A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

So what went on last week, everybody?

I guess this little post wouldn’t be the same without it’s weekly Facebook update, so let’s begin there. Finally, Facebook has admitted to their multitude of indiscretions with regards to user’s privacy. This admittance was delivered by frontman Mark Zuckerberg in both private and public arenas, and in my opinion is one step in the right direction towards building amends with their users and rebuilding that trust. It’s not bad, actually I’m slightly impressed. In a private email conversation with blogger Robert Scoble, Zuckerberg admitted Facebook “made a bunch of mistakes but [his] hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place…” Earnest, it seems. In his public message, Zuckerberg admitted to knowing that Facebook users want more control over their privacy settings, quoting that “people want easier control over their information.” So what happened then? What did Facebook actually do?

Facebook headed to DC for a Congressional briefing on user privacy and finally, changed user’s privacy settings to make information sharing more controllable by the user. Great. I like it. Maybe now we can all move on.

I may have spoken too soon. So, we caught wind of a new issue this week, doted as people searching (isn’t this just like Googling?) and it’s raising eyebrows big time. People Search sites like “…ZabaSearch, BeenVerified, and Spokeo…[show]…not just personal data. It is personally identifiable (and often free). You can find people’s names, addresses and income — regardless of whether they’ve ever signed on to these sites. But people search sites aren’t stealing this info. They’re gathering it from publicly available sources.” Yikes. That’s not something I wanted to know existed.

What else, well…Twitter was in the news this week, making changes to ad networks usage of the service. And a big day, that was! COO Dick Costolo was quoted as saying “We will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.” What did this actually mean? An attempted boost in tweet integrity, but also the end for startups like Ad.ly, and Sponsored Tweets, “while giving more prominence to Twitter’s own ads, called ‘Promoted Tweets.’” I feel like this was a big move for Twitter, I hope that they continue to take steps to clean up the twitter feed. Hope to see more of the same.

We were reminded, again, that ad spending is seeing sunny days. This time, with the help of the Olympics no less, we saw a “5.1% improvement over the first three months of 2009.” This news isn’t anything new (in fact, I seem to see the same type of headline pop up week after week), but I figured it would be worth mentioning as something to go back to in future weeks as we start to see results from Q2 unveil.

I’ve been wondering when this would happen! Skype Video…meet the Android! I love the fact that “a Skype mobile application that will hit the marketplace with video functionality ‘later this year.’” That is great, just great. However, we were also told that a study found that kids are more likely to own a cell phone than a book. Sigh.

Back on a happier note, there was another great announcement this week; AffinityClick went live! We turned on our services to our users and started to activate accounts. This was a great week for us here, and we’re so excited to see results churn in the weeks to come! If you haven’t already signed up for our contextual and social product placement service for your blog or website yet, now’s your chance! Check it all out here: www.affinityclick.com.