Let’s face it. These days you can’t just rely on books to stay on the top of your industry. While you don’t want to let your RSS feeds make you less productive, you do want to keep up with them as much as you can. Plenty of people, including yours truly, use Google Reader to get the job done. It’s quite a powerful tool and has a ton of features for saving and sharing information with others. It can get a bit overwhelming if you have too many feeds in your account. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could customize the look and feel of Google Reader to go through the new content more effectively? Good Noows is an exciting news reader application that lets you create your own mini newspaper online, getting a better sense of the top stories in your industry.

Good Noows not only lets you keep track of your favorite website, but it also can accept your own RSS feeds too. So you can customize the information displayed on your front-page. You can even create new news sections (think of it as categories or folders) and add your favorite feeds to them. I also love the fact that you can customize Good Noows layout easily.

As you can see in the above screen-shot, you can add new sections as well as new sources of information to your account. You get plenty of layouts to choose from too. The service lets you change the font size and translate your news to a language that you can understand (if English is not your first language). You can also share your favorite stories right from your front-page.

I would not use this service as my main RSS reader. But it is an invaluable tool if you want to identify stories that are worth reading quickly. The service needs a bit of work and hopefully more features will be added to it in the future. The concept is awesome though.

It took only a small while before people realized there was something wrong with Twitter yesterday. Once the site starts loading slow, and you see the big whale image on your screen, you know something’s happening at Twitter. Apparently, the company had some server issues and has fixed most of those issues by now. A year ago, it would have taken people a while to get informed on any outages. These days, Twitter can’t get away with that. Not when it has millions of people who can’t stop tweeting.

Twitter’s status site was full of news about the state of the network (most of which were not good news).

Twitter has gotten much better these days when it comes to handling the load that it gets from all the tweeters. But it has ways to go to become perfect in that regard. Perhaps what’s more distressing is seeing so many people complain about what they can’t do when Twitter should be used as a tool and not a life-style.

Twitter may be struggling from time to time to keep up with all the traffic that it gets. But that is not going to stop the team from implementing new features. Twitter is in the process of introducing its own URL shortening feature that will not only help users save some characters, but it will reduce the chances of people getting scammed on Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but I will continue supporting third-party URL shortening services out there. It’s never ideal if one company is handling all your data, even if Twitter can use your data to improve its features. Twitter may not be perfect, but it does not have to be. Twitter being down for a few hours should not alter your strategy much anyway.

A whole lot of people spend hours each day on Facebook updating their status and viewing other people’s status. Facebook is still growing and holds a lot of promise for marketers and businesses. It’s not a finished product by any means. Facebook’s Advertising platform has gone through many changes in the past few months, and it’s become another venue for marketers to take advantage of. Now it seems Facebook is testing status advertising. Essentially, it’s trying to make it easier for Facebook page owners to promote their top status updates and get more action going on their pages.

Credit: Web Pro News

Web Pro News has discovered that some Facebook page owners are seeing the “promote” feature show up next to their status updates. The process seems to be pretty straight forward. Once you click on the promote link, you are going to have to go through a wizard, which will include you approving how much money you want to spend promoting your page and who you want to show it to. From there, you can expect traffic to flow to your pages.

Online marketers are already taking advantage of Facebook to promote their pages. Some argue that advertising will take away from Facebook experience. But advertising is going to be the future of Facebook. That’s how the company has managed to stay afloat while Twitter and other services still struggle to come up with a proper business plan.

Promoting your page status updates is another easy way of increasing traffic and interactions on your Facebook pages. Of course, you want to make sure you spend enough time to optimize your Facebook pages. This latest move by Facebook could be just a test, but we have heard similar stories about Twitter. There is no question we’ll be seeing similar attempts in the future.

Your thoughts: are you against more ads on Facebook?

Those of you who have been on Twitter for a while have probably realized the need for a retweet button under each tweet. It’s not too inconvenient to copy and past tweets and add RT information to them. But it’d be much fun if you had that ability on Twitter. In truth, you are going to get that ability on Twitter soon. The company has been testing the “retweet” feature for a while now, and if you happen to be one of the lucky ones to have the feature activated on your account, you can test the feature by yourself.

