ADOTAS – The 80s had Madonna, the 90s also had Madonna, the 00s had Britney and in the teens we have Lady GaGa. Or is it Katy Perry? I’m not very good at keeping track of mainstream pop divas.

I wasn’t really surprised to see Ms. Stefani Germanotta as the featured musician on the Apple page for its new iTunes-based social network Ping (I was surprised to see than she likes Iron Maiden old Metallica and Faith No More). I swear I must see eight different headlines about the pop star every day, no matter what website I go to. Popular music needed a larger-than-life character a la Grace Jones and wa-lah — here is what the industry manufactured (whines the truly independent — read unsuccessful — musician who needs a day job to support his hobby).

Ping resembles a Twitter for the music obsessed, allowing iTunes users to follow their favorite musical artists, as well as friends, and see what they’re doing and listening to. It aims to be the musical discovery service MySpace never was. Silicon Alley Insider set up this handy-dandy tour.

Apple chose an interesting tag line — “Set your inner groupie free.” Apple is aware what groupies do, right? They want us to offer up our bodies to our musical idols through their social network? Perhaps they’re trying to sex it up a bit, but being a starf—er isn’t much of an appeal… At least not to me

When it was introduced yesterday, users could find their friends via Facebook Connect, but that’s gone today. Apple CEO Steve Jobs told AllThingsD that Ping is not hooked up with the social network because Facebook’s terms were “onerous.” Perhaps FB is feeling threatened?

Actually all the social networks should feel threatened. Where are the ads? we in the marketing world ask. Well there aren’t any because Ping is supported by iTunes sales. It’s another Apple walled garden that may take a lot of attention away from other networks, ones that subsist on ad revenue.
However, the tech media is already complaining about problems in functionality (as well as the name choice). There’s also the drag that classic rockers like The Beatles aren’t featured on iTunes (I’ve also got some 30-year-old bad news if you want to see what John Lennon is up to these days — RIP, Working Class Hero). There seem to be some overtones of Google’s much maligned Buzz — can Apple get away with adding a social element to a popular service?

And also, tell me the chorus of “Poker Face” doesn’t remind you of Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City.”

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ADOTAS – Chatting yesterday with Arnie Gullov-Singh — CEO of Ad.ly, which has built an endorsement ad network for third-party Twitter applications — he commented that the Twitter folks have been quite careful in rolling out their ad products because while revenue is awesome, the last thing they want is to alienate their users. Gullov-Singh has some good connections — he’s known Twitter COO Dick Costolo since he was heading up his baby Feedburner and Gullov-Singh help build the Fox Audience Network with new Twitter President of Revenue Adam Bain.

Huh, I thought, if only another highly popular social network put its concern for user experience above its revenue dreams… Or at least made it appear that way.

But Twitter is not your average social network as it’s encouraged developers to build third-party apps off of its microblogging stream (even though developers had a bit of a hissy fit when Twitter acquired Tweetie to be its eponymous mobile app). In a blog announcing the full embrace of app authenticater OAuth, the site even acknowledges (seemingly without envy) that most users have fooled around with third-party apps, which tend to offer more functions in terms of filtering (which also leads to some skewed search stats)

User experience trumps all, which is why Twitter informed developers last December that third-party apps would only be allowed to use OAuth to access the stream, a switch the company flipped on Aug. 31. Previously developers could choose between Basic Authentication and OAuth, but BA requires the user to supply a username and password, which would be stored in the cloud or on a device.

That’s not the safest route — OAuth offers increased security by authenticating apps without storing a user name or password, which will prevent malicious apps (or “Snidely Whipapps,” as I like to call them) from stealing Twitter credentials and tying them to the railroad tracks. Tweetdeck, Seesmic and other high-profile apps already use OAuth, which I am now picturing as a certain handsome mountie, as well as Facebook and Yahoo, which take advantage of the authenticater to allow users to share social content in several locations.

Apparently the transition has been a bit bumpy with user complaints of login troubles and a weird dialog box appearing on tech websites such as Wired and ReadWriteWeb asking for user name and password for API access. Enter the requested information and… Nothing happens — the dialog box remains.

It’s the OAuthcalypse! Repent Twitter sinners! Or quit whining and update your widget code.

For all those panicking and tweeting “The end is night,” Twitter sent out an email to users this morning explaining the switch to OAuth — and they didn’t use any big, confusing words! — as well as the expanded rollout of its t.co link-wrapping feature.

Currently links in Direct Messages are converted to t.co and go through Twitter, which checks for malware before sending the user to the destination. (It also will make sure that you’re wearing a helmet as well as knee and elbow pads.) Twitter is planning to roll out this feature to all users by the end of the year. Marketers should perk up their ears as t.co will also be used to measure the number of clicks a link gets and incorporated into the Resonance algorithm that is used with the microblogger’s Promoted Suite of ad products.

“Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you,” the company wrote.

Twitter board member and venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a blog post called “The Twitter Inflection Point” back in April ahead of the Chirp developer conference that caused a bit of a furor. Wilson suggested that while developers had performed a swell job filling in the gaps in services, Twitter the company should have supplied services such as link-shortening in the first place. Well, now big T is picking up the slack, which has some developers grumbling (louder than usual — I’m pretty sure developers are perpetual grumbling machines).

Wilson’s advice to developers at the time was “move on” — even politely phrased, that’s not something spurned partners appreciate hearing. But Twitter has developed a pretty extensive ecosystem and realizes the importance of third-party apps. The OAuth switch and t.co rollout are first and foremost for user safety — it’s really refreshing to see that matters more than anything else to the Twitter folks.

