Looking through Google’s search results, it’s obvious what side of the spectrum they chose for their results. However, color psychology goes deeper than just warm and cool. Can brightness play a factor in how people react? Google seems to be testing this theory out, as noticed by a Blogoscoped user.

The problem with researching colors for design purposes, is everyone reacts to colors in different ways. Some people are drastically affected by color and brightness, while others are able to simply look past it. Looking at the image above, the lighter colors seem less attractive to me. However, there are some looking at it who perhaps see the increase in brightness as a positive.

It will be interesting to see if Google explains their testing, but considering it’s such a subtle shift they might roll it out the door without much fanfare. Or perhaps they’ll see a negative response, and decide to eventually keep the darker tones.

What are your thoughts on the color change. Does the brighter tones give a more positive feeling, or do you prefer the darker shade?

"Due to upcoming Facebook changes, your Music data on Facebook won’t show on your profile and you’ll stop getting concert alerts. Take this step to save your music data."

The restrictions stop users from adding music to the Facebook profile and receiving personalized concert alerts. iLike has responded by asking users for their email address to send concert alers directly. 

Facebook’s move against iLike is also a bi-product of what they called a wider

campaign of "New Ways to Find and Engage with Your Favorite Applications".  Obviously, new does not always mean better.

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The New York Times tells of how things could look very different for the online advertisers in the future

The new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, David C. Vladeck, says it is time for that to change. In an interview, Mr. Vladeck outlined plans that could upset the online advertising ecosystem. Privacy policies have become useless, the commission’s standards for the cases it reviews are too narrow, and some online tracking is “Orwellian,” Mr. Vladeck said.

Privacy is a serious matter for sure and it should be. Vladeck appears to be on a fast track, however, to creating sweeping change if he gets his wish.

In June, the commission settled a case with Sears that was a warning shot to companies that thought their privacy policies protected them. In just over six weeks on the job, he has asked Congress for a bigger budget and for a streamlined way to create regulations. And he said he would hire technologists to help analyze online marketers’ tracking.

“These are pretty aggressive moves for an agency of a new administration,” said Charles Kennedy, who handles privacy cases at Morrison & Foerster.

Experts are calling for caution as sweeping change could upset the Internet economy. Considering the fact that the Internet is one of the few industries that is performing well in the current economy would it be prudent to just come in after 8 years of a pro-business stance and pull the rug out from under the business? Vladeck has already said that the industry’s attempts to police itself are not good enough and is meeting with industry execs to talk about the issue.

“The frameworks that we’ve been using historically for privacy are no longer sufficient,” Mr. Vladeck said.

As seen in the Sears case where consumers were paid $10 to install software that then tracked them with their consent it is no longer good enough to tell people what they are signing up for and thus be protected under the law.

Sears had included information about tracking in its user license agreement, but that wasn’t good enough anymore, Mr. Vladeck said.

OK folks so it looks like the Internet marketing industry doesn’t have the support of Washington with the current state of affairs. Also, what once was may not be anymore. While it is early, it appears as if Vladeck is bent on making his mark. What is your take on this? Reason for concern or just some DC bluster? Let us hear you. This one could be real important.

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 Rather then a big splashy make-over, YouTube has been rolling out an ongoing series of changes and improvements that marketers and uses should pay attention to.

• Download MP4 Files of Your Own Videos: You no longer have to panic when your computer crashes and you lose the original files of videos. Find the video you want in YouTube’s "My Videos" and hit the "Download MP4" button to save the MP4 file of the video back to your new computer. 
• A More TV-Like Experience:  One new feature hides the player control bar when viewers are in full screen for a more TV-like experience. You can also "pop out" any video by clicking on a button and it will open in a new window, without any of the surrounding features or videos. This feature won’t work when embedding has been disabled.

So what the heck does this have to do with Facebook you ask? In an article at MediaPost it appears that Facebook may be having their own trouble with the number 55. For them, however, it’s not about a speed limit but rather the shift in demographics in a direction that Facebook is not too familiar with which is down.

Earlier this year, women over 55 were identified as the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook. Now it looks like they’re going in reverse. During April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months, according to new data from the Inside Facebook blog.

