The Facebook Toolbar allows you to log into Facebook direct from your browser.

You can quickly navigate to friend requests, new messages, event invitations, group invitations, upload photographs and even share pages you are currently browsing to your Facebook profile.

I personally like the ‘quick links’ facility where I can navigate to my friends lists to quickly review what my friends have been posting or keep up to date with Facebook Pages I am a fan of.

Be warned that if you activate the Facebook Friends sidebar that it could distract you as you will see all the updates from your friends in real time.

And I would also recommend that you review the ‘settings’ so that you customise what if any pop-up notifications you want to receive from Facebook.

You can download the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox of Internet Explorer here.

What is your favourite way of connecting with your Facebook Friends and your community on your Facebook Page?

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The company says the new toolbar will help save expensive ink. It’s available for recent versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, for Windows versions after Windows 2000.

The toolbar allows users to print a portion of a webpage they have highlighted directly, text or images. Users can schedule automatic printing of webpages and tell the toolbar to print in black ink or text-only.

The neatest part of the toolbar, though, is that it removes all the links and junk you don’t want printed, saving ink, time, paper, and frustration.

This a nice move from Lexmark from marketing perspective. The company has been plagued by flagging sales recently; the offshoot of IBM’s old printing division, Lexmark enjoyed a decade of positive financial quarters.

Rivals like HP and Canon have outshined it lately, though. The toolbar creates an opportunity for the company to revitalize its brand by making the brand more ubiquitous on the Net while providing a positive experience for customers.  
 

Google’s noteworthy engineer Matt Cutts stirred up the SEO world with a little note on his blog. The always-sparkling discussion of PageRank and its secret sauce got a nudge from Cutts with his announcement.

“I

Count us among the sites noting reports of Google Toolbar’s bad behavior with 404 error pages. As the old saying goes, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Google’s Matt Cutts explained why everyone should calm down and take a breath. The Toolbar behavior had been disclosed in a couple of places, but probably didn’t receive enough attention.

“If you

Astute webmasters quickly realized the value in making their 404 Page Not Found messages offer more than an oblique error message. A custom 404 can help a visitor get back on track within a website; the custom 404 proves its value quickly by serving as a retention aid.

The Seoker blog witnessed something disturbing after adding the beta of the Google Toolbar to a computer:

Google grabs the 404 error code returned to the web browser in certain situations and instead of displaying the 404 error page of the website you are on, it creates a custom 404 error page – made by Google. The “new” 404 error page ‘conveniently’ includes a Google search box and if used by a visitor will drive the visitor away from your website.

“I find it humorous that Google, who has horrible 404 pages, is replacing 404 pages for other sites with the toolbar,” said Rustybrick at SEORountable. “Besides for the humor and irony in this, replacing a 404 page with something else is purely evil in many webmaster’s minds.”

For months, the speculation surrounded an apparent decrease in PageRank scores on Google’s Toolbar. It seemed the decrease in rank was connected to penalties associated with buying and selling links that passed on PageRank, a practice Google not-so-quietly condemned last autumn.

But what was more confusing was that though the toolbar scores were dropping, the actual search rankings looked to be unaffected. Google appears to have updated its Directory on January 8 along with PageRank scores that are significantly higher than listed on the toolbar.

Observers say the Google Directory update seems to be pulled directly from DMOZ, the open directory project. As a result, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable joins others in discrepancy reports:

"…it seems like the Toolbar PageRank of this site is a PageRank of 4. But if you look at the most recent Google Directory update, this site appears to be a PageRank of 7."

There are few theories posted about why this is occurring, Andy Beard explains how this could be problematic for advertisers looking to assess the true value of a website:

"It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.
 

"Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion." 
 
 

There’s quite a spread of features packed into this new product.  For newbies (or people with clumsy fingers), “Suggestions for navigation errors” will try to guide them to a working address.  More advanced users (and many of our readers) should instead be interested in a “PageRank Display” option.

And there’s just about everything you can imagine that falls in between, as well.  Convenience seems to have been a big focus of the update, and Ionut Alex Chitu writes, “Probably the most interesting new feature is that you can choose to save your settings on Google’s servers so you can access your buttons, settings and AutoFill data even if you don’t use the same computer.”

Google has yet to formally announce this update, so it may not be in absolute tip-top condition.  Still, it should be fun for whatever group of people uses IE and is interested in the Google Toolbar.

Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person.

via compete blog

Ok Compete gathers their data in a few different ways, first they have a toolbar which lets them gather data, easy enough to fake the same way Alexa is faked. However they also use other methods like clickstream data from ISP’s (like hitwise), and then weight the data according to their algorithm.

Not to rain on their parade but people sometimes send automated queries to search engines for any number of purposes, some benign like ranking reports, others more nefarious like trying to influence things such as Google Trends. Of course a human being does “push the button” so if you wanted to get technical about it yes they are all human generated, but I think the essence of your statement is each query is done by a person singularly, not en masse. It gets even more difficult when sophisticated people start generating massive amounts of “pseudo human” traffic, and throttle it with variable time intervals so it appears more natural. Compete you really think you’ve got that one beat do you … c’mon now … (wink wink nudge nudge).

No doubt you are better than many of the others, but lets be real adversarial information retrieval can get very tricky at times and I think declaring “Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person” would rank right up there with building an unsinkable ship … and removing spam from the internet

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For most everybody else, the warning shot was nigh on bursting your eardrums. Once the din was done, webmasters – especially those of marketing sites – looked around to find everything except their toolbar PageRank still in tact. It was sound and fury signifying, well, something.

The most obvious thing it signified was that your toolbar PageRank is virtually meaningless, and is probably why Google slapped it. It’s an attention-getter without causing any direct harm. Reports from around the blogosphere have reported no affect on traffic afterward.

But what if – if nobody listens to the warning – Google did start taking out these same marketing sites with paid links and cross-linking schemes? Would they crash out of existence? Is Google that powerful?

Search Engine Guide’s Robert Clough, whose site dropped from PR 7 to PR 4 over the past month, hasn’t decided how much he needs Google.

Are we willing to risk losing the traffic Google sends simply because we don’t buy into this crazy notion? Will we nofollow every paid link just because Google demands it? At this point, I don’t know. It’s a decision that will be made based on what is best for, and with the input of, our readers, advertisers, contributors and employees.

A tough call indeed. But Debra Mastaler at Search Engine Land suggests it’s time to stop sucking at the Google teet and diversify, so that, if you want to be truly independent, you can create a world without them.

You’ve heard the line: it takes seven impressions before a user takes action? It’s even harder on the web where a person can click away and reach a competitor in seconds. It’s not always possible to find and advertise on all the sites your buying public visit. Since many people report assigning credibility to sites they see both on and offline, it’s a good idea to start looking for offline advertising venues.

Google isn’t the only site on the Internet and it’s time we stop treating it as such. Start looking for online sources within the traditional and web2.0 areas, experiment with all until your find the right mix.