Finally in Twitter news (sure has been a busy week for those kids), the iPad application has arrived and it looks good. The company added developer Loren Brichter, the brains behind Atebit and the winner of 2009 Apple Design Award, to the Twitter mobile team in April to design the iPad application, and seems like he lived up to the hype. The iPad app truly takes advantage of the tablet’s functions, employing planes for easy navigation as well as media. Check it out here.

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ADOTAS – Bing came a-courtin’, but AOL decided it was going to stay married to Google when it comes to search. The new five-year search deal inked by the two companies actually expands their relationship to mobile search and YouTube, which will feature AOL video content.

AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong called the more “another important step in the turnaround of AOL. AOL users will be getting a better search and search ads experience from the best search company in the world – Google.”

It’s a little bit of surprise because in July AOL said it was contemplating three search partners — an open marriage if you will. Bing was rumored to being itching for a piece of the pie, but the new deal makes AOL’s search Google-exclusive. The Wall Street Journal suggests AOL was just trying to make Google jealous and get a sweeter deal.

Always looking to expand one-year-old Bing’s share of the search market, Microsoft was in talks with AOL but balked at the rates. According to comScore, AOL boasted 2.3% of U.S. search queries, but an anonymous Microsoft executive told AdAge that the company wasn’t sold on AOL turning it all around as the portal’s search share has been on the decline. Questions are lingering whether AOL has got what it takes after a cringe-worthy quarterly report and the departure of a few key veteran executives.

But them Bing boys may not have been taking a look at the bigger picture — AdAge also noted that beyond search share, AOL users tend to be clickers, which of course drives ad revenue. Still, I’m with WSJ in thinking AOL used Microsoft to ruffle Google’s feathers — naughty girl!

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ADOTAS – It’s a rapidly changing mobile space, and the Mobile Marketing Association, which hosted a pretty kickass conference during Internet Week NYC that was packed to the gills, is repositioning itself to better represent the evolving ecosystem.

The repositioning is based on feedback from member and nonmember companies from around the world. Unveiling a new look at the MMA Forum in Sao Paulo, the company introduced five building blocks for tending the growing industry: promoting the channel, educating all parties, creating authoritative metrics, establishing best practices and public advocacy and self-regulation.

“In its formative years, the MMA placed great emphasis on helping build a global industry, creating standards and guidelines to support the growth of a new industry,” said Federico Pisani Massamormile, MMA Global Board Chairman and interim CEO. “In many ways, the need to act as evangelists for the mobile channel has evolved into to a need to get brands and agencies to increase spend on a channel they’re now aware of. Marketers understand the need to include mobile in their plans, but still need support to find the right role for mobile in the marketing mix.”

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ADOTAS – While merely the mention of “ad verification” will make many an ad network or exchange executive furl his/her brow, they know those services are increasingly what advertisers want. Damn that customer for always being right!

ContextWeb, which runs the independent ad exchange Adsdaq, has partnered with Mpire to offer its ad verification and optimization service AdXpose to clients. Networks within the exchange will be protected from make-goods and charge-backs while brands will perceive Adsdaq as a safer place to play.

“Advertisers are increasingly requesting campaign verification by third parties to minimize fraud and wasted ad spend, and to ensure that ad exchanges and networks are fulfilling their contractual obligations,” said Jay Sears, general manager of Adsdaq exchange. “By offering AdXpose’s services as option to our customers and prospects, we’re sending them a clear message that we’re a trusted partner, we’re looking out for their best interests, and that their success is as important to us as it is to them.”
while

Mpire is integrating ContextWeb’s Real-Time Classifier into AdXpose to boost its ability to analyze and classify page content. Recently the company earned the TRUSTe seal of approval for its treatment of user data.

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ADOTAS – When running a large-scale search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, there are some things that marketers typically assume. For instance, it’s natural to assume that search ads appear in search and content ads appear in content. Constantly policing this would be far too time-consuming to be worthwhile. That assumption, however, appears to be slightly flawed.

Recently, while reviewing some of the search query reports for one of our clients, we came across some very interesting trends. The query with the third-highest impression volume was “prints patterns pillows pillows throws home décor home.”

This query triggered the keyword “decorative pillows,” which was set to Google’s broad match. However, this was very obviously not the kind of query that a user would enter in a search box, and certainly not 20,000 times, as the impressions in the report would suggest. This query also sported a click-through rate (CTR) of .02%, very similar to what would be expected on the content network.

To find answers, I did what anyone in our industry would do… I searched. I copied the long query and pasted it into Google. The top result was a page on Target.com that bore a page title similar to the query I saw. When I looked at the bottom of the page on this site, I saw my client’s ad. This client is opted out of the content network, so how could their ad appear in a context such as this?

I dug a little further and looked at the source code of Target’s site. I found that their site was using Javascript to send its page titles to Google as a search query through the AdSense for Search program, not through the content network. In essence, Target is showing search ads on a content page using a script to simulate a user-entered query.

When I went back to my search query reports, I found over a thousand queries that bore similar characteristics to the one I initially investigated. Spot-checking these by searching them on Google invariably led me to pages on Target.com. When I aggregated the performance of these queries, I found a cost per conversion that was more than triple that of the rest of the search partner network and four times that of Google.com search.

In addition, I discovered a few other sites, including Macys.com, that were sending queries using a similar method. However, many of the queries sent by scripts on these sites look very much like standard search terms, making them difficult to identify and evaluate separately from actual user-initiated searches.

