See for example bbpctv.com, its sign up page diplays a “Login quicker” option with Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

If you have a facebook, google, or yahoo account, then you don’t need to register to bbpctv.com. For example, if you have a Facebook account,  just click in the button login with Facebook, and a login facebook page will popup:

After you login another page will ask you, if you accept to share your email information with www.bbpctv.com.

After you agree to share your email, you will be login to www.bbpctv.com using your email registered in facebook. That’s it. Next time you want to login to ww.bbpctv.com, there will not be popup windows.

The OAuth suppose to be a generic standard with the same implementation across different web sites. Even though, there are some differences in the implementation of OAuth.

The following is the links of the official documentation for the implementation of OAuth in your web site.

Facebook Developer Information: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/

Google Developer Information: http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth2.html

Yahoo Developer Information: http://developer.yahoo.com/oauth/guide/

Twitter also supports OAuth. Event though, twitter does not allow to share the email as Facebook, Google or Yahoo do. The email is the unique identifier that can be used to record the user. Because of that, this web site only allow Facebook, Google, and Yahoo users to login and Twitter is not included here. When Twitter decides to allow users to share their Twitter registration email, then Twitter will be included in OAuth capable web sites to login bbpctv.com.

Google Plus button with counter:

Facebook button with counter:

Twitter button with counter:

I use Firebug to do a comparison of the download time of the files associated with the Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter counters.

Facebook downloads 4 files with total size of 115.4KB, meanwhile GooglePlus downloads 99.8KB in 6 files and lastly Twitter downloads 19.9KB in files. Some files are being download in parallel so it takes less time.

One of the Twitter files takes the longest to download, 1.71 seconds. The longest for Facebook takes 715 miliseconds, and Google Plus takes 329 miliseconds.

These numbers explain the order how they appear in the browser. Let me know if you have a way to improve the performance of these counters, for now I’m removing the counters from my web sites.

The formula is actually pretty easy. It is a multiplication of three factors:

Web Site Value ($)  = V x M x F

V = Monthly Unique Visitors, which is not the same as number of visits. If your are using Google Analytics you can easely find this number for you web site.

M = Average Minutes spent in each visit. It is also found in Google Analytics.

F = This is the factor used for Wall Street Analyst to appraise the value of the web site.

Now, we know the theory, lets apply this to formula to LinkedIn, with a current value of 6.5 Billion dollars in the stock market, According to comScore, 92 million unique visitors hit LinkedIn’s site world-wide in October and spent an average of 15 minutes on the site. We do the math and we get a LinkedIn Factor of 4.7101449.

$6,500,000.00 = 92,000,000 x 15 x 4.7101449

Now, let’s do the same for Facebook, valuated as the Wall Street Journal states in 100 Billion dollars. Facebook had 790 million unique visitors who spent more than six hours on the social network. The Facebook valuation factor is 0.35161744.

$100,000,000,000.00 = 790,000,000 x 360 x 0.35161744

Those are big numbers. Now let’s try it in one of our web sites with only 10,000 monthly unique visits and a average visit time of 5 minutes.

LinkedIn Formula = V  x M x 4.7101449 = 20,000.00 x 7 x 4.7101449 = $659,542.00

Facebook Formula = V  x M x 0.35161744 =20,000.00 x 7 x 0.35161744 = $49,226.00

If I use the LinkedIn formula to sell my web site, I will get more than a half million dollars, instead using Facebook formula the value will be only 50K.

Really? How about adding other web sit s I own and I am would be a millionaire.

You might want to do this calculations for your web site. We created a gadget that you can add to your web site to calculate these formulas for you web site.

The links of the gadget is:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105899732871539083845/Your-web-site-value.xml

If you have a WordPress web site you can also add this gadget. See: http://www.optimumclick.com/how-to-add-a-google-gadget-to-a-widget-in-wordpress/

A Google Gadget is also a piece of reusable HTML and you are able to add to your web site by copy and paste the HTML code, which uses the Google API. If you know how to edit HTML in you WordPress web site, then it will be a piece of cake to insert a Google Gadget Code. If you are more comfortable with Plugins you can install a plug in called: Widgetize Google Gadgets.

Once you install the Widgetize Google Gadgets plugin, your wordpress web site will include a widget with a link where you can go to the Google Gadget Directory.

In the Google Gadget Directory , you can browse thousand of gadgets. Once you select your favorite gadget, you can configure some settings, like the background, before generate the Google Gadget code.

