Facebook took a bet on FriendFeed showing yet again openness in adopting advanced third party features that would improve its service: Flickr’s photo tagging, Delicious’s link sharing, and now FriendFeed’s search features in its real time search engine powered by Bing.

FriendFeed is the creation of four ex Google engineers that developed Gmail and Google Maps. Popular Facebook features as the “like” and “comment” items in users feeds, have been already inspired by FriendFeed. Pouring FriendFeed’s talent and technology on a social media platform that currently has 250 million users worldwide, is a massive blow to Facebook’s competitors in the real time search field: Google and Twitter.

Introducing the new share to “everyone” option in its Publisher (the application launched when you click on the Share button), Facebook will inject user data in a real time search engine that will allow search through shared media and status updates.

Will SEM switch from Google AdSense to Facebook?

What consequences will this deal bring to Search Engine Marketing and new media advertising? How will Google react?

Acquiring Twitter could be the most obvious response, and Google needs to catch up in integrating the social graph in a real time search engine.

FriendFeed’s co-founder Paul Buchheit, developed the original prototype of Google AdSense: Facebook could become web advertising heaven and a central hub of online social media, enabling 250 million users to share and search feeds from virtually any social media platform available on the web, including Twitter.

Is this the beginning of the end for Google?

For more on the subject, read the announcement on FriendFeed’s blog and Facebook’s press release.

Earlier this week, Google Mexico and the Mexican government signed an agreenment to promote archaeological and historical sites in a bid to revive tourism following the swine flu epidemic, according to the Press Association.

Considering Google’s many, many… many talents, will the revival of tourism in Mexico be feasable? yeah.

The plan is for Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History to provide Google Mexico with information, images, videos and facts to help the Mexican tourism industry bounce back. They will profit from tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps which will link Google users to the various virtual tours of some of Mexico’s most renowned museums as well as rotating videos of the country’s major landmarks such as the pyramids and other ancient ruins.

The Mexican government has also placed its bet on a YouTube channel called INAH TV where all kinds of information regarding Mexican sightings, museums, galleries, ruins, ethnic information and exhibitions will be available to 85% of Mexico’s entire internet population of Google users.

Other initiatives such as the online contest dubbed ‘Let’s put Mexico on the Map’ have been designed for college students to simulate some of Mexico’s most prominent landmarks using Google’s 3D animation software, Sketch Up.

This is yet another example of Google’s great potential and how the search giant can be leveraged to best suit your needs, regardless whether you’re a marketer, a company, or an individual. Take the aforementioned agreement as an example, although it is presented from a macro perspective, the same ‘principles’ used by the Mexican government can be applied in conjunction with any online marketing  strategy, adding or substracting a few instruments here and there.

What’s interesting though, is that a country such as Mexico looks to Google to bring tourism back on track following the outbreak from a few months back.

Mom’s been calling you non-stop all day long- wouldn’t you love throwing your phone out the window? Your friends don’t stop sms-ing you to ask you about your whereabouts come Saturday?

Google has rolled out a possible solution to these particular problems. Google’s mapping application has just undergone an upgrade that lets people track down friends, colleagues and relatives in a total of 27 countries around the world and 42 languages.

Google Latitude is the new feature from Google Maps which works for both PCs, adds on to the  iGadgets list, and mobile phones, allowing you to be in touch with friends via Google Talk and Gmail.  Latitude helps you find your friend’s  location on a map at any given time. Once you have selected a group of friends you’d like to share locations with, both your picture icon and their picture icon will show up on the map and show-up as a list on the sidebar.

If for some reason you don’t find this convenient and need to instead be ’secretive’ about your whereabouts, you can do so by controlling how much privacy you want on a contact-to-contact basis, or even simpler, you can enter a fake location for yourself.

In any case, Google has also included detailed privacy settings on the application so you will be full owner of your personal location, thus you are not forced to display your approximate location; settings are entirely modifiable.

Head to google.com/latitude from your PC or mobile to opt-in to Latitude and try it out.  Set up, contact-by-contact, who will be able to see your live updates and who won’t, plus you can even set-up status messages for specific friends.

and yes, it will soon be available for Apple’s mobile devices…Visit TechCrunch to read more about Latitude for mobiles.

Are you up for it? Let us know what you think!

Al Jazeera and the DR Congo currently use it to visualize incidences of violence in their respective countries.

Ushahidi, which means witness in Swahili, is a free and open source platform created to trace and report issues of crime, crisis and violence to the general public. It was developed specifically during the post-election breakout in Kenya in 2008.

Ushahidi is a Google Maps mash-up that allows users to report information via SMS, emails or web form.  Users from all parts of the world can fill in a simple form with an exact description of what happened, where it took place and assign a category to it.  Some of the categories include looting, riots, crime and sexual assault each represented by different colored dots easily detectable on a map.

For the DR Congo, NGO’s are currently helping with the gathering of information to keep locals alert. When clicking on a particular dot, a report is generated in both English and French, plus it will identify exactly where the incident is happening on the map of the DR Congo.

As expressed by the creators of the platform, ‘our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. ‘

Hats off to Ushahidi’s developers, Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh and David Kobaya for creating such a useful tool that lays out a bold vision for the integration of existing technologies with the purpose of ending war, fighting crime and restoring peace in areas of conflict.

Please pass the word around, we can only profit from tools such as these that use technology as a medium to help others with no self-interest. Ushahidi is present on Facebook and Twitter. For more info, check out their Blog.

