1. The Queen hits Twitter
That’s right HRH has joined the social networking revolution with her own Twitter page. Technically it’s actually the whole Royal family’s Twitter page, and none of them will actually be tweeting. That’s left up to two teams at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. STill at least it shows the Monarchy aren’t as out of touch as some people seem to think.

2. Health officials spend £30 million on marketing
“Where’s the social media link?” you say. Well, health officials have set aside a budget of £30 million to spend over the next three years on a marketing campaign to raise awareness on healthy eating, obesity and the like, with Facebook and Twitter being the main focus. Naturally, this has come under fire, with critics suggesting the money would be better off spent elsewhere. But at a time when advertisers are attaching increasing importance to the amount of time people spend on a site, then why shouldn’t health officals adopt a similar stance? After all Facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world, and Twitter is growing at an unprecedented rate.

3. PrankNET gets probed
Think prank calls are funny? The FBI certainly doesn’t. They’re investigating increasingly violent ‘pranks’ done by PrankNET – an anonymous prank-calling internet group. The group have claimed responsibility for such “pranks” as convincing staff in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant to douse the restaurant with fire-suppressing chemicals, evacuate the building and strip off their clothes in the freezing cold. Now, firstly that’s not a very funny prank. And secondly, who in their right mind would follow those instructions anyway?

4. Google Street View hits Stonehenge
The internet road-mapping service, Google Street View, has decided to extend its service from driving routes to popular off-road destinations, such as the Angel of the North, Loch Ness and Stonehenge. The service has had its issues with privacy laws in the past, but I doubt Nessie will be kicking up a fuss. The Druids on the other hand, might pose a different challenge…

5. iPhone rings pure
You can get all sorts of applications for the iPhone nowadays. Applications that turn it into a satnav. Apps that run your bath for you. And now you can even get a Purity Ring iPhone application. Basically you take a “purity pledge” and a spinning silver ring is displayed on your iPhone’s screen. Whether this will work is debatable. Unless your iPhone also gives you a shock when you’re about to get frisky, I can’t believe that a spinning ring will stop you. But then I am weak willed.

Google’s share of the search space has fallen from 78.72 per cent in May to 78.48 per cent in June according to internet data firm StatCounter. That might not sound like a lot, but Microsoft’s share of the market, meanwhile, has grown to 8.23 per cent – that’s a rise of one per cent since Bing’s launch.

Those might seem like tiny fluctuations, but when you consider we’re talking percentages of the four billion pageloads a month that StatCounter analyses, those tiny percentages become massive figures. Yes Bing has a lot of catching up to do, but the underlying trend is positive. And that can only be a good thing for Microsoft considering the fact that it’s spent close to $100 million dollars rebranding its search engine.

Elsewhere in the world of social media this week, I read on The Telegraph’s website that the future of social networking and online companies trying to turn a profit (according to Kate Burns, vice-president of Bebo) rests on peer-to-peer recommendation rather than search.

Speaking at the Future of Broadcasting conference in London, Kate Burns, a former managing director at the aforementioned Google, said: “I know and understand the power of search. However, social recommendations are the future. They will not only open us up as individuals to the web, but to publishers and social networks, it will offer a relevant and open engagement we didn’t have before.” An interesting insight. Let’s see if her predictions come true. If they do, then that’s two bits of bad news for Google in a week.

When all’s said and done, though, Google’s still one of (if not the) largest companies in the world. And as long as it continues to develop (Google just introduced a website translation tool update that automatically translates the website you’re reading into one of 41 languages), then proclamations of a demise would be seriously misplaced. It’s the competition from little upstarts like, ahem, Microsoft, that pushes Google to bigger and better things. And if Search succumbs to social recommendation sites then you can bet Google won’t be resting on its laurels. So, here’s to the competition. May it continue to push the big boys to bigger and better things. And all the better if they remain free.

It started with Twitter clients. Twitter is a great form of communication, hampered by a clunky web interface. Smart devs took advantage of the API and trotted out clients that update in realtime, resized to slap on the side of your screen or altered for mobile. Some of them (Tweetie, say) might even be making a substantial profit, unlike Twitter itself.

Then, Facebook got a little jealous and rolled out a new Facebook publisher bar to publish comments, links and media, just like Twitter. Suddenly, it made sense to start having a Twitter client that brought both sites together: Twhirl‘s successor Seesmic Desktop does just that.

Now though, we might have just seen the apex of that progression: Google Wave. Unveiled at Google’s I/O conference, it’s not web 2.0, it’s not web 3.0, it’s just everything rolled into one system. You can message people, share content drag and drop stylee, have messages shown being tapped out in realtime, and conversations embedded in websites. If that sounds a bit confusing, check out the demo video below. It’s long, but well worth a watch, and can explain it far better than words (Google Wave isn’t just about words after all).

Here’s the thing: when it launches (next year), Google Wave isn’t going to replace any of these services I mentioned above. It’s just going to bring them all together, and in your browser to boot. There’s already a Twitter gadget for it, Twave, and the API is out there right now to make much more. It’s not hard to imagine everything from Digg to BBC iPlayer from getting on board with it too.

