Google Integrates AdSense For Feeds, FeedBurner, Analytics

The desire to integrate products is strong at Google; it’s not hard to imagine that the company would eventually like to offer one great, big search/video/email/advertising ball.  And today, it took a tiny step along that path by rolling together some analytics products.

A post on the AdSense for Feeds blog announced, “If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.”

The post then continued, “Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as ‘feedburner,’ the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as ‘feed’ or ‘email,’ and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as ‘Google Reader’ or ‘Yahoo! Mail.’”

More distribution endpoint labels are on the way, too.

Hopefully this update will help people earn a little extra money heading into the holidays.  At the least, it may simplify FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds users’ lives a little, which would also represent a nice treat this time of year.

Have You Read This?

> Google Launches Analytics For Mobile Apps

> Correcting Your Web Analytics Mistakes

> FeedBurner/Google Alum Goes To Twitter

TypePad Gets Real-Time Blog Updates

Today Six Apart, the makers of TypePad, released a new TypePad PubSubHubub hub, which automatically promotes blog updates in real time. It's a free feature for bloggers who use TypePad, and it automatically updates Google Reader, FriendFeed, SuperFeedr, and LiveDoor.

It's not even a plug-in, but simply an automatic feature, which requires no changes from bloggers. Although, those using Advance Templates in TypePad will have to add a line of code to their atom.xml, which can be found here.

Pubsubhubbub is described as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." This is a protocol that Google itself has adopted for shared items in Google Reader, which allows it to contribute to real-time search. Google recently provided the following presentation:

"The PubSubHubbub protocol is decentralized and free," explains Six Apart's Nima Badiey. "No single company controls it and anybody can run a hub, ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs."

"The new TypePad PubSubHubbub hub builds on the exciting work that Brad Fitzpatrick (a Six Apart alum) and Brett Slatkin’s team at Google have done with the implementation of PubSubHubbub," Badiey says.

A lot of blogs are hosted by TypePad, so this could prove to be another big stride for the real-time web, which we hear more and more about every day. That's why real-time search is not limited to tweets and Facebook updates. Content in general is rapidly pushed out from many different media channels all over the web. Freshness can play a big role in some kinds of queries.

Speaking of "real-time," a way to get close to real-time search using Google has been discovered by way of tweaking a URL using a time-related search option. More on this here.

FeedBurner/Google Alum Goes To Twitter

It looks like Twitter's filled another hole in its lineup of key executives.  The title of Chief Operating Officer should go to Dick Costolo, who was the cofounder and CEO of FeedBurner and also did a stint at Google post-acquisition.

Costolo left Google about two months ago.  His LinkedIn profile claims that, since then, he's been working for Monkey Beach Crime, Inc.  (Chalk this odd tale up to Costolo's former career as a comedian).

Michael Arrington provided a more likely story by writing this afternoon, "Dick Costolo is Twitter's new chief operating officer, we've heard from multiple sources. . . .  We'd heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him."

Since he's worked for both a startup and a corporate giant with a $144 billion market cap, Costolo may be in a good position to help Twitter mature as a business.  Experience on both ends of that scale is hard to come by and often quite valuable.

If - and this is an if that at least a few people are thinking about - Google tries to buy Twitter, Costolo could probably help there, too.

Yahoo Alum To Head Twitter’s Search Efforts

It appears that Twitter's found someone to take charge of its search efforts.  Doug Cook, who once worked for Yahoo and has several other impressive items on his resume, quietly assumed the title of "Director of Search" at Twitter sometime last month.

Yes, somewhat ironically, we've spent several minutes searching and not find a single press release, blog post, or tweet announcing Cook's start at Twitter.  But Daniel Tunkelang broke the news yesterday, and so on we go with a look at Cook's past.

The first entry on Cook's LinkedIn profile documents a stint at Sun Microsystems.  Then he spent more than a few years at Silicon Graphics.  Next, Cook moved to Inktomi, and stayed on with Yahoo when it acquired the software company.  So far, so good, right?

Still, the most interesting and relevant thing about Cook's list of accomplishments is probably that he's the founder and owner of Able Grape, a wine search engine.  So he has some experience building a search engine up from nothing.

Cook's use of Twitter to promote Able Grape (he seems to average around five tweets per day) also shows that he's quite familiar with the micro-blogging site.

It'll be interesting to see how this works out.  A hat tip, in any event, goes to Joseph Tartakoff.