The big issue here is that my client was paying search CPCs for a placement that is a content placement with no way to set a bid based upon performance. Since Google does not provide an option to block individual sites in the search partner network, nor do they allow us to set different bids on a site level or even for the partner network, I came up with a solution that appears to be working.

First, I duplicated all of my campaigns. All of the original campaigns were opted out of the search partner network while all of the duplicated campaigns were opted in, but their bids were lowered substantially. I also set many of the hardest-hit keywords to exact match and lowered the bids on any keywords that had a CTR that looked like a content placement.

The results were immediate. The search partner network now provides our client a cost per conversion close to the level we see on Google. Our aggregate CTR jumped from .5% to 2.9%. Functionally, we gave Google keywords with a higher CPC that they will select to show on a Google search before the lower-CPC duplicates, but we gave them only one option at a lower CPC when the query originates from the search partner network.

A great number of competitor retail sites were included in the ad units on the ecommerce sites I came across. I recommend that all search engine marketers look through search query reports, separate out the search partner network, and look for any queries with a very high impression volume and a very low CTR.

You should be especially concerned if that query looks like a website breadcrumb or is nonsensical. If you find that you are affected, you may want to consider duplicating your campaigns and taking some degree of control over these placements.

So the question remained, how can this be within Google’s AdSense terms of service? A little bit of further exploring led me to a page in Google’s help documents for advertisers that suggested that search ads may appear on pages within a site’s directory: “Your ads may appear alongside or above search results, as part of a results page as a user navigates through a site’s directory, or on other relevant search pages.”

Upon asking my Google rep, I was told that this is, in fact, an example of this kind of directory placement and some “premium partners” are allowed to do this. So basically, Google considers drilling down into the content of some sites to be a type of directory search, even though there is no query entered by a user.

What Google tells their publishers appears to be substantially different. Google’s terms and conditions page for AdSense for Search partners states, “Queries must originate from users inputting data directly into the search box and cannot be modified.”

This seems pretty clear-cut; AdSense for Search can only be initiated by user queries. Why, then, does Google make exceptions for “premium publishers?”

This seems incongruous, as it seems that Google disallows this practice in general, but provides exceptions for a few large retailers who subscribe to AdSense. It is possible that Google has some internal mechanism that evaluates a “directory” site against some unknown criteria for inclusion in the directory search category.

It is also possible that some premium publishers did not want the considerably cheaper content ads on their pages and lobbied for the higher-yield search ads.

The bottom line is that advertisers have zero transparency, zero control and usually zero knowledge of the existence of this practice. Regardless of why this is happening, Google will change this practice only when enough advertisers have made enough of a clamor to effect change.

If every advertiser reduced their bids to a level commensurate with the worth of this type of traffic, it would effectively bring the overall CPCs down to the worth of the lowest common denominator in the network, including the CPCs on Google’s own site. I doubt that is something Google wants.

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ADOTAS – Much of the user furor over Digg’s revamp has been directed at founder Kevin Rose, who took over the reigns as CEO on an interim basis when Jay Adelson was pushed out supposedly for the lack of progress on the Digg revision. Considering the bile being spit at Rose since the public unveiling, Rose has decided to step away from the spotlight as Digg confirmed former Amazon higher-up Matt Williams is going to take over the CEO role.

The CEO search had been on for several months and Rose had hinted that a name would appear a few weeks ago, but the company couldn’t have picked a better time to bring in a new face. Rose said on the company blog that even though Williams is taking over day-to-day operations, he will still remain actively involved in the “product.”

An 11-year Amazon vet, Williams’ last position was general manager for consumer payments. He came to Amazon when LiveBid.com, which he founded and CEOed, was acquired in 1999. Seems as if he’s managed to fly (soar?) beneath the radar — here’s an interview with Williams from a few years ago.

Some commenters on Mashable are applauding the appointment, calling him “an undiscovered talent, now discovered,” while on just about every other site commenters are expressing their sympathy for the guy who gets to clean up the train wreck.

As for the user uproar over the Digg revamp — which circles around changes in submission policy that appear to spurn power diggers while making it easier for publishers, brands and celebrities to flood the social link-ranking site — Rose said:

“I know it has been a wild past week since the launch of our new platform. Introducing change is never easy, and bringing something as radically different as Digg version 4 was bound to generate a strong reaction. We are absolutely listening and really value everyone’s feedback as we take Digg in new directions.”

Rose also posted a list of changes made — most important, updating the algorithm so a single source couldn’t dominate the homepage like rival Reddit did — and ones coming soon, including improvements on user recommendations.

Rose seems to be taking this moment to fall on his sword, saying, “OK, it’s all my fault, but this new dude is going to make things all better.” Hopefully irate users will give Williams a chance to clean things up, though Rose did tell AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher earlier this month that being Digg’s CEO is “a pain in the ass and something I would never wish on my worst enemy.”

The top comment on Digg’s company blog sums it up pretty well — tmar89 writes, “Talk about dumping a pile of flaming shit onto the new guy. Or maybe this was the master plan all along? To destroy your own creation before you leave? Excellent…”

The Los Angeles Times blog suggests Williams take a page from Facebook, which “lets things stew for a bit and eventually finds either a mountain or a molehill. Molehills disappear rather quickly. Mountains normally get addressed through company blog posts, often by Chief Mark Zuckerberg. Those messages have offered an excuse, some reasoning or an unusual alternative.”

