YBO Interactive Blog

Here is a really funny clip made by comedy.com.
The fact that this video clip is hosted on YouTube proves that the people in Google still got some sense of humor left.

My friend Hilit called me devastated and said that her Gmail account is blocked. Apparently some virus used her Gmail account for spam. One thing led to another and as of yesterday she can’t login any more to her Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs abd Google Calendar.

Can any of you help her? She tried to fill in some recovery forms but that didn’t solve anything. Just more and more questions and nothing helped. If you or any of your friends know someone in Google that knows someone in the Gmail team that will listen to her and try to help, please comment on this post or send her an email. If you can add a link to this post to your Facebook or Twitter, that would be great. Your help is appreciated.
Problem Solved!

When I heard about it, I thought that this could easily happen to me or to any of my friends. However, as I wrote once, there are ways to minimize the risk.

1. Instead of using a gmail address for your business, get your own domain and use Google Apps - the price is only $50/year. This way, if something happens, you can always point your mx record somewhere else. (Anyone tried Yahoo!?)

2. Once your get your own Google Apps account, forward the old Gmail account to the Google Apps account and set a vacation reply in the old gmail account, saying you have a new email address. It will take a few weeks and all your friends will update their address book.

3. Install Microsoft Outlook and configure it to download all your gmail messages (It will probably take a few days). Leave messages on server, no need to delete anything.

4. Install Google Apps Sync and upload all your gmail data to your new Google Apps account.

5. Configure your favorite email client to pop3 download all your emails on a daily basis from your new Google Apps account. Make sure you don’t delete anything from the server, this is just for backup.

Anybody has more tips?

I have just logged in to Twitter and saw this error message:

Isn’t that a beautiful?

Instead of the ugly 500 Internal standard error message, why don’t we all be nice to your customers?

Google reported in the official google blog that they are on their way out of China.

This is unbelievable.  The amount of traffic Google is going to loose as a result of this move is enormous.  The revenue they will loose as a result of this move is still unknown, but I guess that out of the $5.94 billion they made in Q32009 a few hundred millions came from China. I’m not sure that investors will like it, however I’m sure that companies that provide services that allow internet users to use Google from China will be very happy with this news.

Here is a Gmail bug I have just found.

If you open 2 Gmail chat windows, one of them is in SMS mode and the other is in regular chat mode, The SMS quote is ticking even if you send messages through the regular chat window and not the SMS

See how it looks on my Chrome:

Gmail has done it again. And again and again and again.

And they are now doing it again…

Did you know you can send SMS messages for free from your Gmail Chat window?

In order to do that, click on Settings -> Labs,  and enable the SMS features.

How can it be for free?

The answer is very simple. Google gives each gmail user a qoute of 50 outgoing SMS messages.

Now, for every incoming  SMS you recieve, you will get 5 credits for outgoing SMS. And this is where they make their money. Google has signed revenue sharing agreements with the cellular companies on the incoming SMS. For every SMS message you GET, they make some money.

I still don’t get it why the ratio is 1:5 but I’m sure they have their reasons.

There are plenty of other Gmail Labs feature that make Gmail the BEST email option out there, I promise I will write about it some time soon.

Track SEO rankings?

Well, you can’t specifically track the exact position of the keyword that was clicked like you can do with AdWords. But it is possible to determine the page he was on. A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from ‘personalized search’ or ‘local results’ that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. People see other results than you see with your ranking tools. And therefore you need Google Analytics to do the real ranking.

Setup the filter

To get the rankings in your Google Analytics reports you have to create a new filter:

The title of the filter contains a 3, that’s because filter 1 and 2 take care of filtering out everything else than Google Organic traffic. So yes: you also have to create a new profile to apply these filters on to be sure you don’t screw up your main profile.

This filter only works for Google. if you want it to work for Yahoo and Live Search also, make sure you change the filters 1 and 2 so they accept Organic from all three of them. Then setup the filter like this:

The ranking results

After a while the “User Defined” report will look like this (ignore the language):

What you see are not the actual rankings, but the number of the first result of the page the keyword was on. So when you see 20, it means the keyword was on the third page, and a 50 means the sixth page. (Yahoo and Live Search will report 21 and 51 in stead of 20 and 50).

When you don’t see a number but only “(page: ): it means the keyword was on the first page. So perhaps it is better to change “page:” to “minimal position;”, I leave that up to you.

If you want to filter the list of keywords on keywords with at least a page 2 position you can use “\(page: \d{2,3}\)” in the filter field below the list. The \d stands for digits, and the 2,3 for the amount of digits you’re looking for.

Enjoy.

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This excellent post was written by André Scholten and was originally published in yoast.com

This is just brilliant. A simple feature that will make my life so much easier.

TED has an amazing video about the SixthSense. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.

I have just got an email from Barry Schwartz announcing SphinnCon is back to Israel!

It is going to take place in Jerusalem on March 7th, 2010.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend, since at the exact same time I will be snowboarding in Val Thorens, France.

(OOOHHHHH YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!)

I warmly recommend anyone that wants to know more about Internet Marketing to attend.

The first SphinConn took place in Jerusalem last year,  I have attended that event and it was great.

This one is also not too expensive ($50) so hurry up, there are only 200 seats. Singup here