LinkedIn Revamps BlackBerry App

No stone unturned seems to be the policy LinkedIn is looking at for the moment. After a very effective and massive update to LinkedIn profile pages, the company has turned its head to another update. This time it's on the Smartphone front. The site' Blackberry app has gone for a complete makeover.

See Also: Viadeo Launches Android App

So while their closest competitor, French based PSN Viadeo.com were focused on providing an update to their app on Android and iPhone and neglecting the Blackberry world with the update (as we mentioned in the article posted a few days back); LinkedIn has gone ahead and made sure they don't neglect the Blackberry users. With Android and iPhone app already doing good (in fact great), the company revamped the Blackberry version to be available to " BB6 and BB7 users to make the LinkedIn mobile experience simpler, better, and faster". The app is available in "8 new languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Indonesian, Hindi, and Portuguese".

As per the post on LinkedIn' official blog, the new app has been organized in to four areas that will offer LinkedIn' new features and functionality to the users:

Updates: See your network’s new connections, job changes, and shared posts from the stream, as well as top news from LinkedIn Today.
Inbox: View and respond to your invitations and messages both in the same place.
You: Review your profile, see who’s viewed your profile, or share an update.
Network: Add people you may know or look through your connections.

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Meet The New LinkedIn Profiles

LinkedIn has been very heavy on the changes that its making to the site in the near past. The recent update or news about the change comes in part of the main product on the site, Profiles. With 175Mn members already using its services, the company has been taking all care to make sure they make this number explode. The changes to the Profile pages aren't really changes. You may say the page has received a new look altogether. In line to what we say the new Profile look was unveiled a week back at an event called "Meet the new LinkedIn".

See Also: ApnaCircle Launches New Profiles

In the meantime the new profile gets rolled out to all the LinkedIn users in the coming month, here is a what it now offers you:
Make a punch with the new look crafted for a better first impression as you showcase your skills and accomplishments. The new feature of inline editing makes it easy for you to make your profile complete and make quick change to keep it updated.
Rich and visual insights on the people and companies that are in your network. The new options will provide with benefits to expand your network and interact with people outside of your network who may be sharing common goals with you.
What matters most is now on top! The recent activities now occupies the top of the profile space, making sure you don't miss out on what your network has been up to while you weren't looking at them.

While this is just the snippet of the changes that accompany this rollout, you may want to have a look for yourself on your profile. If you still are not the one who have received the new look; wait for some time as the new changes gets rolled out to all Members. In the meantime try to expedite the process by registering here. And here is the video link for the event.

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Google SiteLinks Policy Changes

Google recently made changes to the policies concerning sitelinks that are used to determine the ad serving for webmasters that have Ad words running for their respective sites. If you use sitelinks with your Ad campaigns or plan to use them, read on...

If you want to learn more about Adwords or Sitelinks you may visit this help centre thread. In general sitelinks help your readers(rather the net users who see your Ads) reach specific parts of your website more quickly. So webmasters create Ad campaigns to target users and make them land on some specific pages of the site through these sitelinks. The current policy for sitelinks ensures the users have a good experience while clicking your Ads. This in turn requires all sitelinks used by you (as a webmaster) are unique. Unique in the sense that they point to different parts of your site that have unique content. Thus making the page a relevant content destination for the user.

The problem that Google detailed in the mail that notified us of the policy change is that they recently noticed sitelinks that are not unique in terms of content. In other words these sitelinks basically use the same landing page as their destination or may be pages which are duplicated as far as the content is concerned. This clearly turns out to be a bad experience for user. The search giant clearly noticed this and thus will soon be enforcing changes to the required policy.

Mail says the initial focus will be on the "new and recently changed sitelinks". The verification will be while serving the Ads for a site. As the Ads are being served the sitelinks will be verified to check if they meet the standards already laid out. If they for one reason or another are found to violate any terms then the Ads will be restricted from appearing. The mail further explains the impact these changes will being on performance as:
"Having fewer eligible sitelinks could keep your ad from showing in the larger 2-line and 3-line formats, where more eligible sitelinks are required. Remember, larger formats are more visible and typically have higher average clickthrough rates (CTR). And if you don't have enough eligible sitelinks in your campaign, then your ads may not display sitelinks at all."

Google further states that since the clean up from webmaster side may take a while, they are "delaying more proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months". But also warns the webmasters to not wait till the last minute. Here are a few steps you may start with:

1. Log into the AdWords interface and click on the "Ad Extensions" tab.
2. Select "Sitelinks Extensions" from the drop down menu.
3. Sort your sitelink extensions by impressions or clicks by clicking on the column header.
4. Click on each sitelink in the top campaign and follow it through to its landing page (there's no charge for these clicks).
5. Fix any duplicates you find in each campaign by hovering over the extension area and clicking the pencil icon.

