Citysearch Has New Way for Local Businesses to Advertise

Citysearch recently announced a set of APIs to make all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. It's called CityGrid. Today, the company announced an online advertising solution called CityGrid Complete, as an extension of that.

CityGrid Complete was built around an investment from Citysearch in OrangeSoda. CitySearch tells WebProNews that with the investment, they will offer local advertisers:

- Access to a pay-for-performance advertising platform and campaign management tools

- Scalable search engine optimization solution on the Web, including targeted keyword optimization, and reporting (ranking, conversation tracking and trending)

- Local listings optimization, including business profile optimization and phone call tracking and reporting

- Wider distribution across CityGrid

"Whether it's driving new customers to our advertisers from major search sites or mobile applications, CityGrid Complete is about delivering local businesses the highest quality leads for the best value," said Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining the distribution power of CityGrid with OrangeSoda's platform, every small business in America now has access to a one-stop local advertising solution with SEO strategies and tactics that historically required a large dedicated team of experts."

"Every search engine has introduced local directory listings prominently in their organic search results and this has given small businesses another way to get featured in the search engine results real estate," said Jay Bean, CEO of OrangeSoda. "For over 15 years, Citysearch has helped small businesses gain exposure on other websites, and now they want to help small businesses gain better exposure through organic search results. By bundling our expertise and tool set with CityGrid, we are offering small businesses a revolutionary local online advertising package that no other company offers."

OraneSoda has provided SEO services to brands like International Truck, Remax, and Jiffy Lube.

Google Checkout Gift Messaging Gets Some Changes

Google Checkout's Advanced Buyer Messaging (gift messaging) feature has been taken out of beta. This feature, which was released over a year ago lets Google Checkout customers add gift messages, add additional instructions, and request gift receipts.

The new beta-less version of the feature comes with a few changes. Google explains, "Based on user feedback, we have streamlined the number of tags making the feature more straightforward to use. We will support only the gift-message, include-gift-receipt and special-instructions tags going forward."



Users who are currently using any of the old tags can continue to do that, but Google wants users to switch to one of the supported tags. "If you haven't used the Advanced Buyer Functionality yet, we encourage you to explore how these features may be able to improve your customer experience," the company tells users.

There is an extensive explanation about how to use the Advanced Buyer Messaging feature of Google Checkout on this page. It covers messaging options, gift messages and special instructions, gift receipts, and HTML tag definitions.

On a semi-related note, Google has reportedly hired an eBay veteran to fill its vice president of commerce position. Stephanie Tilenius would presumably oversee Google Checkout.

Google: “Buzz Will Be Just Another Node”

When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you'll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."

What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.

"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."

Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:

- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google's Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.

Old Version of AdWords API Nears Expiration Date

Update: Google is reminding users of the AdWords API that on April 22, most of the services related to v13 will be turned off.

Google is telling users to switch to v200909 as soon as possible to avoid any complications.

Original Article: Google has launched the newest version of the AdWords API v2009 beta. That would be version 200909. Google cites the following as the highlights of the new API:

- Asynchronous calls - Asynchronous calls allow you to work with large sets of data faster and more easily. Instead of having to wait for our system to fully complete your request before you can make another one, you’re now able to make another call as soon as the API service confirms that it has received your previous call. No more waiting for the server to complete large requests. V200909 will continue to support Synchronous methods as well.

- Keyword and placement ideas - With the new TargetingIdeaService, you'll be able to get keyword and placement ideas through the API, leveraging the functionality of the search-based keyword tool.

- Location Extensions preview - Limited location extensions functionality is now available as a preview of the full functionality in development.

These are just the highlights. Google has a complete list of all of the new features in its release notes.

The company says that over the next few months, it will continue to introduce new features and additional AdWords functionality. New features will include ReportService, AccountService and the ability to pre-check for errors.

"Given that v2009 introduces new concepts and features, we have extended the sunset period for deprecated services to 6 months," Google says. "If you haven't already begun migrating your systems to the v2009 API, we strongly encourage you to start right away."

v13 services CampaignService, AdGroupService, CriterionService, AdService, InfoService, KeywordToolService, and SiteSuggestionService will sunset on April 22, 2010. Other v13 service sunset dates will be announced in due time.

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