microsoft’s search results. Revenue will be shared between them, with Yahoo! doing the bulk of the consumer relations and new business acquisition for paid search.

If you’re running search campaigns on both, you’re going to have to get ready to scale down to a single one. I called Yahoo! and Microsoft this week to find out what this is going to entail.

Yeah. That just about sums it all up.

Get used to Microsoft AdCenter

By the end of 2010, Yahoo! will start migrating their clients’ campaigns over to Microsoft’s AdCenter. They don’t expect to have every campaign moved until Q1 2011. This means if you aren’t familiar with MS AdCenter yet, you need to start working with it. The good news here is that it is a LOT easier to use than the Yahoo! interface. That’s not really saying much, mind you – sneaking a grown cat onto a plane in your underwear is easier than the Yahoo! interface.

Don’t give up on Yahoo! yet

Personally, I haven’t seen a great deal of search traffic coming from Microsoft’s accounts, and Yahoo! still delivers. So why is Yahoo! selling? I have to guess paid search isn’t giving them as great an income as everything else is – but as an end user, Yahoo! search is just more productive.

So you need to start advertising with Microsoft soon if just to get used to it – but it won’t take up a very large part of your budget. Yahoo! will likely bring you more traffic for the immediate future. But when your campaign is switched, and suddenly you’re on both, the Microsoft traffic is going to jump incredibly.

Google is still King

I always throw this in, because it’s true, and people forget it: Microsoft is still third to Google, and the only thing they’ve done to change that is buy the guy in second place. If you want to know how the Big 3 ranked, comScore’s June 2009 report breaks down the market share of each. Microsoft’s market share was only twice of Ask.com’s. And they’re Ask.com! The only people who use Ask are Theodore Kaczynski and about 15 other guys who hate technology.

My point is, if you have a limited budget, don’t listen to the hype surrounding Bing. It isn’t there yet, and there’s nothing to suggest it will get there soon. Stick with Google for the time being. Remember, with paid search, you can get on the front page of a search engine’s results inside of 10 minutes if you need to. It’s not like natural search, where the work you do can take months to do you some good.

Thanks @gawthrok for the head’s up on this WordPress theme.

This is actually the one he had been using himself on his own site, www.kevingawthrope.com. Then again, he’s a brilliant web designer, and in Kindergarten I failed crayons. So he doesn’t need themes provided by WordPress and I do.

The big news today is that Facebook has purchased Friendfeed – a brilliant social media aggregator. Writing about this feels like writing the site’s obituary. I’ve never made any bones about my dislike (read as: bottomless hate) for Facebook, and watching a site I really do like get swallowed up by the latest Internet behemoth is like watching Austria get swallowed up by Germany circa 1938.

Unless you’re one of us (now) many social media geeks, you aren’t that familiar with FriendFeed. Certainly you know Facebook – a place where you can do and post just about anything, share it with your friends, and maintain relationships that don’t require much in the way open conversation. It’s all about your immediate friends, and perhaps some of their friends, but the level of discovery is comfortably low.

Friendfeed, however, has always been about sharing anything, anywhere, with anyone. I’ve found a number of interesting videos, photos, and news stories (including the one above, which, for the record, is NOT an example of irony,) on FF from people I did not otherwise know. All one needs to do is look at the information one takes in in a month on Facebook, and the amount one takes in on FF, and you can see how vastly the latter outstrips the former.

All the reasons I dislike Facebook are all the reasons it is popular: Closed garden environment, people jockeying to have high “friend” counts, silly Flash games and silly stories shared far and wide with little purpose or benefit to anyone. It’s like a high school yearbook come to life. Of course, people like their high school yearbooks. Why wouldn’t such a thing be popular?

Facebook also stole liberally from FriendFeed’s better social networking ideas. That “like” option for people’s posts? That’s straight from FriendFeed. The scrolling layout on wall posts is FriendFeed’s as well.

FriendFeed itself changed it’s layout earlier in the year to look suspiciously like Facebook. The changes weren’t improvements, though, as the old version allowed you to easily see where the information shared was coming from – Twitter, YouTube, the author’s blog, a Disqus comment, etc. At the time I thought these were done to try and compete with Facebook. Now it looks as though they were done to entice a suitor.

The reason Facebook is purchasing FriendFeed can’t be for it’s traffic, after all. Facebook is now, officially, bigger than God, and if God has a problem with that he will have to have his lawyers contact Mark Zuckerberg – or smite Facebook the way he did MySpace before it.

No, Facebook is going after what FriendFeed does best: Information sharing between users. Rather than continue to lift what FF does best, they are simply paying for it up front. What I fear most is how Facebook will monitor how FriendFeed information is shared, censor that which does not come from Facebook servers, (share a Facebook video on FF, but don’t bother sharing a YouTube one,) or even collecting user data even if they aren’t on Facebook while on line. If you know Facebook’s history with how it collects – and shares – its user data with others, maybe you can see why I chose the Anschluss metaphor at the beginning of this post.