Not bad advice — bottoms up, Williams.

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ADOTAS – Irony is a dish best served hot and tangy: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that the latest lawsuit against him and the social network is trying to unearth details of his private life only to harass him. So is that better or worse than unwittingly having it sold to advertisers because someone changed the default controls?

Paul Ceglia, who owns a wood pellet fuel company located in Wellsville, N.Y. and is not without his eccentricities, claims he has a paper that gives him 84% ownership of Facebook. Both Ceglia and Zuck are sketchy folks to say the least, so it’s hard to take a side in the impending lawsuit, which was recently moved to Federal Court.

However, Ceglia is trying to take the case back to New York State Court under the claim that both men are New Yorkers (which is kinda odd considering Zuckerberg has lived in California for a while now…). According to Seton Hall Law Professor Adam Steinman, defendants tend to fare better in Federal Court while plantiffs can sometimes have a “home-field advantage” in state court.

The get this: in a filing in Federal Court in Buffalo, N.Y., on Monday, Zuck’s lawyers claimed the plantiff “filed this remand motion to harass defendants under the pretext of obtaining jurisdictional discovery into Zuckerberg’s private life.”

Oh? Give us some juicy details! No, Zuck’s lawyers aren’t even hinting what might be at issue, and it ain’t clear what Ceglia is interested in either.

We know in the soon-to-be-released movie “The Social Network,” Napster cofounder Sean Parker (in the form of Justin Timberlake) snorts cocaine off of bare teenage breasts (which Facebook claims is fiction, though still pretty hot), but I can’t wait till Oct. 1 to see how dirty dirty dirty Zuck is! What drugs does he like to snort off of which body parts? My money is on crushed Adderall delicately perched on the elbows of geriatric men.

It’s hard not to chuckle at the guy you can’t block on Facebook fending off third parties trying to manipulate their way into his personal life. But perhaps we should have a tad bit of pity for Zuck, as his doppelganger is currently appearing on posters all over cities with the word “Punk” in large letters. OK, they also read “Genius” and “Billionaire” — the world’s smallest violin is finished playing the world’s shortest etude.

On another interesting “Social Network” note, while Facebook has declined to run ads for the movie on its network, its Facebook page has 15,000 Likes. The official website has 29,000 Likes. Not bad — still got a month before the debauchery. Snort it up, Parker!

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ADOTAS – Local business is an online revenue stream dying to be tapped — just ask Facebook, which recently launched location-based feature Places and is set to bring in even more cash from local advertisers.

Yahoo also sees the potential in local advertising and had expanded its partnership with Dex One, which runs the local business directory DexKnows.com. Now all local businesses advertising through DexKnows.com will have the opportunity to appear in Yahoo Local search results.

While the companies first joined forces in 2007 in a deal that covered the 14-state region where Dex One is the official print directory publisher for Qwest, this new partnership will double the geography covered.

“Yahoo! is committed to helping local businesses unlock the potential of digital advertising,” said Regan Senkarik, Yahoo’s vice president of channel sales. “Expanding our agreement with Dex One will provide their clients with greater exposure in local communities and more consumers with detailed information on local businesses.”

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ADOTAS – You’re a media planner or media buyer and you hear that Quattro Wireless/Apple will no longer service business outside of Apple’s closed iOS platform.

You say that’s great news if your target audience uses Apple products. If not, what are you to do?

Apple’s decision to support ads exclusively for the iAd Network has left many advertisers hunting for a cross platform solution, one that allows brands and agencies to reach any mobile user on any device via any mobile advertising channel.

What these advertisers are after is reach, far beyond the relative small percentage of those who can be reached via iAd.

Specifically, marketers continue to seek audiences segmented by geography, demography, content channel, carrier, handset or time of day. Further, many continue to want to engage with consumers via SMS, display ads (mobile web, in-app, in-game) search, e-mail and MMS. Such has been the case for regional, national and local brands, including HBO PPV which saw 12.9% click-through rates for a Mayweather-Marquez championship boxing match telecast.

HBO, through its agency partner The Gary Group, tapped Hipcricket’s Ad Network to announce the bout, compel people to sign up to watch the fight on HBO PPV, and to generate opt-ins into their mobile VIP club.
The results were a knockout — the click-through rate was 12.9% and loyalty club opt-in rate was 69%.

Key things to look for as you seek to employ a mobile ad network partner:

• Reach: the number of mobile subscribers that can be targeted via SMS, the mobile web and/or applications.
• Targeting: Real-time targeting with multi-dimensional segmentation – in other words, right audience, right time, right device.
• Comprehensive portfolio of advertising options: Display ads, SMS, MMS, E-mail and Search.
• Direct relationships with the leading mobile publishers.
• Sophisticated end-to-end measurement to report success metrics and showcase ROI.
• A variety of “beyond the banner” units — including rich media expandable banners — that are larger units and can deliver video
• The ability to combine mobile with email as more people are opening e-mails straight from their mobile device.

Much like the online world, mobile advertising is about reach. You can bet iAd will deliver for customers. But often it will be part of the advertising mix, not the end-all.

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ADOTAS – User reaction to the relaunched Digg is making the all the screaming and cursing you hear when Facebook goes through a makeover look like sleeping kittens.

Last week Digg unveiled “v4,” which had been in the works for more than a year — in fact, founder Kevin Rose was so miffed at the lack of progress that he replaced CEO Jay Adelson with himself back in April. Digg was hoping the revamp would reverse its traffic woes.