This wouldn’t be so interesting if the announcement touting the growth of this segment just in February hadn’t sounded so out of place itself. So what is the reason? The editor for the Inside Facebook blog, Justin Smith postulated

“Maybe older users are still getting acclimated to how to use Facebook’s real-time stream to share information with friends and family”

On a personal note, I have watched one person who fits this category actually come on board with Facebook in the past month. It’s my mother-in-law. As an aside, it’s for this precise reason that I don’t use my Facebook page for professional purposes. I never thought that getting a comment on my status from someone could be so touching and bone-chilling all at the same time.

Oh yea, Facebook and business. Sorry about that. The most interesting statistic about Facebook is actually not this sudden exodus of the Ensure crowd but rather the slowing of overall growth. Caution: The following statistic is one that bemoans decreased growth not a decrease in overall users. It’s one of those “Hey, that’s not enough growth!” scenarios that plaques the Internet as a whole. You’ve been warned

Facebook’s overall growth slowed in the last two months from the beginning of the year. In April and May, active U.S. Facebook users increased 4% to 60.4 million, compared to 11% to 56.1 million in February and March.

Here’s the whole picture in a pretty picture:

Hey, growth is growth. Maybe the 55 and older crowd had vivid memories of the Cold War era and couldn’t take the Russian investment news. Who knows? Should we care?

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Remaking the world of online advertising would be an ambitious stretch for the most experienced executives on the Internet. Facebook’s approach, spurred by Zuckerberg’s pronouncement that "once every hundred years, media changes," has been a clunker so far.

Missteps by the company have not helped its public perception. Facebook had to change Beacon, its tattletale social referral program, after privacy complaints began hitting the media.

Users didn’t like having their latest online purchases hit the Facebook News Feeds of their friends. Advertisers aren’t happy with being part of a controversy, especially as changes to Beacon may make it less useful than Facebook has led them to believe.

Facebook’s legal action against a website that published a less than flattering picture of Zuckerberg, along with some personal information like his Social Security number and his girlfriend’s name, ended up backfiring despite the legitimate claim that these details should not have been part of the report.

Kara Swisher at All Things D called it "a well-deserved court loss" when a judge denied Facebook’s takedown attempt of the tell-all article at 02138 Magazine:

"It should come as no surprise, of course, given it was essentially a legal temper tantrum on the part of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg," Swisher wrote.

The formidable task ahead of Zuckerberg, and those who advise him behind the scenes, indicates the youthful executive should follow Google’s example. With a lucrative IPO pending, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page rescued Eric Schmidt from his faltering stint as Novell’s CEO to run the search advertising company.

Facebook would likely find plenty of interested candidates, especially anyone who has envied Schmidt’s steady prescheduled selling of Google shares that has netted him millions. The prospect of having a motivated CEO in place to guide Facebook to the promised land of rich profits should be enough to nudge Zuckerberg toward finding someone to suit the bill.

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I caught Katie Paine’s session at Executing Social Media in Atlanta yesterday – here are some indicators that your world is changing forever:.

• You spend more time on Facebook than on email
• Deadlines don’t exist anymore – it’s a 24 hour news cycle
• You don’t need the media to get your messages out
• It’s possible to create your own podcast or video for just a few hundred dollars and reach more people than you would with mainstream media
• Companies like P & G are learning to let go control and co create marketing material with customers
• People believe what’s in Wikipedia and it gets page one position in Google for practically any search term
• Google has replaced dictionaries, the thesaurus, encylopedias and yellow pages – it’s become much more than a search tool
• Measurement is easy – in a digital wolrd you can track most anything
• Size no longer matters – it’s who you reach, not how many
• Screaming at your audience no longer works.  You have to start listening.

Her take away tip:  the most important thing you can do to succeed with marketing and PR today is listen and build trust. Be transparent, don’t lie and don’t fake it.

The one theme that was heard throughout the day was learn to listen.  It’s no longer a mass media. one way dialogue.  Markets are conversations. The new media landscape is littered with campaigns that used old PR and marketing methods and failed.

But if you get it right the rewards are astounding.

