Move Number One:

We’ve been waiting for some time for Google to integrate Facebook updates in Google search results, and they’ve announced that the time is finally here. Well, kind of. Because Google doesn’t own Facebook (yet), they’re at the mercy of what Facebook will allow to be indexed, so for now, results from Pages are what show rather than all status updates from personal profiles.

This is certainly incentive to focus on your business pages, and it is praised by some for cutting through the noise. For those providing value and discussing their neighborhood, their practice, and educating consumers in general, they will be rewarded with Google traffic whereas people with pages that are focused on themselves and their drinking escapades will not see that traffic because consumers don’t search for “Bill Jackson went golfing while drunk today,” rather “buying a foreclosure home in Las Vegas.” Content finally matters for more reasons than just the principle of the matter.

Move Number Two:

Google has acquired Picnik, which is a free web based application for editing images. In fact, most of the photos that appear here on AG are edited with Picnik which traditionally is tied to photo sharing site, Flickr.

Google stated they will not sever any relationships with current Picnik partners (like Flickr, owned by Yahoo!) and emphasize the brilliance of photo editing in the cloud. We suspect that Picasa which has been massively overshadowed by Flickr needed some sort of injection, so this is Google’s play to take back that market share in the photo sharing sector, so we look forward to seeing what they do with the tool that we love so much.

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