Digg v4 encourages importing friends from other social networks and following Digg users. The “My News” tab feature on the user page features top stories have been “Dugg” by friends or is sponsored, while the “Top News” tab supposedly functions like good ol’ Digg and takes the top stories from across the network.

But users upset with v4 have launched a full-on revolt across social media sites, including rival Reddit as users were able to flooding the Digg top stories list with links from Reddit. Other users started screaming yesterday that it was “Quit Digg Day.” Digg traffic plummeted 33% after the launch, according to the not always (or often) reliable Alexa.com.

In addition to the inclusion of auto-feeds, power diggers are no more in the new Digg, and their history of ruling has apparently been destroyed. Instead of requiring carefully chosen words and images, submitting a story now only requires a link (similar to Facebook). That may seem to level the playing field, it also encourages publishers to submit their own stories and effectively destroys the “balance of power.

Social Blade notes that Digg v4 allows “publishers and celebrities to take the limelight with little to no ‘real’ contribution that was in existence prior to the change.”

The sudden furor is interesting because Digg had a very open and easy to get into beta testing period for the last few weeks. On Twitter, Rose dismissed the hysteria as “Digg Revolt #5,” but admitted, “we’re working hard to fix the source diversity part of the digg algorithm, more news soon.”

Meanwhile, Reddit is having a grand old time. While already drawing attention for bucking parent company Conde Nast and running a pot legalization ad campaign for free, the social news forum has given its alien mascot a shovel and added the message: “Pardon our construction: we’re digging around for new logos this week.”

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ADOTAS – As CardStar CEO Andy Miller displays the features of the company’s just-released iPad app, I flash back to standing with my mother in the grocery store line as she fumbled through a wallet flooded with discount cards.

CardStar’s loyalty card smartphone app — also available on iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices — has made that a scene from the past, though certainly not a simpler time. Consumers can manage their collection of retailer and brand discount cards through the app, which boasts 19 retail categories and 700 merchants.

In addition, retailers and brands can target mobile coupons as well as perform customer relationship management in near real-time. CardStar partners with companies like Zavers to offer an array of offer opportunities.

Users can sync with a family members’ CardStar accounts to share discount cards and CardStar provides a backup database (CardStar Connect) in case a device is broken or stolen. In most cases, the card can be scanned at the register right off the phone. A recent Foursquare integration allows for easy check ins.

The iPad app in particular takes advantage of that device’s extra real estate to create a “digi-circular” with clickable coupons that consumers can save, or drag and drop into a folder that automatically redeems all of them at the register.

Consumers can share deals with friends via email or social networking and rate them, give each deal a thumbs up or down. CardStar’s machine learning engine adjusts its user profile while users can also add personal filters.

Any retailer or brand — national or local — can sign up with CardStar in about five minutes and begin building hyperlocal or time-based offers. As you can imagine, CardStar collects a great deal of data that can make for some powerful analytics, including competitor stats. Miller is nearly giddy as he shows maps with data overlays — coupon redemption, time of use
intent data — that the company soon hopes to make available to clients for optimizing local targeting.

To some extent, CardStar is bringing display targeting techniques to mobile couponing, allowing merchants to buoy their consumer profile data.

“Coupons and rewards programs have been around for decades, but they haven’t adapted to today’s ever-evolving economy nor met consumer demand for digital content,” Miller says. “The CardStar iPad app is an extension of the mobile wallet and offers consumers another touch point to connect with merchants and brands.”

Since the company’s 2009 launch, CardStar smartphone apps have been downloaded 2 million times and are actively used by 700,000 consumers. In early August, Verizon’s venture capital arm injected $400,000 into the company.

Check out the video below for a demonstration of the new iPad app.

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ADOTAS – Google recently acquired information hub MetaWeb and began introducing answers to questions within user queries. I wondered whether such a service would diminish the lure of social Q&A sites, even ones that crawl a user’s social graph — conversational media companies like Solariat are hoping that’s not the case.

AOL is certainly a social Q&A proponent: almost three years after AOL bought the Israeli startup, Q&A community Yedda has been rebranded as AOL Answers. Oldtimers who have been on the Yedda wagon for some time can pick up the “Yedda Badge,” which the Yedda blog says “will serve as a reminder of the rich history of our community, to mark this moment of change.”

TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters also notes that nothing is changing in the service except the name (users can still log in via Yedda.com). Yedda’s services are along the lines of Anwsers.com and Yahoo Answers, but not “‘next-generation’ Q&A services that tap your social graph rather than the entire Web community as a whole, such as Quora, Aardvark and the recently launched Facebook Questions,” she writes.

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ADOTAS – Dirk Freytag is moving on up from his slot as AOL Advertising senior vice president to take on the executive leadership role of the product management division.

BuddyMedia has brought on some fine talent to round out its marketing squad. An interactive ad vet of 14 years who was last seen managing the marketing practice at Publicis’ Kaplan Thaler Group, Myles Kleeger has been named general manager of strategic brand partnerships. Eric Lituchy, former head of consumer marketing at eBillme with nearly 20 years of experience, is taking on the role of vice president of digital marketing. Finally, Joe Ciarallo, who was the founding editor of PRNewser at mediabistro.com, has joined as director of communications.

MediaTrust founder, President, CEO and arm-wrestling champion Peter Bordes has been given a seat on the board of people search engine PeekYou. Though nobody else quite has the biceps of Bordes, the board features other industry hot shots such as founder and CEO Michael Hussey and chairperson and former AOL COO Kimberly Patroll. When not working on his “guns,” Bordes heads the membership committee of the Performance Marketing Association and writes insightful commentary for this very site.