	Learn how to listen to the online conversation
	Online public relations success depends on tapping into online conversations. Read the November issue of The PRoactive Report. Request a complimentary copy.

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"What we need to see is a change in U.S. legislation that removes that discrimination against EU operators," Mandelson told reporters before going to Capitol Hill to talk about the issue with U.S. lawmakers.

"It’s not in the interest of American consumers to have good responsible competitors in this market excluded by regulatory mechanisms."

The European Union has been in compensation talks with the United States since Washington decided to retroactively ban gambling services from the market -opening promises it made in 1994 as part of the Uruguay Round world trade agreement.

The United States took the action after the World Trade Organization ruled in a case brought by the Caribbean nation Antigua and Barbuda. Last year congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which is a stricter online gambling ban.

EU gambling companies have asked the bloc to demand as much as $100 billion in compensation for not being allowed in the U.S. market. "When a member of the WTO defaults on its commitments, compensation is due. That’s the case of online gambling," Mandelson said according to Reuters.

Mandelson said he would speak with Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee about his bill to end the online gambling ban.

"This issue could be resolved very simply by regulation in the U.S.," said Gordon Price, CEO of CasinoGamblingWeb.com, "if the U.S. government would consider the merits of Congressman Barney Frank’s bill H.R. 2046, which includes regulation, licensing, and enforcement, with adequate safeguards to protect minors and problem gamblers."

Madelson added that the EU is not telling the United States how to regulate the online gambling industry, but that however they regulate not to discriminate against non- American firms.

First off, the facts: after some initial confusion over what companies had joined OpenSocial (different reports carried different names, and vastly different quantities of names), Google itself has stated that Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING are part of the team.

MySpace is, as well, and it’s this addition that made many people take a second look at OpenSocial.  Before, it was a collection of relatively small (and occasionally crappy) also-rans.  With MySpace, OpenSocial became a group that might overpower anything in its way.  And “anything” includes Facebook, at least for the time being.

Yet another word that deserves consideration is “might.”  Facebook had quite a bit of momentum before this all occurred, and I have yet to hear from a single (non-developer) person who became interested in other networks due to the introduction of OpenSocial.

Furthermore, Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines three fairly major concerns about the setup of OpenSocial.  One relates to Google’s place in all of this – is the search giant growing even bigger in a not-entirely-good way?  Complaints about privacy and spheres of influence were already widespread.

Kirkpatrick then asks, “Are These Write-Only APIs? . . .  While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another.  Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another?  That’s not being discussed at all.”  Which makes it possible that this whole development is much less important than most people think.

Lastly, “If This Is Good, Will Official Sanction Kill It?”  Google’s not as Big Brother-ish as some other tech companies, but there’s still the possibility that doing everything according to some predetermined rules and regulations could stifle innovation.

So it very much remains to be seen if OpenSocial will have the intended effect.  But we’re at least getting a better idea of what factors will influence that matter.

The Yahoo team says, "Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

At the first glance, it looks like one of the monthly weather reports of Yahoo! Search. But with a second glance, the picture becomes clearer that there will be some significant changes made by Yahoo!

The recent Google PageRank update has helped in getting a good amount of blog and forum coverage over the past week, but as far as Yahoo!’s case is concerned, it looks like these latest changes in the rankings definitely deserve celebrations. But on the other hand, this has compelled others to reconsider their strategies.

Yahoo! Is not leaving any stone unturned to clean up their search results, since the launch of SearchAssist, expansion of Yahoo! Shortcuts and the inclusion of Flickr images and videos in Yahoo results. As the growth in the Yahoo! Search is noticed, it will be better for them to confront the relevancy of their organic results.

In a recent thread titled, "Yahoo update 31oct07" at Digital Point Forums, while some members have reported increase in rank, there are some others who have noticed their sites being dropped down into the Yahoo! Index.

One of the members says: "Just like every morning I am checking my SERP’s through the Keyword Ranking tool here at DP and to my astonishment I found that 90% of my sites lost rankings in Yahoo…

Most rankings have declined from top3 into lower top 10 or even top50 and my previous top10 rankings are now nearing the 100."

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