But that’s all conspiracy theory stuff. What’s more likely is that Facebook will simply suck the marrow of the good ideas that made FriendFeed so good, implement it in its own Pages and Profiles, then announce one day that FriendFeed will be closed for business.

“But don’t worry! We’ve got everything about it in our new FaceFriendbookFeed!”

FriendFeed was simply too smart to survive, and the ones who understood this best, the lowest common denominator Facebook, knew it. Good for them, bad for us.

Facebook has been the flagship example of social networking for the last couple of years, based on the large number of people using it. Rather than simply being the domain of tech geeks and social media junkies who will, let’s be honest, use any social site, it has been adopted by Myspace dropouts. These people don’t use their computers for anything but the occasional Mapquest check, or some e-mail.

It’s so popular, you can bet if you have an account you are going to be friended by your friends, as well as your parents, your bosses, people you do business with… at which point, the fun of it drops away.

In an article in Newsweek this week, this problem is referred to as “content collapse,” perhaps the best description of the problem.

“That’s the term used to describe a series of awkward events like when your boss or parents friend you, or someone posts a picture of you that you don’t want your colleagues seeing, or when an elementary school bully from your past starts commenting on your status updates. As these activities cascade, social media research has shown that people begin to shy away from their on line persona and begin aggressively limiting the information that appears about themselves.”

People who crow about how users need to be more “open” in social networking, and need to share their real selves, will feel the bite of doing so and leave. Flame wars, or bosses finding pictures of drunken parties, or opinions that are contrary to what your company’s official position is, are easy examples of things that will drive people away.

Since so many people in one’s life are on Facebook, it becomes very hard to cover yourself so you can enjoy yourself AND keep out of trouble with the people you need to.

Personally, I used to keep two lists of friends on Facebook: “Real Friends” and “Not Real Friends.” The former was for people I am friends with off line, the latter for bosses, clients, business contacts, or just people I don’t normally socialize with. When I told people this, I received a lot of flack for not “getting it,” that social networking was about opening up one’s self completely. Obviously I disagree with this, and anyone who has been burned on line for being themselves would agree.

This trend is also what threatens Facebook. With so many people using it, the average user has some 120 friends on average. That’s a l0t of people to have to worry about tagging you in an inappropriate photo, or calling you a “n00b.” My solution was to unfriend those people who were in the “Not Real Friends” list, and keep them as contacts on Linkedin – a more appropriate network for people I work or do business with. This isn’t the same as abandoning Facebook – which I really can’t do, given the business I’m in – but many are walking away from the network, as they see the problems inherent in having information about them instantly available to everyone they know.

Do you think Facebook users should be able to create an “inner circle” and an “outer circle” of friends? Or do you think everything there should be open, and users take their chances?

Facebook grew largely through the drop in popularity of Myspace, which used to be the most enormous thing on line. We’re only a short time from the next big thing, which is probably already in existence and ready to steal away Facebook’s traffic. If Facebook doesn’t think hard on how to keep the people it now has, it’s going to end up being the next failed thing.

Years ago, my friends and I would make movies. We’d come up with these wild little concepts, draft our friends into being in them, shoot some scenes, have some laughs… and occasionally we’d even finish them. At the time there didn’t seem like much point in putting a lot of effort into them, because there was nothing to do with them once they were done.

Today that’s no longer a problem. YouTube is the greatest distributor of video content the world has ever seen. According to their own blog,  the channel receives 20 new hours of content every minute. If you figure a feature length film runs 2 hours, that’s like having 14400 new features being released each day. Clearly, there’s no longer any problem finding a distribution channel for video, as long as you don’t mind not getting points on a back-end deal. Since it’s all free, YouTube is the only one making any money.

So now there’s an open door for filmmakers (well, videographers) to show off their talents.

There’s also a wealth of advertisers trying to “break out” on YouTube in some meaningful way, and usually failing to do so. The problem is that if a company puts time and energy into creating something to show, they feel they have to justify the effort by making it a full-on advertisement. They also aren’t typically interested in creating content, just promoting – so the end result is poorly executed.

Film students, on the other hand, have passion. Even the ones who make commercials for class work or a show reel aren’t primarily thinking of how to show off a product, they’re in it to entertain. This isn’t necessarily a good thing if you’re making a commercial for television broadcast, but it’s exactly what’s needed if you’re trying to get noticed on line.

Think of the Mentos/Diet Coke videos – the people who made those weren’t working for either company, and weren’t trying to promote either brand. Still, how many Mentos mints do you think people bought because they became aware of them through YouTube?

Film and video students are skilled at the technical realities of shooting footage and editing it, but are also keenly aware of pacing and tone – intangibles that decide whether something is entertaining or not.

I cannot understand why no one has yet approached a film school to get students to produce pieces for them on YouTube. Doing this would give artisans the chance to do their thing, and companies would get gifted new-comers to make interesting on line content for them.

That content would also have a greater chance of becoming “viral” than anything a marketing department might come up with. Film students still have edge, something that gets lost once you’re consumed strictly with marketing and promotion.