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Android App Monetization in India

When you see a particular market grow like India has in the near past, you got be upfront with your business ideas based on the location. So when Android device activations jumped more than 400% in the past year with Indians downloading more apps in the past six months then last 3yrs combined, its time Google gave more freedom and options to Indian app developers in Google play. Since India is now the fourth largest market place for app downloads, the search giant decided to give more leverage to the app developers from the country and make them earn from their app submissions.

The Android team announced last Thursday that the Indian app developers will now be able to monetize their app submissions. If you are not aware, Google still has restrictions on a country by country case as far as the monetization from app submitted to Google play is concerned. So till last week early, developers in India were forced to submit their apps in Google play as free apps. Since last Thursday, Indian developers "can sell paid applications, in-app products, and subscriptions in Google Play, with monthly payouts to their local bank accounts. They can take advantage of all of the tools offered by Google Play to monetize their products in the best way for their businesses, and they can target their products to the paid ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users in India and across the world."

To get started right away all you need to do is sign in to your developer console and set a Google checkout merchant account for yourself. That's it! From now on any new app that you may have could be published as paid apps besides selling in-app products or submissions. This is not all, for all the apps that you had previously as free apps; there will be an option to make them paid and monetize from them. All you need to do is add in-app products or submissions for them.

After you complete the settings for in-app products and submissions just put a price tag on your apps(in any of the available currencies), publish them in the market place and receive the payouts in your local currency. More information on the Android developer help center. Google, besides adding the seller support in the Google play for India, has also added buyer's currency support in India. Google still has this restriction on a lot of countries and that's why developers from those countries are not allowed to monetize yet. But that should be going soon as noted on the post from Android' official blog.

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Nexus Devices Getting Android 4.1.2

The anticipations of LG Nexus and Android 4.2 are still open and pretty wide but while everybody is busy thinking on what Android 4.2 will be bringing in with and will the new Nexus be launched on 4.2, Google' Android team has released a small software upgrade of Jelly Bean. The new update is versioned at 4.1.2 and contains small bug fixes and performance improvements. 

The upgrade which comes via OTA has been sent to some Google Nexus devices and also on Nexus 7 tabs. An official change log of the same wasn't to be found anywhere and we are still searching on the official announcement from the search giant or from their Android team. For those who haven't received the update yet can relax as there doesn't seem to be much really that can meet the eye here. Some bug fixes and some unknown performance improvements besides one feature of the expandable clubbed notifications via one finger on the smart-phones and a landscape view of the home screen on the Nexus 7 tablets. The landscape view of the home screen has been kept away from the smart-phones for some reasons known only to Google.

For the notifications feature, just go to your notification view when you have multiple notifications(also works with a single notification) from same app, hold it and pull your finger down while keeping a nice enough grip on the notification item(like you do when you want to do a 'App info' on the notification item) and you will see the notification item expand. You could collapse it by moving the finger back up. We are still scratching the head on why was this update send at a time when absolutely everybody seems to be expecting a 4.2 rather than any other prior number. Not to mention that the update really doesn't carry much with it. Have you received it yet? If not you may do a manual try in the phone setting of your device but we really don't see anyone giving it a go really.

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Viadeo Launches Android App

Yes baby we waited for so long on this one. Viadeo, the French parent of India's Career and Business Networking site ApnaCircle.com, has finally introduced itself on the Google play store. Viadeo Android app is now available for you to download in the Google store. The app has an update date of 11th October 2012 and has already been downloaded more than 50K times. There hasn't been much official announcement from Viadeo (apart from this tweet on this (may be we missed something on their blog) but we discovered the news through a Google search on Viadeo. You will see the Android app on the 5th result on the first page itself.

As announced on Viadeo' official Twitter account, the company has made updates to their existing apps for each of the smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows). However we still see a July 17 2012 updated app on the Blackberry world. The iPhone app however shows it has been updated and is now iPhone5 compatible. The android app looks great anyway and offers these features:

• Access your Viadeo address book.
• Call professional contacts (by phone, on Skype, etc.).
• Read and reply to messages.
• Edit your profile.
• Search and view millions of professional profiles.
• Add new contacts quickly and easily.
• See who's visited your profile.
• Get real-time notifications for new messages and connection requests.
• Share the latest news from your industry.

If you already are a Viadeo member, just download the app and log in with your web credentials. New to the site? You will see a registration option as well on the app, which is really nice to see, so go ahead and register yourself.

The app also offers a Skype integration right from within the contact details. While viewing your address book just tap on the 3 dots menu extra options and you will see the menu as shown in the screen capture on the right. As you see you have an option to contact the Member through Skype. by the way if that person doesn't have Skype details filled out in his/her profile, the app suggests you send a message to him/her to let them know that you are using the Viadeo app and that you wanted to touch base with them through Skype while using this Android app.

From the same menu you also have options to ask the contact for his/her phone number and also view the Member' business cards. The business cards are the virtual online cards we posted about some time back on one of our posts. And if you are a recruiter and the profile matches, you may be looking to use the forward profile option that you see here.

