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Traffic and Time Spent on Black Friday Sites Increase Rapidly

New research from Nielsen finds that during the last weeks of October and the early weeks of November, the number of unique visitors to the top websites offering previews of Black Friday deals (like bfads.net for example), has been increasing rapidly. No surprise there.

Week-over-week, however, traffic to these sites has increased by as much as 87%, from 3.8 million unique visitors during the week ending November 8, to 7 million during the week ending November 15.

LinkedIn Celebrates 3 Million Members In The UK

If you didn’t read or somehow couldn’t guess from the title, LinkedIn’s hit a significant milestone, attracting its 3 millionth member in the UK.  This is a very good sign for the networking site that’s focused on connecting people aside from those who see each other at school or parties every week.

Iraq Comes to YouTube
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Google has announced that the Iraqi government has launched a dedicated YouTube channel. It can be found at youtube.com/iraqigov.

The Iraqi government joins the Pope, the Royal Family, Queen Rania, and the presidents of the United States, France, South Korea, and Estonia in having YouTube channels to communicate with the public. Here’s a YouTube message from Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki:

Google Makes Google Reader More Personal

Update: Google has also now added favicons to feeds in Google Reader.

Google Gives Mobile Users a Better Movie Search Experience

Google has launched a mobile version of its new search results for movies. This comes just in time for the holidays, so bored people can find some entertainment while their significant others are out shopping on Black Friday or watching the games.

Microsoft Announces CFO Changeover

Chris Liddell, who’s served as Microsoft’s chief financial officer for four and a half years, intends to leave the company rather soon.  Microsoft announced that Peter Klein will be transitioning in over the next month, and then Liddell will depart at the end of the 2009.

It should comfort Microsoft fans and/or shareholders to know that Liddell isn’t leaving in any sort of disgrace; CEO Steve Ballmer complimented him in a formal statement, and Liddell in fact seems to be interested in becoming a CEO himself.

Facebook Stock Maneuver Feeds IPO Rumors
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Consider yourself forewarned: the official line is that "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time."  Just the same, a financial maneuver the company’s performing has raised a few eyebrows since it seems to point towards that possibility.

Yahoo Survey Finds Optimism for Holiday Online Retail

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they’ll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years.

"Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger," a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

Yahoo Suggests Searchers Use Other Yahoo Properties
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Yahoo has started rolling out some new Search Assist features for its web search boxes. They are present in the search boxes of most Yahoo properties. For example, you can find them on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Finance.

"These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers," explains Yahoo Search Senior Product Manager Linda Wang. "You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most."

Sync Your Computer’s Firefox with Your Phone’s
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Update 3: Mozilla has now released Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 2.

Update 2: Mozilla has now announced the release of Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 1.

Update: Mozilla has now released Weave Version 0.6.

Gmail Lets You Send Attachments While Offline
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Google has introduced a feature that lets you send attachments in Gmail while you’re offline. It works the same way as it would online, except that you can’t include inline images.

Online Shoppers Have Bigger Holiday Budgets Than Offline Shoppers
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Compete has shared some findings from a new study on consumer holiday shopping behavior. According to the firm, active online buyers (consumers who intend to spend over 30% of their holiday budgets online) have bigger budgets than other shoppers. Furthermore, they are more likely to spend that money on Black Friday.

Twitter Cofounder Talks Again About Acquisitions
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There’s no need to start refreshing the Twitter Blog every five seconds; it doesn’t sound like any pens are poised over paper at the moment.  However, Biz Stone has made some statements concerning acquisitions that point to more of them taking place in the future.

Google Ignoring Its Own Policy on Desktop AdSense?
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It has been discovered that Google is now showing AdSense ads inside Google Earth. While it is not that surprising to see Google putting ads on another one of its properties, it has raised a few eyebrows, given that Google Earth is a desktop application.

Google Obtains Access To TiVo Data

Google TV Ads is about to become a significantly more powerful marketing system.  A new pact with TiVo will allow Google to gather (and then pass on) very precise data about which commercials are being viewed, and even (to a lesser degree) who is doing the watching.

Interesting Chrome Extensions On the Way
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Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google’s full launch.

Ensuring Your Site is Indexed in Google’s Mobile Search
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In this day and age, you pretty much can’t ignore mobile users. The rate at which consumers are accessing the web via mobile devices is growing rapidly, largely thanks to the increasing popularity and production of smartphones.

Just having a mobile site isn’t even enough. Sure, it’s a great start, but you have to start thinking about a mobile site just as you would a regular site. Can people find it? Just because you have a good ranking in Google does not mean that your mobile site has a good ranking in Google’s mobile search engine, or is even indexed at all.

Now Google Delivers GPS for Android 1.6
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Update: Google has now announced that it is expanding availability of Google Maps Navigation to devices running Android 1.6 (Donut) and higher, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the G1.

Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured in a Lot More Apps
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LinkedIn has opened up its platform to developers. It can be accessed at developer.linkedin.com.

Android Continues To Make Inroads

Google’s Android is growing like a weed.  Perhaps even a weed that’s been fertilized and watered as if it was a desirable flower.  A new report from AdMob lays out some impressive usage statistics and hints that there’s much more to come.

Here are two eye-opening stats of a somewhat broad-spectrum nature: "Worldwide requests from Android devices increased 5.8 times since April 2009."  Also, "In the US, Android has 20% share of smartphone traffic, up from 7% six months before . . ."

Google Gets a New Real-Time Infrastructure for Display Ads

Google just announced that it is acquiring Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising." The company considers itself a pioneer in dynamic ad serving and optimization solutions. Google appears to agree.

AdTweets Seek to Promote Retweeting of Ads

Businesses and ad networks are increasingly finding new ways to integrate social media and advertising. This is evident with AdKnowledge’s recent acquisition of SocialMedia.com’s ad network, and it is also evident with TweetMeme’s new AdTweets. AdTweets is a product, which TweetMeme says is designed to reward advertisers for using engaging advertisements.

eBay Back On Its Feet After Search/Browse Outage
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eBay suffered a significant malfunction this weekend as an unspecified "technical issue" affected users’ ability to both search and browse listings for most of Saturday.  Now, the site’s been restored to working order, but a lot of sellers remain extremely unhappy.

eBay

New AOL (or is it Aol.?) Logo Revealed
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AOL has shown off a new logo, which it considers a significant part of its new "brand identity." That is of course to go with its newfound independence from Time Warner. The logo is simple. Aol. That’s it – capital A, lower-case o, lower case l, and a period.