Google is getting rid of Buzz, updating Gmail & Reader, and helping you Go Mobile.

Google is giving Buzz the axe, no doubtedly becasue Google Plus is now in full swing and doing a lot more. Gmail and Reader both got a facelift to match the rest of the Google Suite. The interface is much friendlier and gives you the feeling of chatting with your pals, rather than wading through those long, heavy work emails.

The last Google item that Finn Digital is excited about is GoMo. They are providing tools and information on How To Go Mobile. They provide reasons to do so, case studies, success stories, and the coolest part -- the ability to test your mobile site! Not to mention all of this is wrapped up in a very slick site itself. We love seeing and creating in the mobile web space, so this is a great tool to help develop and educate on the subject.

How does your site look on a mobile device?

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

Google Page Speed is out of Google Labs and is official now. For those unfamiliar, Page Speed is a pretty awesome tool that tells developers how the speed of their sites can be improved. Put in a URL and Page Speed will tell you all of the ways you can optimize -- whether its compressing files, utilizing caching, or deleting unused CSS styles.

Page Speed will prioritize these suggestions for you by priority, and tell you what you are already doing well! Encouragement and positive reinforcement rocks!

This tool also lets you look at a web page through the eyes of a mobile device. This is extremely helpful as optimization on mobile is key. Small images should be loaded (not just shrunk down to fit) and being on a cellular network doesn't give these devices a lot of bandwidth to download fast.

Put your website in Google Page Speed and tell us what you learned!

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

Early this week Google announced a new programming language it is developing to replace Javascript. The reason for this upgrade being "to be more easily tooled for large-scale projects and better security features" [source].

The goal is to make the language familar to programmers, like using classes, and also similar syntactically so there is a small learning curve. The classic 'Hello World!' example looks like this in DART:

main() {
var name = 'World';
print('Hello, ${name}!');
}

As far as current compatability, it will work in Chrome, Safari 5+, Firefox 4+, and on servers -- with more to come. For further reading and examples, check out the DART language page. We are excited to be experimenting with DART, is a Javascript replacement needed?

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

Facebook's big changes are not only changing the way users share, read and interact on Facebook, but is changing the way people share on the web. With all these new interactions, its collecting new user behavior and data, which provides new ways to target audiences.

These changes put the power in the users' hands allowing for higher preference control which inturn affects their engagement. The final say to all these new updates are in the users hands, and how the users engage in the new features will determine how brands engage. The interface and functionality updates lend themselves to be more relevant to the user, resulting in more sharing. Initially users are going to need to adapt and use Facebook smarter -- filtering what the do and don't want to see. Friends, Friends-of-Friends, People, Pages and Apps will be providing content at higher levels than ever. With that said, brands need to be more relevant and not bombard their Fans. In return this strategy will result in a more qualified, engaged audience.

If you are already on Facebook, looking to develop new Facebook initiatives with Apps, or integrating Facebook into your existing website, we highlighted the latest changes that need to be reviewed: the three new distribution channels, Open Graph, new social plugins, and Insights.

News Feed

The News Feed has received a re-work, and is no longer just information listed in a chronological order, and is broken into a couple of sections. These sections and the stories that are shown, not only change based on how long a user has been logged in, and time since they last visited, but more importantly, shown based on the value to the user, which is determined off of various criteria. Having a full understanding of the News Feed changes will help define strategy of content distribution. Not only is it up to the user to distinguish between what is relevant and what is not, but Facebook will need to make adjustments to how it determines what is important for each user. This would be a learning process based on how 800 million people filter through their content.

Recent Stories

These stories will get #1 spot in the new News Feed. If users visits Facebook frequently, or have been visiting for a certain amount of time, recent stories will be listed in this section.

Top Stories

The Top Stories are published stories that Facebook thinks the user will be interested in, based on the relationship you have with the story publisher, story likes and comments, and the topic of the story. Facebook gives users control of what they consider to be Top Stories, by letting users add stories as Top Stories, or by removing current Top Stories. As a brand, your Page posts can also be marked or removed as a Top Story.

For brands, what we don't know or see yet, is how Facebook will include Top Story in the Page Insights and how, if any this plays into advertising. One Insight that would be valuable is a Page Updates Top Story Impressions vs Impressions, as this can give insights into the quality of your audience.

