Today I have been busy polishing off a feature article for tomorrow’s SEO newsletter but in the midst of that I came across a few articles and posts that caught my eye:

• My Twitter friend and social networker extroardinaire Tamar Weinberg wrote a great article that shows which social media networks she networks across different social sites:
  “How Do You Network On Social Sites?“
• ResourceShelf has links to recently posted research papers by Google employees. These papers can be gems for foretelling the future of search: Recently Posted Research Papers and Biblographic Info by Googlers. Special thanks to Barry Schwartz and his helpful Tweet that brought me to this info.
• The unofficial Facebook blog (“AF”) discusses the incredible potential of social shopping heralded by Facebook’s recent Beta test of a payment system. You will be hearing a LOT more about this very soon.
• Did you know that Democrats “participate more fully in social technologies”? This is just one of the interesting nuggets found in this fascinating post by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research: Social Profiles of Political Candidates. The posting has excellent information sourced from a Forrester research document.

Tuesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbook announced the launch of Facebook Ads. This new ad platform will allow advertisers to focus their precise target markets.

Facebook’s Ads consists of three major parts: “a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.”

With the announcement of Facebook ads, a number of brand specific pages were released Tuesday to the tune of 100,000 pages covering the world’s biggest brands. Users can share information about businesses they like acting as a trusted referral, sending qualified and highly targeted individuals to the main businesses page.

Users can also write on the wall of the business, add reviews, and interact with the business based on the features the business chooses to install.

A Facebook press release announced the following today:

“Starting tomorrow (Weds), we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. A public search listing provides, at most, the name and profile picture of any Facebook member that has their search privacy settings set to “Everyone”. It will show less information about a person than results of a search performed by someone logged in to Facebook. We wanted to give people who had never come to Facebook, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to discover their friends who are on Facebook.”

The news has caused a bit of an uproar from Facebook fans concerned about their privacy. In my opinion the risks are extremely low with the minimal amount of information provided but it is a vastly smart move for this popular social media website. Why is it a smart move? By opening the gates to spiders Facebook will amplify its impressive footprint by allowing search engine users to discover Facebook while they search for specific people. This all ads up to a hell of a lot more market share in the social media web space which is sure to make an IPO all the more tantalizing for investors.

One thing is for sure… Facebook nay sayers should definitely take a step back and reconsider their standpoint because I am in good company believing that Facebook is poised to be the Google of social media.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

As Paul Kedrosky noted today in his blog it appears undeniable that Facebook is positioning itself for an initial public offering (IPO). When? Who knows but their newly available job position for a “Stock Administration Manager” with “strong knowledge of SEC, FASB, and IRS rules and regulations relating to stock plans and insider trading…” is a good tip off that one will be coming within a year. With Facebook seemingly on the lips of every 20-30 something person I know (both in the tech sector and not), I would say this will be one very lucrative windfall for the current shareholders.

I have been hard at work writing a white paper that we will be releasing today on do it yourself social media marketing. As a result, my blogs have been rather infrequent – my apologies. Here, however, is a quick list of some of the articles that have piqued my interest over this past week and I expect you will find worthy of a read as well:

• Rand Fishkin posted a hair-raising live example of the repercussions of a Google penalty on a real estate agent that had been using manipulative linking practices.
• What to do when your company Wikipedia page goes bad: reputation management is a hot topic
• Social media and user generated content in the Spanish space: coverage from AdTech Miami
• Andy Beal’s blog shares an interesting fact on how un-linked images appear to be counting as links in Yahoo!’s algorithm according to Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Compete.com now offers keyword analysis by Jeremiah Owyang
• Facebook is acquiring widget startups in a manner that is very Google-esque and Josh Catone of Read/Write Web wrote a great article discussing the virtual ‘Facebook Economy‘.

Lastly her is an interesting interview with Eric Peterson, web analytics guru. Note the background noise is a little annoying.