Justin Schachter has arrived at eXelate as director of agency development, where he will be in charge of East Coast agency sales and client development. Previously, Schachter was director of East Coast sales at Brand.net and also served as regional sales manager at Tremo.

Korn/Ferry Vice Chairman Dennis Carey is the latest addition to the Scanbuy board of directors.

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ADOTAS – Once you have pre-defined your success metrics, the next step in the process is to iterate through ideas for your new site. Generating ideas can be done in brainstorming sessions. Try to do this with a small group of people in a creative and positive environment.

Focus on ideas that are not so different that you can’t find a site that is similar in some way and already successful. You want an idea that your traffic providers will be comfortable with and that you can use other successful implementations as guides for. Choose the best idea and start on implementation.

This is the point where most ideas get very misdirected. Companies get lost spending time and money trying to develop the perfect product. Their natural inclination is that they can think of everything given enough time and that they know precisely what consumers want. This is not impossible to pull off, but the odds are stacked sharply against you.

Designing and implementing these ideas costs real money and there is no guarantee of return. Rather than taking the risk of high investment on the front end of the development, you should design for a soft launch of a scaled down prototype version of your idea.

Get the idea into form as quickly and cheaply as you can. Put live traffic on the prototype and collect as much information as possible. You can use analytical software, revenue tracking information, conversion information, etc. Collate all of this information and overlay it against your success metrics. This should tell you very clearly if your site is working and if not in which areas it is breaking down.

Focusing on those specific areas will maximize the efficiency of your development efforts. Brainstorm ideas to fix those specific weaknesses, implement cheaply, test and repeat.

The final step in the process is accelerating failure. Being able to identify failure quickly will take time. People don’t like to fail and become attached to their ideas. They feel like they have to succeed on every attempt and failure is a personal reflection on their efforts.

As I have mentioned, the reality is that the process is heavily swayed toward failure. It is impossible to correctly predict every time what consumers will want. Some ideas work for one website owner and won’t work for another because of alternate justifications. Some website owners are able to support different success metrics because of scale or access to traffic.

Regardless of the reason, rest assured that if you are trying enough ideas some of them will fail. The value in accelerating failure is to create an environment where failure is not condemned, but it is used as a learning experience for everyone.

The more failures communicated to and understood by everyone involved in the process, the faster they will learn and the faster future failures will be identified and avoided. This will lead to less wasted resources and ultimately a better ratio of success to failure when building websites.

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ADOTAS – How come every new technology that comes out has to be a “killer”? When Google’s NexusOne was launched, the headlines read, “iPhone Killer?” Eight months later, that doesn’t seem to be the case as the iPhone 4 boasts terrific sales and Google has given up on ol’ Nexus.

Hey, we in the media are fighting for pageviews and sensation snatches clicks, but new tech and digital services can certainly be complementary with the current offerings, or even provide a springboard — Apple’s iAd is off to a bumpy start, but other mobile ad networks that already had similar offerings are doing quite well for themselves.

When Facebook Places, the long-awaited location-based mobile piece of the social Goliath, arrived the other week, the tech and mainstream media alike was a-buzz about the “Foursquare killer.” Only thing is Facebook had already said that Places would integrate data from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla — executives from those services were actually at the public launch. Dave Marsey, senior vice president of media at Digitas, wisely suggested that although Facebook was bringing massive scale (the polite term for 500 million users) into the space, it wasn’t going to slay Foursquare and other networks, but lead the path ahead for mobile social.

“Places will put pressure on [location-based mobile social networks] to share more insights/data given Facebook’s 500 million user footprint and gives Facebook huge clout in setting the future strategy/direction for location based services,” he said.

Since the launch of Facebook Places, Foursquare has had nearly half a million signups, leaping from 2.6 million pre-Places to just 3 million last week. Apparently the company was expecting to hit that milestone in early September.

As the four days after the Places announcement marked Foursquare’s biggest growth spurt ever, Silicon Alley Insider makes this deduction:

“Mainstream media outlets deemed Places worthy of their attention. Virtually all of them described the service as a ‘Foursquare-killer.’ This left readers wondering: ‘what the hell is Foursquare?’ So they looked Foursquare up in Google, and many of these readers started an account.”

We digital folks world are so consumed in our world of apps and smartphones, we forget the American public isn’t always up to date with the latest marvels of technology. However, considering how much mainstream coverage Foursquare in particular has received (as well as a brutally hilarious Onion piece), I don’t think location-based mobile social networks were that much of a mystery.

At a cafe recently, I was joking with a industry guy about checking in on Foursquare (I think I’ve checked in four places total — I kinda like being at undisclosed locations.) and the barista overheard and asked if she could see the app. She’d heard about it but had never seen it in action, so I checked in and showed her the mayor of the cafe — “Oh yeah, she gets soy lattes here all the time,” the barista replied.

My guess is, like my barista, people knew about Foursquare and it’s location-based ilk, but Facebook Places legitimized it, made it safe for the masses. “I dunno about this location-based social networking — oh wait, Facebook’s got it? Well maybe it’s OK, I’ll set me up an account, hee hee hee. Check in at trendy bar… Oh wow, I got me a badge already!”

At an Ogilvy-hosted chummy panel discussion of location-based mobile social networks that included representatives from Foursquare, Buzzd, Loopt and BrightKite, I asked if it was feasible for so many moso networks to coexist — sure, the sector was in its infancy, but weren’t they going to start bumping shoulders as more mobile users checked in?