The Rest

Continuing down the News Feed, is the rest of the users subscribed friends, people and page updates, mostly chronological, but if a user has been logged in long enough, Top Stories will find their way into this area.

These News Feed changes, along with the recent Friend Lists updates, and the Subscribe Button, users have more control into what they read, and ultimately change how users will engage with your content.

Ticker

The Ticker is another feature added to a users News Feed, and itself is a news feed callout, but its purpose is to provide real-time updates and conversations between people and their friends activity. Much like the News Feed, if a user's friend engages (likes, comments, shares) with a Page, this activity will be shown in the Ticker. In addition to Page activity, Open Graph and App activity are aggregated into the Ticker in real-time as well, allowing for people to inform, engage, and share with their friends even quicker.

We don't see Ticker Impressions or Interactions in Page Insights yet, but one can say that might be in the near future, as Open Graph Apps (we'll go into these below) include Ticker Impressions and Referrals.

Timeline

The biggest announcement at Facebook's F8 event, was the new Timeline .

Timeline replaces the old Profile pages and shows a persons entire life while scrolling down to their birth. Of course for most of us, we have not been using Facebook that long, so the last few years are in detail. Facebook does a good job of inserting your birth, when you graduated college or high school, when a sibling was born, and other random dates it knows. For the dates pulled in from other parts of your profile Facebook asks for some details and a photo to complete the entry. At any other point in the Timeline an entry can be inserted to slowly complete your life story. We think this is amazing, and although some may dislike it at first, they will see how cool this change is. The Facebook Profiles are no longer just a page of all the facts about you, everything is organized and tells your story. All of your content is much more personal and it is easy to scroll through time with a sense of nostalgia.

Open Graph Apps

The other big announcement at the F8 event, was the new Open Graph, which is currently in beta.

The new Open Graph allows for a custom Actions (the action that people can perform) and Objects (the objects that people interact with) within apps, and the actions a user engages with, gets shared and aggregated throughout Facebook, on all channels. This opens up more relevant, targeted and engaging interactions that people can have with either another person, a brand, content, media, or even a location.  It's no longer just "Liking" pages - it's Reading, Listening, Cooking, Learning, Buying, etc.

Similar to the users Timeline, a user gets a Timeline of their interactions within the app. These new Open Graph interactions and their Timeline enable users to engage with a brand or product on a whole new level, and allow the users to build their own timeline or experience with the brand.

Using the app Insights (Facebook's analytics) you can now track all of these actions that users engage with in your app. Insights will break the impressions into the different channels, Feed, Ticker, and Timeline. Taking these new Actions one more step, you can see from which part of Facebook the referrals came from.

For further reading:

• Company App Showcase
• How it works

Social Plugins

There are two new social plugins that Facebook is adding to its Social Plugins list, that makes it easy to integrate specific Facebook features into your website. These are updated to reflect the new Open Graph and new Timeline, and at the time of this post, they both are currently in beta. We were hoping to show examples of these, but unfortunately, at the time of this post, beta means broken.

Recommendations Bar

The new Recommendation Bar is a small bar that will be embedded on you website's pages, like blog articles for example. When the page is loaded the Recommendations Bar stays mostly hidden until a Trigger is activated. A Trigger is defined as a certain amount of time, scrolling a certain percentage down a page, hitting a certain area on a page, or just triggering by some other action the user takes. Once triggered, the Recommendations Bar allows Users to Like and/or Add To Timeline, as well as show if the page is Recommended by their Friends. This is a powerful tool to Share, Like, and Recommend the Internet through Facebook.

Add To Timeline

Another new Social Plugin is the Add To Timeline button. Similar to the Like button that is now on most pages across the Internet, the Add To Timeline button acts in a similar manner. Users can click this, and their action will be recorded in their Timeline view. As this is a more intimate and personal account of ones life, these actions will be more closely tied to a User, and the more interactions with the App will result in a more prominent position in the Timeline.