All in all a very nice and fast app. So far has received 250+ plus ones on Google plus for this app and a total of 450+ ratings for an average rating of 3.2 which we think is a little on the lower side considering the improvements that we have seen in this new app (if we compare the previous version on iPhone). But these are still early days and we don't think the word has spread that much. So what are you waiting for, go ahead and download the app and hey, don't forget to check out the Smart News section inside the app, we loved the way it has been laid out  :)

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Google Updates Page Layout Algorithm

If you have a website that offers a good amount of ad slots above the fold on its pages, you may want to give your page layout another look. At least that's what Google hinted when it introduced the Page Layout Filter algo right at the start of this year, January 2012. And now a couple of months away to end the year, they have announced a refresh of the algo and as per Matt Cutts tweet on 9th Oct 2012, this update will effect around 0.7% of the English queries.

The search giant's have been very heavy on the algo updates since the last fortnight, with this update being the fourth since last week of September. The details about the algo were explained by Matt in his post on Google' webmaster blog when the Page Layout Filter was first introduced around 9 months back. In the post Matt explained:
"As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."

So any sites that were affected by this filter initially and made changes accordingly should see a improvement (however small) with this refresh made a few days back. If however you still haven't or are the few who are affected by this refresh then make the changes and wait till Google bot re-crawls your pages, the time frame for which is difficult to predict; even for Google. Matt also explained more on the algo:
"We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads."

By the way, this algo has come to take a name of its own and is also called "Top Heavy" due to its nature of penalizing the sites that are heavy on the Ads on top part of the pages.

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Gmail Launches Free SMS Service

If you logged in to your individual Gmail or Google apps account since yesterday, you would see a message as shown in the below image capture. And in case you haven't, there is some good news for you from Google.

The search giant has started providing free SMS feature from the Gmail chat. All you need to do is check if your country and the network provider that you use are listed and supported. Just visit this page for the details on the countries and providers supported. The free service is now made available in India and other 51 countries in parts of Asia, Africa and North America. The feature is only available on the web version of Gmail, so users who mostly use the GTalk app on computers or on their smart-phones will be disappointed for a start. However, it was good to see that the Google apps users will be able to use the feature.

So how does it work? For using the feature, just start typing the contact number of the person you need to send the SMS to in the chat search box that sits just above the chat contact list of yours in the web version of your Gmail account. Once you are done typing the full number, you will see a 'Send SMS' option in the drop. Click on this option to open a small pop up where you will be required to put save this contact's information like 'Contact name', 'Country' , 'Contact Number' and type of number (Work, Mobile or Home). Fill these information and click save. That's all for a initial part. All that is left to do is to now type the SMS and hit send. On the chat like window where you will type your SMS, you can see how many SMS credits you have currently.

To start with, you will have 50 SMS credits that will decrease by 1 each time you send a message to your contact. The replies that you receive on each SMS  sent by you will be shown in your chat window and also stored in the chat history. For each such reply you will gain 5 SMS credits (till a maximum of 50 credits). To make sure that you are not locked out of the system, in case your credit goes down to zero it will be raised back to 1 after 24hrs. For buying additional messages, Google says that "if you'd like a higher message credit, you can always send an SMS to your own phone, and then reply to that message multiple times. Every time you send a reply message, your SMS credit is increased by five. Effectively, you're buying more messages by paying your phone company for these outgoing messages."

Beware as the word is that sending too many SMSes from web to a mobile may ban the web user from the feature in case the mobile doesn't replies to the SMSes sent. However the "too many" wasn't related to a number. Good way to stop spammers, what's say??

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Twitter' New Look For Profiles

The cover image fever seems to be gripping one social network after the other. After Facebook introduced it, we saw Google plus use a similar sort of design with user profile and pack of five or a banner image. We also saw LinkedIn use the same on their career/company page and now Twitter has it rolling with the new profile changes introduced a couple of weeks back.

You can now upload a new header image (as Twitter calls it) and the feature is available not only on the web but also on Android and Apple(iPhone and iPad) devices. Once uploaded, either from the web or any app, the image would be viewable on any platform you are on. The whole new design is available on the web as well as the smartphones which also received an update for the changes. So with the header image in place, your profile pic/image now gets in to the center of the page as against in a corner, previously. All your tweets will now have the new header image on top of them.

The web also has the option to put a background image and users will now be bale to use that to good effect. Put a background image that now suits and compliments your header image to create that ever lasting effect. On the smart-phones(iPad, iPhone and Android) the user' photo streams now appear below their most recent tweets. You will also have the option to swipe through this stream to be able to see the photos they have shared. Need a larger view? Just tap on the thumbnail for a full-screen view.
The most noticeable improvement this update brings with it is the upgrade on the iPad app, which the company says gets more closer to Twitter on Android or Twitter on iPhone. As per Twitter they have on iPad, "rebuilt the app from the ground up to make it fast, beautiful and easy to use". This seems to fall in line with their mobile first strategy. Have you updated your header image yet? Share with us the link so we can have a look!

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