The general sentiment held that it was great how many different options mobile users had and they saw such diversity thriving in the future. In fact, as Places was still gathering speed on the rumor mill at the time, the participants were anticipating Facebook’s entry and excited about the attention it would bring the space. Seems pretty prescient now.

Interestingly, one moso guy expressed his displeasure that Facebook is akin to the Roman Empire of the online world — shouldn’t there be more competition? We can always wonder if News Corp. hadn’t bought MySpace and squeezed every dime of cheap display revenue instead of improving network functionality, would the two still be rivals? MySpace’s new layout and design changes are a bit too close to Facebook for comfort, but what if the network had made such changes years ago — when they would have been relevant?

Coulda, woulda, shoulda… MySpace’s ad revenue keeps sinking — it looks like the iceberg penetrated one hull too many. So we turn to the new challengers: Diaspora, with its ambitious approach to data privacy, and Google Me, which has piqued curiosity across the Internet.

However, on the mobile-social front, the population is already pretty mixed, and it appears the diverse ecosystem is going to survive for a while.

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ADOTAS – Thanks to the wonderful Jamie Bernheim and ever-growing TRAFFIQ team for sponsoring last week’s open bar at Digital Wednesdays. After a few Sapporos, I had the pleasure of discussing the future of the ad agency with Traffiq’s brand-new account director, Peter Schnupp.

I ran into Digital Wednesdays regulars Jessica Musicus, Michael Demby and Michael Fineman (who always refers to me as Justin Timberlake). I watched impresario Max Ramirez, founder of Digital Wednesdays, navigate the Tanuki Tavern with ease and introduce all the new faces to members who have known each other for years. Some came to the event to learn about Traffiq’s state of the art technology platform, while others came to network and enjoy the pleasant atmosphere of the Tanuki Tavern.

I left the party around 8:30, but am told that the networking and boozing lasted late into the night. Hats off to Max for another great party, and looking forward to his next mixers on Sept. 8 and 22nd. Tanuki Tavern is located in the Hotel Gansevoort at 18 Ninth Avenue, NYC.

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ADOTAS – Facebook’s decision to cancel an ad campaign from political group Just Say Now featuring a marijuana leaf — after running 38 million impressions — drew a lot of attention. In particular small and medium-sized advertisers had a right to be upset as it was another example of Facebook bending it’s advertising policy to assuage bigger, “more conservative” brands. I’m sure SMBs wonder if they’ve fallen below users on Facebook’s priority list — “How could we sink so low?!?”

Of course it’s Facebook’s prerogative — FB also similarly screwed over the Libertarian Party in July, but they’ve got every right to decline a pot leaf ad right after denying a NAMBLA one. But many critics wondered why FB would turn down a rather innocuous revenue stream, especially considering that the social network got it’s start with and is still heavily used by college kids. As Chef (RIP Isaac Hayes) told us many years ago on “South Park,” there’s a time and a place for that, and it’s called college.

Now in what’s being labeled the “Reddit Revolt,” last Friday Reddit has decided to buck parent company Conde Nast, which acquired the social news site in 2006, and run the Just Say Now ads at no cost.

Reddit, which has several user pages devoted to weed legalization, contacted Just Say Now after the Facebook controversy broke to discuss running the ads. Conde Nast, which was once known for publishing magazines and now just for folding them, told Reddit it “does not want to financially benefit from this issue.” Reddit’s management found that excuse pretty lame, commenting, “frankly… it’s ridiculous that we’re turning away advertising money.” Wired noted the social network has struggled with advertising revenue and Conde Nast could use every cent it could get.

Thumbing their noses at the parent company, Reddit decided if Conde Nast didn’t want to bring in some revenue from pot legalization campaigns, it would run the Just Say Now ad for free. It doesn’t look like Conde Nast has responded and it’s not clear whether it will.

Just Say Now, which encouraged its nearly 10,000 Facebook likers to switch their profile pics to the banned image, notes the ads are supporting passage of Proposition 19 in California, which would force married homosexual couples to smoke marijuana while limiting increases on their property taxes… Whoops, getting my propositions mixed up there — Proposition 19 would just legalize the use of marijuana. These ads are not promoting using marijuana, but holding a discussion on its legalization — I get the nuance as I’m for the decriminalization of marijuana but not (really) a user.

“Large online communities proved, en masse, that they were waaaay ahead of both corporate America and our political leadership when it comes to their readiness to discuss an end to marijuana prohibition,” said Just Say Now leader and prominent political blogger Jane Hamsher.

That’s why the Reddit example is fascinating — here’s an online social network owned by a traditional publisher that called out its parent on denying a revenue stream based on outdated social mores, for being too conservative in the always forward-moving land of the Internet.

Sheesh, even Google is running the ads — get with the times, Facebook! As Bruce Fein, Just Say Now advisory board member and former Reagan Justice Department Official, summed it up: “Facebook’s concocted prissiness over political advocacy is more to be disparaged than imitated. Freedom of expression is made of sterner stuff. Google deserves applause for exposing Facebook to shame.”

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ADOTAS – Inspiration to create a website can come from any number of places. An idea could pop up from having a conversation with a colleague, viewing a competitor’s website, noticing a gap in the marketplace, studying response data from current customers, brainstorming sessions, etc.

Some ideas seem to have the perfect fit; they seem so groundbreaking and significant that you are positive they will work. All you need to do is build it and customers will come. You immediately dive head first into development of your idea sparing no expense on features and functionality along the way. This site is going to be perfect.