Thanks to the Geolocator API web application your phone will be able to:

* Obtain the user’s current position, using the getCurrentPosition method
* Watch the user’s position as it changes over time, using the watchPosition method
* Quickly and cheaply obtain the user’s last known position, using the lastPosition property

So before this advancement and when logging onto Google Maps to request your current location, this would specify your remote location with a ‘blue circle’, which wouldn’t change size regardless of your current position in a given place.

Today, if you request your exact location on Google Maps, you will be given a more precise location and pin pointed more accurately on the map, which also means the circle will change depending on how close its estimate is to your true location or how far.

So the better the estimate, the smaller the circle, or the more populated the area, the smaller the circle and vice versa.

Check out this video for a more in depth explanation on the advantages of My Location.  In the meantime, keep in mind that any application powered by Google’s geolocation service automatically benefits from these latest improvements, so it takes nothing to begin enjoying the service.

Don’t get lost, and don’t be late!

As we know, a couple weeks back, Google released ‘walking directions’ as part of their Google Maps feature options.

If you’re keen to taking random strolls down some unknown street, perhaps some new ‘pedestrian friendly’ town you happen to be visiting for the weekend, or want to enjoy the beautifully HOT weather that has come to us this year, or basically move within a radius of not more than 10km, Google walking directions is your thing.

I can’t even tell you how glad I am for this. Even though I strangely enjoy getting lost in places I don’t know cause I’m a strong believer that the more you get lost; the better you get to know a place,- this new feature is definitely a time-saver.

BUT, lately, it has become somewhat of a private issue for some. Concerns have been raised that Google is being a bit reckless in terms of providing high precision information, like walking directions down your street sidewalk. This takes us back to the couple from Pittsburgh who sued Google for trespassing ‘Private Road’ territory using Street View, which provides users with a 360-degree photo of the place intended for visit.

Same thing goes for Google Health. This is also a fairly new feature where people can keep track of their health information by importing health reports, gathering all medical related data and saving it all in one safe place. Safe? People are beginning to think twice about this whole ’sharing their world’ ideology on the Web, in particularly Google.

Some may call it paranoia, for others it’s convenient, others just can’t be bothered with it. What do you think?

The Google Team has realized, maybe due to continuous claims, that some of the places that appear on Google Maps, are in need for some major tweaking. Meaning, they may not even contain any rivers, roads or even bike trails. They’re just plain…blank. In the example below you can notice there’s the before and after versions of a map from Myanmar, which has slowly been modified by engineers from the area.

What better than having the locals contribute to ‘filling in the blanks’ of their own geographical region?

Some other regions in the world in need for local support and expertise are the following: Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Caribbean nations of: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago.

Although, as I was browsing through other sites, I found this blogger’s opinion to be quite reasonable. Stephen Shankland from Cnet News commented on how Google is continuously profiting from user-generated contributions that offer users better mapping, however, and I quote Stephen’s words, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too?’ I agree.

The Google Map Maker functions are very easy to use and basically anyone can add to any of these empty looking maps.Its just a matter of time before users become fully aware about the fact that their local knowledge could really give the search engine monster a hand.

Google does not cease to amaze us. It hasn’t been announced yet but rumors say Google is building up a platform that will map the Earth’s boundless ocean floors.

According to a report from News.com, the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. hosted a group of selected research experts from various institutions to discuss the elaboration of a 3D oceanographic application, provisionally called Google Ocean, for mapping the underworld.

They explain the tool will not be like any other already existing 3D online mapping device. This new tool will provide users with the underwater topography, known as bathymetry, which will even show all depth layers of the ocean, including currents, coral reefs , weather patterns and everything there is to point out in relation to the sea floor, while at the same time allowing users to navigate by zooming and panning on specific spots; you may probably catch a shipwreck or two.

To offer clearer images of the ocean floor, Google will be using high-resolution grids and images in order to show all these aspects of the ocean’s topography as well as, surroundings, in greater detail.

“Google will basically just provide the field and then everyone will come flocking to it,” predicted Stephen P. Miller, head of the Geological Data Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

But what makes it all the more interesting is that there’s a vast world down there that remains unbeknown and somewhat enigmatic, which could be eventually understood and meticulously explored with advancements such as Google Ocean.

When will Yahoo! give in and introduce equal sitemap format?

Google introduced the use of sitemaps for video today. It allows webmasters to let Google know the location and description of their videos, which is undeniably good for video SEO. If you are featuring videos on your site, you can attract a decent amount of traffic if these videos pop up in search results on Google Video. And Google Universal Search which also shows videos.

But the service has received some critique on its own blog, and rightly so. The most important questionable point is that this service is – for now – only useful for Google search. Google representatives say that they hope that other search engines will follow, but this means that we will still have to work with two video sitemaps to upload. Three for the sites that also have a mobile version. And since we work with Yahoo! as well, which demands its own sitemap formats, that means that the total amount of sitemaps we will have to upload is between four and six. We think that it is time for a universal sitemap format, and we suppose Yahoo! will have to come up with it; they have more to gain as Yahoo! is often the second advertising platform after Google, and it is hardly ever the other way around.

We expect Yahoo! to introduce the same format as Google for their sitemaps soon, and think that in the end also video sitemaps will be included into the general sitemaps, making the lives of us SEO specialists a lot easier.

Up to now it was possible but rather hard to put Google Maps on your pages. With the new function anyone can do it! (see below)

View Larger Map

The only concern we might have, is competitors’ (future) advertisements appearing in the Google Map on your website. We hope Google has thought of this and will filter out any advertisements on the Maps that companies sport on their sites.