That’s where the next goal lies: grouping all your communication and social media together to make it accessible in one place. Maybe Google Wave won’t be the holy grail of it. But that’s where we’re going.

Message Translation is a service for Gmail that will translate your email into no less than 41 languages! I didn’t stand a chance, really. And to think I could have avoided all those harrowing German lessons with Mr Johnson, wielding his broken snooker queue as if it were Excalibur, ready to bring it down on the desk of the next boy who wasn’t paying attention. Where were you then, eh Google?

Anyway, I digress. The feature integrates Google Translate technology into Gmail and will appear within Gmail Labs as an experiment called “Message Translation”. It will be available to Gmail users around the world. Anyone who takes part in this experiment will be able to view any emails they receive in any one of the 41 languages at their disposal. Much to my chagrin, I can’t deny it’s a really useful feature, particularly if you have relatives abroad and you’ve let your ancestoral tongue wane. Ahem.

The very fact that 113 million people worldwide use Gmail is reason enough to suggest that this feature will be a success. But I really do hope that it doesn’t mean the end for children learning foreign languages at school. It’d be a real shame to deprive them of the same experiences I went through…

One of the best ways to do this for a brand, is to step inside the business and bring it to the outside. This happens day in and day out on Nokia Conversations, which works tirelessly to bring the myriad untold stories to the people who want to read them. This not only helps break down the barrier between a brand and its customers, but gives us as editors something to write about when typically there might not be. It also gives users a reason and an excuse to visit a brand’s website more regularly. And Google loves this.

We hear all the time about Search Engine Optimisation (Snake Oil) but with little real understanding of what it means. To us, it means simply having something worth searching for. For that, it must be both interesting and relevant. Typically, that which is either interesting or relevant is also previously untold. New. In other words. The days are long gone when you could create a site, stuff it full of “optimised” “content” and hope for the best. Today, a site needs to be living and breathing, updated daily, continually developing and evolving and backed up by a solid editorial strategy. The best way for a brand to do this? Open up. Tell the stories that don’t normally get told. Allow the outside in, and crucially, allow the inside to venture out.

See, Google (the search engine, not the company) likes it when sites are updated regularly, when they offer something new or previously untold. Those same tales will initially be read by the very interested few. Quite quickly some of them will write about them elsewhere (linking back to the original in the process) and the few will turn into a few more, when the whole process will start again and ultimately, the few more turn into many. All the whilst Google (the search engine, not the company) loves it even more as the more links pointing to the same story, the higher up the results page the story will go.

It can’t be faked, it must be real, genuine, interesting and engaging. To do that, brands need to get comfortable with the concept of opening up and telling those stories they wouldn’t previously consider telling, in an environment where people aren’t just welcome but actively encouraged to share, comment and react. It’s the very antithesis of the traditional closed corporate mindset. Sure, brands could put any old stuff up on their site and hope for people to come. But if people aren’t searching for it, they won’t find it. Telling quality stories, that reveal something more about a brand, in an open and honest way is a great way to be found.

And that’s how Google is changing corporate culture.

Tracking the top ten most popular online brands, Nielsen Online found that UK users spent on average one minute every eight minutes on the social networking site, equating to a total of 3.8 billion minutes in total for the month of April. So those of you who thought that Twitter was stealing some of Facebook’s limelight can think again. Twitter didn’t even make the top ten web brands last month.

As you’d expect, the usual suspects are all present in the list, with Windows Live (Hotmail) and Google completing the podium. Unsurprisingly in these hard-up times eBay makes an appearance at number four with two billion minutes, and Yahoo rounding off the top five.

In all the the top ten made up for 45 per cent of all the time spent on the internet in the UK. That’s a phenomenal figure that shows just how powerful the big boys on the web are. It’s this sentiment that’s echoed by the people at Nielsen Online: “The Internet is a complex and varied ecosystem and I think most people would be surprised by just how much time is accounted for by a relatively few brands who, in turn, are increasing their share of the pie.” said a spokesperson for the company.

If the little man is to get a larger slice of the internet pie, he’s going to have to use all the internet tools at his disposal. That means, among other things, understanding and using SEO to your advantage, creating a community for your website, and pushing stories out there. All elements that we at Republic adhere to and promote. Who knows, with a little hard work and luck you’ll see us on that list next year…

Top ten web brands in the UK for April
1. Facebook – 6.2 billion minutes
2. Windows Live – 4.5 billion minutes
3. Google – 2.6 billion minutes
4. eBay – 2.0 billion minutes
5. Yahoo! – 1.7 billion minutes
6. AOL – 1.5 billion minutes
7. BBC – 1.1 billion minutes
8. YouTube – 898 million minutes
9. Microsoft – 733 million minutes
10. Apple – 719 million minutes

I’ve been using Google for almost ten years now and I remember thinking two things when I first came across it: one that this was one of the most useful tools I’d ever encountered. And two, enjoy it while it lasts because there’s no revenue stream. No way of making money out of it. How wrong was that!