So here is how the feature works. You see a story that you want to retweet, you click on the retweet button, and Twitter asks you whether you want to retweet the story. Twitter does the rest for you.

The Retweet feature is certainly convenient and fun to play with. Keep in mind that it’s a new feature so it will take some time for Twitter to get everything right. But while many are excited about the introduction of the new feature, there are people who are upset about the way Twitter has implemented the feature and for a good reason. Twitter does not allow you to add your own take on these stories when you retweet a post. So essentially, you post a piece of article with all the attributions but without your take on it. It’s also regrettable that you can only see RTs from the people you follow. So if you are not following the top dogs in your niche, you are not going to see the stories that they like.

The first issue is not something that can’t be fixed. The way Twitter has implemented it can certainly make things get done faster. I do believe that Twitter needs to add another option to the above pop-up to allow us to add our own take to stories. Maybe we will see that when the feature is released to everyone. The 2nd feature and the way it’s been implemented are actually something I do agree with. If you are not following someone on Twitter, you probably don’t want to hear from them. Besides, you don’t have to be following everyone to get those top stories on your timeline. If you are following people who truly provide value in your niche, there is a good chance they’ll catch the top stories and tweets from other top people around the world. So you don’t have to follow everyone in the world to see those top retweets. If those who you follow catch them, you will as well. That’s why you should only follow people who provide real value. There are just too many folks who follow a lot of people in hope of getting followed back. That’s not what Twitter was designed for. So I wouldn’t put any blame on Twitter for how it has implemented the second feature.

The good news is that we are finally going to get the retweet button on Twitter. It may need some work and not everyone is going to agree with everything, but it’s a nice step forward.

What’s your take: do you have an issue with how Twitter has implemented the retweet feature?

Google may be the top dog when it comes to web search, but the company has not used the power of the social media to provide more useful information to online searchers in the past. Not until now anyway. Google has announced that it will introduce a new Google Labs feature called “Social Search” that will integrate your favorite social media sites into Google search page to help you stay connected with your friends and followers.

Google is now going to start grabbing information from your favorite social networking sites that you have listed on your Google Profile. This is exciting on two fronts. On the one hand, you are going to be able to keep up with the latest developments in the world of social media. So you can catch the latest news and developments faster through Google Search. On the other hand, your results are going to be somewhat customized for you. It’s not personalized search just yet, but it’s a very good start.

In case you missed it, Microsoft is also trying hard to get a lead in this department to put pressure on Google. But the latest announcement by Google should stop a bit of momentum that Microsoft was going to make by taking Bing social. The move will certainly marry social media optimization and search engine optimization. Now you can share images, videos, text blogs, and so on across multiple networks and gain a lot more traffic from Google as well.

The future of search is social. It’s all about user generated content mixed with corporate content. It’s about time Google and Microsoft paid attention to all the content created by social media users on a daily basis. We are still in the early days of true social search. But too hard not to get excited about it all.

Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo Buzz is now open to publishers. Yahoo! Buzz is a social news service where people get to vote or rather Buzz up stories that they like on the Internet. A few things to do before jumping in to Yahoo! Buzz:

• Research: Make sure to check out what stories are getting the most votes on Yahoo! Buzz. It’s a different channel but similar to Digg.
• See the Buzz: see what stories are getting the most buzz in the past 12 hours. You can really see the trends and top ongoing stories on the net (for instance, right now you can find a ton of news items on Olympics and Michael Phelps).
• Target Buzz: create a product only for Yahoo! buzz. The WordPress Plugin for Buzz is getting quite a few votes. You can have a piece of the pie as well.
• Don’t spam: Buzz is a new community but you can be sure that they will come down on spammers. Don’t submit anything that does not add any values.
• Add Buzz to your Blog: add Yahoo! Buzz to your blog or site to get free traffic. If you are a serial linkbaiter, then you can get buzzes and free traffic from Yahoo! Buzz.
• Think about Value: write down your strategy for Yahoo! Buzz before it’s too late. Just like Digg, you’ve got to go in with a clear strategy on what you want to accomplish on Yahoo! Buzz. These days there are no excuses for not having a plan for doing things online.

So what are you waiting for? Buzz up!