Teens Use Facebook To Improve Existing Friendships

While parents often have concerns about allowing their teens to use social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, a new study by University of Virginia psychologists indicates that well-adjusted youth with positive friendships use these sites to improve the positive relationships they already have.

However, they cautioned teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more likely to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways.

"We were interested to find that the best-adjusted young people were far more likely to use social media as an extension of their positive friendships, while less socially adept youth either did not have Facebook or MySpace pages, or, if they did, were more likely to use these sites in less-than-positive ways," said U.Va. psychology professor Amori Yee Mikami, the study's lead author.

The researchers assessed the friendship quality and popularity of 172 13-to 14-year olds, and then eight years later, "friended" the study participants on their Facebook and MySpace pages to examine their interactions and friendship quality.

"It was like being a fly on the wall at a slumber party," Mikami said.

She found that those who were better adjusted in their early teens were more likely to use social media in their early 20s, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or parental income, and that overall, the patterns of friendship quality and behavioral adjustment as early teens continued into early adulthood.

"We're finding that the interactions young adults are having on their Facebook and MySpace pages are more similar to than different from the interactions they have in their face-to-face relationships," Mikami said.

"So parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media. It's likely to be similar positive behavior."

Overall, 86 percent of the youths in Mikami's study used social media Web sites, which parallels the national average, she said.

"Use of Facebook and MySpace is really pervasive among this age group, so it's understandable that young people would want to be connected with their peers in this way; it's an extension of the relationships they already share," Mikami said.

"So parents should try to stay involved with their children and make an attempt to understand their online world in the same way they would want to understand any other aspect of their lives."
 

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Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google's results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site's breadcrumbs show up in Google's results? Comment here.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don't give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don't get with regular search results.

Google's move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It's definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of 'providing context', because the web is heading into its "semantic" period ... where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google's use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google's Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site's hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before...for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn't like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we've changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you're familiar with). So we've iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site's hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn't exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google's original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I'd go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Update: In the comments, one reader says:

My site breadcrumb is seperated by |. Somehow, Google seems to put the > character in of their own accord. I've seen many results with breadcrumbs in the SERPS, and I havn't seen any with a seperating character other than >. I do think Google puts in the > character regardless of your site's seperating delimiter.

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

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Google Narrows Down Mobile Ad Targeting

Google announced that it is now making sure that ads linking to mobile app downloads automatically appear only on devices that actually offer those apps. In addition, the ads will display a "download" link rather than a URL.

"Simply include 'itunes.apple.com/' or 'market.android.com/' followed by the app name in the ad's visible URL, and it will automatically display as 'Download iPhone App' or 'Download Android App,'" says Katrina Kurnit of Google's Inside AdWords crew.

Advertisers also have the option to select specific devices or carriers for their ads in general.

"If you've chosen to show ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers, you can now target specific mobile devices or carriers," says Kurnit. "This feature makes it easier for you to reach the right users if you have a carrier- or device-specific message. This includes landing pages that have been optimized for a specific device, billing relationships with certain carriers, or mobile apps developed for a specific platform. For example, if you sell iPhone cases, you can use device targeting to ensure that users with Android phones won't see your ads."



Mobile Internet usage is expected to continue to increase rapidly. That means a lot of people using a lot of different mobile devices through multiple carriers. Google's new targeting options could become increasingly important in getting your ads seen by the right people, depending on what you are advertising.


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Baidu Readying Mobile App

All sorts of corporations and individuals have agreed that the mobile market is key in China; many more people can afford Internet-enabled phones than PCs.  Baidu may be onto something, then, as it intends to have an app loaded onto phones before they're made available for sale.

If Baidu can get a solid mobile app in front of a lot of people right from the start, it'll decrease the odds of them ever turning to Google.  Given how Baidu's doing so well in terms of desktop market share, it might even win converts.

And Baidu Palm, as the application's known, should be plenty useful.  Owen Fletcher reported that, even in beta, it "hooks users into its search, message board and question-and-answer online services.  It also has a new quick-upload feature for pictures taken with a phone."

Another point in Baidu's favor: things are looking pretty good on the distribution side.  Although no deals have been announced, Baidu's already known to have relationships with a number of communications companies, including China Telecom and China Unicom.

It seems that we'll soon see another big salvo in the Google-Baidu war, then.  Don't count on Google taking too long to respond.

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