One of the most striking things about Google is its homepage. From the outset Larry Page and Sergey Bring (Google’s Founders) were determined to keep the site clean. I read somewhere that they even used to count how many words were on the homepage, pledging never to have more than 37 words on it at any one time. Obsessive? Yes. Pedantic? Maybe. Successful? Abso-bloody-lutely!

But behind that simple homepage is a wealth of free features for users to get stuck into, from Google’s mail facilities, to its controversial (some would say intrusive) geographical tools. It’s that depth that has seen Google sitting pretty at the zenith of the recent Top 100 Global Brands survey conducted by BrandZ, valuing the company at an astonishing $100 billion. It’s no surprise then that others want a piece of the big G’s market. Only today Twitter Search announced a major revamp that’ll see it including search through links inside tweets and ranking your tweets by user reputation. Stephen Wolfram believes his computational knowledge engine, WolframAlpha, will provide a better way of executing certain types of search queries than Google. That’s not going live until later this month, but there are plenty of pretenders to Google’s throne out there: Cuil, True Knowledge and Kosmix. Even Ask Jeeves has come back in full butler garb to try his luck.

Whether these other search engines will get a look in is debatable. Google isn’t perfect by any means, but I challenge you to find another company that provides as many useful tools as Google for free. And to think, I thought this little $100 billion dollar company wouldn’t make money…

Microsoft just showed off Vine, its new Facebook and Twitter-beater in one. It’s a dashboard widget for Windows PCs designed to show groups of friends who’s in the vicinity and what they’re up to. But there’s a more serious side than simply organising impromptu pub crawls.

Microsoft’s trialing its system with emergency services in tow, with its ultimate aim to help track where people are if there’s ever a natural disaster.

Its development was inspired by the confusion following Hurricane Katrina, and lets officials update local users in the event of an emergency. Of course, at the same time they can use it to organise weekly football matches. Or pub crawls. With updates on schedule changes automatically filtering to all involved.

Is it handy? Almost certainly. But Microsoft’s not alone in ploughing the location-awareness furrow. Twitter has the capacity to tag tweets with a geographic location, and new micro-blogging platforms such as AudioBoo integrate location data as a matter of course.

Even Apple is hopping aboard. The next version of its OS X operating system will include location awareness.

But Google could be about to squash the lot of them. Its Latitude technology will share your location with friends through a web browser on any computer, and it’s built into all new Android mobile phones too, as well as being prepped for the iPhone.

So where’s it all heading? My hunch is there’s a ton of money to be made from location-aware ads. Forget country-specific ad campaigns, with this technology advertisers could get down to street level. Searching for a restaurant on your phone? The nearest Cafe Rouge, Harvester or Bernie Inn could grab the space next to your search results, and pay mightily for the privilege.

Of course, sharing your location will never be compulsory, but with so many tech firms weaving it into their products it’ll soon become standard practice, and if you’re not visible on the map, people will start to wonder: what exactly are you up to? Big Brother isn’t just watching, he’s talking behind your back and selling you to the highest bidder.

Now I’m no politician, but I do know social media. And this was an awesome example from the Tories of how manipulating Google can work in your favour, in this case grabbing a portion of the limelight away from the government to put forward their own policies (although, Labour’s policies are probably doing enough to send the public to the Conservative site regardless).

The idea was a simple one. Whenever a budget-related keyword was entered into Google, the reader would be directed to online ads for the Conservatives, which would in turn direct the reader to the Conservative Party website and a “live rebuttal” of Darling’s proposals.

Now politics can be a murky business at the best of times (you don’t need me to mention the smear-gate debacle of recent weeks), but this was just good media-manipulating skills from the Tories. Any journalist worth the media degree he bought online (no? just us then) knows the value of using Google to promote his stories. So why shouldn’t other professionals use it? It’s just good business sense.

And as for the budget? Well. Someone mentioned that it was nearly to the day back in 1943 that Britain scrapped the £1,000 note. Maybe we should bring that back too, eh?

It’s a new feature you can test out in Google Labs now that aggregates News search results by more than just topic. You can see how headlines have evolved over days and weeks, or zero in on a specific topic or type of publication.

I mentioned Twitter though not just because it’s a web 2.0 phenomenon, but because Google News Timeline come within a tweet’s breadth of the microblogging platform’s USP: realtime news and search.

The problem with Google News Timeline is that search by the day, week or month isn’t enough. I’d like to see closer almagamation of stories, and the ability to even chart stories and updates by the second. Liveblogs are a big part of what we do on ElectricPig, and as a reader I’d like to see collection of these in Google News.

Twitter isn’t without its flaws of course. Twitter Search is clumsy compared to apps like Twitterfall. But if you’re following the right people, you can find out what’s happening first, fast. Not even Twitter’s founders seem to have figured out the direction that the service will eventually go, but right now we’ve got a wonderful mess of a community embracing it. It’s that that Google News Timeline is still missing, and Labs developers need to do more to make up for that.