Facebook is adding a lot of features for the users which result in new tactics and strategy for the content providers. Making sure you understand how to efficiently utilize the new services and technology will be in your best benefit for exposure and qualified lead generation. Although it may take the general public some time to adapt to all of the updates, it is imperative that brands are ahead of the game and distributing the content in a smart manner for when the users catch up.

- Finn Digital Team

As an innovative part of Finn Digital's 2011 Fall Outerwear Offerings, we introduce the My Core Is Good Collection.

+ enlarge photo

Men: For the business man on the go. Available in jet-black and filled with the finest duck down for optimal warmth and comfort.

Women: Form meets fashion in this luxurious women's garb, connecting the sleeves is a fur-lined neck warmer. Going for that chic look? Simply flip forward and wear the fur front and center.

Children: Dress your kids for success as you send them back to school. They will quickly become the talk of the school yard while outfitted in this trendy three-piece.

We're digital, and more! Order today, as supplies are limited!

- Finn Digital Team

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee released a free mobile app that is everything a university's mobile app should be. Besides having the obvious things like a map, calendar of events, people search, and popular links, the app goes several steps further.

Students can use the app to track their personal schedule and course locations. The residence halls shuttle service can be tracked in real-time via GPS. Need to use a computer or do laundry on campus? No need to make the trek only to find out there's nothing available - check computer, washer, and dryer use in real-time on the app.

To promote the launching of the app UWM is giving away 6,000 t-shirts as well as a list of awesome prizes. How could your workplace or university benefit from an app like this?

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

While in New York, I visited the New York Public Library expecting to find an awesome part of US history preserved in an extremely beautiful building. While this was true, I came across several instances of the Public Library utilizing technology in a very cool, fun way.

The first item I found was an iPad app called NYPL Biblion: World's Fair:

"Enter the World of Tomorrow and experience the 1939-40 New York World's Fair through the collections of The New York Public Library! Biblion: The Boundless Library is designed to take you - all but literally - into the Library's legendary stacks, opening up hidden parts of the collections and the myriad story lines they hold and preserve. In this free app you will hold documents, images, films, audio, and essays directly from the collections right in your hands."

Information and download the free app

While exploring the Public Library I came across several items throughout that had a small QR code on them. 100 of these artifacts exist throughout the library and are all part of a Find the Future game. The game allows players to collaboratively write a book using their smart phones to scan the barcodes. Each scan provides information on the artifact, its historical significance, and its impact on the future. Check out more information or signup!

The Find the Future game will be available for free to anyone visiting the New York Public Library through 2011.

Follow the New York Public Library on Twitter: @nypl

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

I had my first eye exam at Metro Eye today. I was pleasantly surprised to see their innovative and tech-savvy marketing.

Upon first arriving I had to check-in via Foursquare, only to find out they had a special. A check-in can get you 10% off any frame, sunglass or lens purchase. Not seeing too many specials in the places I frequent in Milwaukee, it was awesome to see it at my eye doctor. The fact that most places in the area are restaurants, while at lunch any number of people are seeing the Metro Eye special when they check-in. This is some great advertising when people are not necessarily shopping for an eye doctor.

At the front desk they also had a QR Code letting patients take Metro Eye with you. The execution of the barcode display is great! It is appropriately sized, has a short and sweet call to action, and gives a good paraghraph explaining what to do and what you'll recieve. Before leaving patients can scan the QR Code and take the Metro Eye website with them.

I would have loved to have seen a mobile friendly site with easy-to-access social media links, some content like about and contact, and maybe a coupon or promotion as an award for scanning, but perhaps this update is underway. I am excited to find out on my next visit. I am also curious what benefits Metro Eye has experienced using Social Media and barcodes.

A QR Code campaign is a great way to engage customers and provide unique, specific, and dynamic content that can be taken with them. Interested in Social Media and barcode strategy, or just want to give your two-cents, comment below or send me an email!

- Chad Schulz
Internet Improvement Engineer

We collected some very interesting statistics over the course of the two days. All of the people playing BoothTag amassed 2,526 scans during the two day event. We put together an infographic of some of the statistics as well as a video of participants.

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, we would love to hear your feedback! Email us at info@boothtag.com or leave a comment below!.

- Chad Schulz (and the Finn Digital team)
Internet Improvement Engineer