Several months pass and your product is finally ready to be released. You swell up with pride a bit as you announce to your friends and colleagues what you have created. You may have invested far more than you thought you would initially, but you know you have made all of the right decisions for your customers. The consumer’s experience on your website is exactly as it should be and you are virtually guaranteed success.

So it’s time to release the website. You buy some initial traffic to the site to see how it works, but it’s not generating enough revenue to offset the traffic cost. You double-check the technical functionality of the site and it all checks out. It must be the traffic. You segment the traffic differently and buy more. It’s still not backing out.

You have invested so much into this site you are determined to make it work. You keep spending and tweaking the site, but its just not working like you thought it would and you are still losing money or barely breaking even. You cut your losses and either let the website run with no additional investment or shut it down and move on to the next idea already in the hole from your last project and confidence depleted.

Don’t feel too bad because you are not alone. In fact, most online businesses never obtain the desired traction and never turn into hugely profitable businesses for their owners. I know this from personal experience. I have spent years developing a variety of websites and I am not ashamed to say that the vast majority of those websites have been complete failures.

What I have taken away from those experiences is that most ideas for websites will fail, those failures are a normal part of the process, and that through acceptance of those failures as a normal part of the process and being prepared for them, you can increase your chances for future success. In other words, through the creation of a lean process that gets the right products to market quickly and cheaply, you can let consumers test the idea of your website.

If they like it, their feedback and response will drive the feature set development for the end product. The process involves three major steps: pre-defining your success metrics, iterating through ideas and accelerating failures.

Pre-defining your success metrics is a two-part process. First, you need to justify why you are building the site. There are many justifications for building websites and those justifications vary greatly from one website owner to the next. Identifying your justification prior to creating a site will allow you to make sure that you build the right type of site to meet your needs and that you recognize when your site is fulfilling its purpose.

Some typical justifications include: building a marketing list, generating a new revenue stream, stabilizing media buys when ad spends change frequently across advertisers, providing value to and/or cross-selling to an existing consumer base, building a unique offering for a publisher base, and more.

Second, you need to define the competitive landscape for your proposed website. You need to understand exactly what you will have to pay for traffic and how much you will have to earn on the backend of your website in order to afford that traffic plus your margin. There are many metrics that traffic publishers are going to care about. There are open rates, click rates, conversion rates, etc., but the most important metric used by savvy publishers is effective revenue/cost per thousand (ECPM) because it factors all of those metrics together.

Publishers will use the ECPM of your website to valuate their traffic against alternate websites so they can make relative comparisons between multiple types of offerings with different conversion metrics and payouts. Each type of traffic has significantly different ECPM values as well as different associated costs to a media buyer. You need to figure out which type of traffic you are going to test with and what the typical ECPM’s are for that traffic.

Once you know competitive ECPMs, you can take the amount of traffic that you want to buy, divide it by one thousand, and multiply it by the target ECPM to figure out what your target revenue per user sent to your site needs to be. That revenue per user needs to be enough to achieve the publishers target ECPM plus your margin if you want to continue to receive traffic from that publisher and make money for yourself.

In real terms, if you are going to buy one hundred thousand units of traffic to your site, your target ECPM is $5, and your target margin is 20 percent then you need to make six hundred dollars off that traffic to both keep your publisher happy and make margin.

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ADOTAS – In all this speculation about Google Me stealing Facebook’s social networking crown, we almost forgot about Diaspora, an upstart open-source social network that got a whole lotta attention and funding during Facebook’s latest privacy debacle.

Diaspora is running and according to the company blog, its developers are digging it. The official launch will be on Sept. 15, two weeks before “The Social Network” — aka, the steamy side of Facebook — opens in theaters nationwide and delights the nation with Facebook executives sniffing coke off of naked teenage girls. Who knew the social media world looked a lot like “Boogie Nights”?

Back in May four New York University students set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 for building Diaspora and took home well over $100,000, with even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donating to the cause. Thought it’s not clear what it will look like, Diaspora’s goal is to take out the social networking middleman — the network operator — and establish encrypted nodes called “instances.” Users will control all data within instances, including what is shared with other instances.

For more vague details, here’s a video:

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Raphael Sofaer on the left notes that in real life we don’t need hubs to communicate with each other, so why should we in a virtual environment?

Only thing, Raph, in reality we do use hubs in communicating with each other — best example, bars. We pay way too much for alcohol because we want relatively neutral ground on which to socialize — being 19, Ralph may not get that… At his age I was sneaking to my over-21 friend’s dorm room to hammer Natty Ice.

As Avi Savar recently noted, social media is pretty much one big party and Facebook is the TGI Friday’s everyone goes to because the drinks are reasonably priced and the other options (MySpace = Applebees?) are kinda gross and REALLY uncool. Also they serve too many minors.

People like places where they get served for the pure convenience, and they’re willing to put up with invasive behavior from the management to an extent. Anger at Facebook stems from Zuck and crew being super shady regarding privacy policy and user data. As Gawker wrote when covering the coke and boobs scene in “The Social Network,” Facebook execs should be “happy there are no scenes where [the] CEO grossly and unethically repurposes user data like he’s been doing almost constantly since.”

Diaspora is a neat idea, but I’m wondering if the creators have forgone functionality for transparency. And of course, where do marketers fit in Diaspora’s game, if they fit at all? How exactly do these wonder boys expect the network to pay for itself? Venture capital has a nasty habit of running out.

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