We all know that there is a lot of noise in social media. This noise is not only a result of more social media adoption by brands, but it is also a result of bad content. Unfortunately, noise impacts both consumers and brands.

Facebook has received numerous complaints over privacy, especially in the past year. Both consumers and privacy organizations have expressed their frustration with the social giant, and in one instance last year, even filed a complaint with the FTC.

With big news from Google Chrome and Firefox, the browser war has been anything but quiet lately. Norwegian browser Opera has also positioned its place in the war with several recent announcements. At SXSW, WebProNews caught up with Charles McCathieNevile, Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, to talk about the company’s recent efforts.

Last month, we introduced a tool called SocialDitto. The idea was to offer a tool that would do for Facebook posts what Blackbird Pie did for Tweets. It simply lets you embed posts into articles, blog posts, or any webpage. …

With the midterm elections taking place tomorrow, Google is highlighting some tools it offers to help voters make their decisions. This is not a new concept for Google, but it’s one that many may still find useful.

Google’s Election Center is available to users as an "experimental" service. It lets election officials provide data directly to Google for use in search tools. 

There’s a new kind of personalized, social search available that may trump any effort we’ve seen from Google to date in this corner of search.

Greplin is a new site that searches through "all your online data in one place, really fast" – or at least your the online data you have in the services that it supports, which is likely far from all of your online data. Still, the concept behind the site is pretty noteworthy, and it will likely add more services as time goes on.

Visa has released a new online shopping tool called Rightcliq which lets users bookmark products on shopping sites, add notes, and add them to a "wishspace". The company touts it as a tool that improves the way you browse and compare products.

American Express has launched a new search marketing tool for small businesses via its OPEN forum. The tool, powered by Clickable, is called SearchManager, and lets business owners manage paid search campaigns across Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Facebook ads from one dashboard.

As Google continues its push to get businesses using Google Apps, the company has now introduced the "Go Google Cloud Calculator". This is a tool that lets you enter your company’s name, tell it how many employees you have, and gives you Google’s estimates for how much money you could save, how much more productive you will be, how much more storage you will get, how many hours you will save, etc.

Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

Google has released a new feature for its Website Optimizer tool, called Experiment Notes. The feature is designed to help users include documentation as part of their testing. For any experiments, users can now add their own annotations.

If you are unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, it’s a free tool from Google that webmasters can use to increase conversions by making adjustments to design and text elements to see what works.

Oddcast has released an interesting new audio status-updating tool for publishing your voice to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. You may recognize the company from its SitePal service, which provides animated characters for websites.

The new tool called AudioPal lets users create 60-second personal voice messages that can be posted to their personal web pages, blogs, and social networks.

If you use Firefox, you are no doubt aware that there are many add-ons that can enhance your browsing experience. Many of these can make your online life a whole lot easier and save you time. Following are some that I have found particularly useful. Which do you like? Tell us.

1. Fire Gestures

Mozilla has launched a new directory with the goal of providing a one-stop shop for open web tools and resources for developers. It is called the Open Web tools Directory.

The reason Mozilla says it decided to start this directory is simply because there isn’t one like it. "There’s no central index of these tools," the company says in a blog post.

Yahoo has introduced a new version of the Yahoo Toolbar today. It runs on Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox (as a beta).

"The new Yahoo! Toolbar now offers greater customization and more immediate access to the information you care about most from across the entire web – not just Yahoo! sites," says Burke Culligan, Senior Director of Yahoo Front Doors.

StumleUpon announced today that it has launched a new URL-shortening service called Su.pr. The twist, however, is that this one is designed to help content creators actually increase their traffic with it. According to StumbleUpon, this is the first such service that does this.

Google has announced the launch of the Google Translator toolkit, an editor designed to give translators an easy means of bringing the "human touch" to machine translation, which everybody knows is often flawed.

Site owners and developers who don’t want to give their visitors a "check your email while this page loads" experience may be indebted to Google.  The search giant has released a tool called Page Speed that’s capable of identifying ways to make things run faster. 

WebProNews is of course attending the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, and Abby Johnson spoke with Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, about the effect the economy has had on keyword usage. Have you noticed differences in keyword trends? Share your experiences here.

Google has introduced an iGoogle gadget for Insights for Search. It displays the top rising searches and top related searches on your Google home page. Users can change the settings to show results for a specific location, keyword, category, or source.

In this age of fast-moving information and technologies, it is extremely important for businesses to protect online reputations. Currently, that means getting involved with social media and real-time search.