Earlier this month we made a few changes to improve user experience. These included more browsing options, streamlined browsing, and integration with Facebook. Now we are proud to announce the addition of categories to the Amvona Blog. Below the title of each article you will see its category. Just give that a click, and whamo you’ll see all of the articles for that category. We hope that this will navigating the blog easier. The categories include:

Yesterday Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced a new addition to Twitter that goes far beyond the twitter.com domain. The feature dubbed “@anywhere” was announced at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Event. SXSW 2010 is being held in Austin, Texas, and lasts for ten days (March 12-21). The event combines music, film, and interactive. SXSW has been running for over twenty years. 

You hear it in business all the time… Location location location, but now it’s becoming even more important for social networking. Yes Twitter connects information and people from all over the world, but up until recently it wasn’t always that easy (or accurate) to find information locally. Yesterday Twitter introduced “Tweet With Your Location” feature. Users will see the option when writing their next tweet, but must opt-in to receive the service.

It’s been a week since Twitter turned on the Firehose to more than just the usual gang of search engines. In all seven new partnerships were formed with companies which range from funded startups to one man shows. These real time search mavens have been using their super internet smarts to sift through all the real time noise including Tweets, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and other sources around the Web. Each company has written press leases or posts for their blogs, but what do the people behind the company have to say? Who better to ask than the people at the top. We’ve gotten the thoughts from the founder and/or CEO of: twazzup, CrowdEye, Ellerdale, and Scoopler.

Yesterday I asked around the web to see if anyone in the Amvona community would like an invite to Google Voice, as I have three lying around collecting dust. I was surprised at how many people were interested, so thought to create this mini contest to make it fair for everyone. Don’t worry it's fast and easy; you won’t be waiting around a week or fill out a bunch of junk.

Twitter has been in the news a lot over the past few months because of their efforts to team up with other online powerhouses. In October Tweets began appearing in both Bing and Google search results, and only one week ago Twitter announced their partnership with Yahoo Search as well. Yesterday, however, Twitter took another big step to further affirm that they want to improve content flow across the Web and around the world.

The future is bright for Twitter integration with Yahoo.  The only integration at this point, is Tweets into real-time Yahoo Search results, but this is only the beginning. Yahoo has already announced features coming soon. The list includes:

Yesterday both the Twitter and Yahoo blog published posts relating to the newly formed alliance. This was only the next step for Twitter. Just another sign that Twitter and real time information sharing is becoming an important part of search result offerings. Also goes a long way in further solidifying social networking and a true testament to its longevity.

Yesterday over at the Twitter blog a graph which displayed the growth in tweets was posted. The growth is just sick. The most current information is estimating an average of 36,000 tweets per minute. This has come a long way from their 2007 daily average of 5,000 tweets.

Because of a misconfiguration, the WordPress servers were down for almost 2 hours on Thursday.  Thanks to the use of Twitter, WordPress was able to keep its users and followers up to speed since obviously they could not inform them on a non-working site.  A tweet on Thursday, February 18th at about 1:45 pm states "WordPress.com is down, we're working on restoring service now." 

HTC HD Mini: Instead of wowing con-goers with more and more features, the HTC HD Mini took the load less traveled. HTC figured that since social media and networking has become the dominant use of the internet, there must be a market for people who just use their phones for Facebook, Twitter, etc. HTC has streamlined this portable machine, but was careful not to sacrifice ANY social media functionality. It's not for everybody, but to you Twitter addicts with limited pocket space, this is the phone for you.

Sponsors were using social media (Facebook, twitter, websites) to push their advertising even before the games began.  NBC was creating buzz on their social media sites to push the Olympics long before it began (obviously they would, they're the station holding it) and like I mentioned previously, Visa allowed viewers to watch their commercials on youtube before they were set to air. 

Advertising during the Olympics is definitely up there in cost and visibility with the Super Bowl.  Each 30 second ad costs hundreds of thousand dollars, and an advertising package can cost in the hundreds of millions.  This year, it is thought that more eyes will see the the Olympic Games on their computer than their TV, and sponsors need to take this into account.  The Olympics this year is being nicknamed the "social games" by sponsors and they will be taking advantage of that by making social media a significant part of their advertising. 

The Winter Olympics began last night and this year they are utilizing all options of social media for both marketing and event information.  The official Olympics web page welcomes visitors to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  On the NBC Olympic website there are tabs for your typical Olympic information; TV listings, results, medals won, etc.  There is also a "Tweets and Blogs" tab that brings you to a plethera of social media. 

If you hadn’t guessed it with the title, Amvona is now on Google Buzz. By this point, anyone who uses Gmail should have seen the info page for Buzz on the way to their inbox. Buzz is Google’s contribution to the ever growing pool of Web based social networking outlets.