Copy the Code from the Google Gadget to WordPress  ( Widgetize Google Gadgets Widget), save it and that’s it.

Now your wordpress web site display a Google Gadget.

https://plus.google.com/115668965316147334355

Google also gives you a badge linked to the same URL.

What about if you want to use shorter and more friendly URL than the one provided by Google?

I need a URL that can be easy to remember, so I can type it automatically without think about it.

The ideal would be something like this:

http://plus.google.com/optimumclick

or

http://plus.google.com/[[your domain]]

Even though this option is not allowed for google pages, it only allowed for google plus profile accounts. I’m not sure if Google will offer the feature to customize the Google page URL in the future, like Twitter and Facebook offer. Anyways, Google Plus has a search box where you can find your page by the domain or page name in the search box.

Some people recommend creating a Google plus account instead for your business. Even though the visitor will have to navigate from your Google plus profile to the Google plus page. Also, How about if you need multiple google plus page for multiple business, then I would have to create multiple Google plus accounts? This solution is not good. I want to create multiple google plus pages from my unique google plus profile. Besides Google says the Google plus account profiles are not for business. If you are a business you should use the Google Pages instead.

There are also people recommending some redirect web services to achieve a short and friendly URL like ShortURL or TinyURL. I do not recommend this because you will have to rely to a third party domains to link to your google plus page. This can even damage your organic search engine optimization by not having direct links to your google plus page.

Finally, my solution is simple and easy to implement. If you have a google plus page, then just create a redirect link with the following format:

[[your domain.com]]/googleplus

in my case, it will be:

http://www.optimumclick.com/googleplus

Easy to remember because is your web site with the “googleplus” word included.

Redirecting is easy in IIS or Apache. If you are using WordPress, I recommend you to use add the Redirection plug in to your WordPress web site.

install plugin redirection

It easy to configure as it shown below:

Source URL: /googleplus

Target URL: https://plus.google.com/115668965316147334355

After configure the Redirection Plugin, you can use the link: Google Plus or you can type directly in your browser:

www.optimumclick.com/googleplus

Now you know the most memorable link or URL to go to your google plus page is your [[your domain]]/googleplus

Will this link be the standard to link to all google pages? I think so, unless Google change this link or it allow users to custom the Google plus page URL.

You do not need to develop a native Iphone App or Android App to expose your website to mobile devices. Your web site can be browsed in the Iphone through the Safari Mobile browser or the Android browser. Even though your web site might be displayed in a very small size and the user will need to zoom out and scroll your web site to be able to read it in small pieces.

Take a look at the next screen shot and compare the same web site i two modes: not optimize and optimize for mobile devices.

This Web Site Not optimized to be displayed in the Iphone:

The same web Site optimized to be displayed in the Iphone:

Notice that in the mobile version the user will not need to zoom out the screen or scroll horizontally. Also the content, ads, menus have to be optimized for mobile, since the screen space in mobile devices is limited to a reduce resolution.

How we can optimize a web site for mobile devices? There is not need to develop a native Iphone App or Android App. You can use HTML 5 to optimize your web site for mobile devices.

HTML5 is a standard HTML and it includes special tags or instructions available for mobile browsers. HTML 5 in combination of CSS can produce a nice mobile formatted web page using the same page you use for desktop browsers, so you can avoid having to maintain another set of pages for mobile applications.

Once you have your web site optimized for mobile phones, you can submit your web site to Apple, without any charge nor paid membership:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/

HTML5 will work for most mobile browsers, so when I should write a native app instead of a web app?

You should write a native app, only when you need features not easily accessible from the browser, like GPS, motion effects for games, etc.

First you have to sign up using this link:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher

After that you'll receive an invitation E-mail to be able to join to the Microsoft AdCenter Publisher Beta:

https://beta.pubcenter.microsoft.com/

The Terms and Conditions Agreement indicates the following:

CONFIDENTIALITY.  The Service, including its user interface (including reporting interface),
features, performance (e.g., click-through rates, eCPM, or other performance statistics provided to you
by Microsoft) and documentation, is confidential and proprietary to Microsoft and its suppliers. 

 As Adsense Programs, I can not reveal CTR, eCPM, or other statistics. But Adsense allows you to reveal your earnings, so I will share some information with you.

  I am surprise by the excelent job Microsoft did in the adCenter Publisher. It was so easy to configure and setup ads. It was very similar to Adsense, the way you can configure sizes, colors, channel, competitive filters, etc. 

There is an option to save your ads as a template, so you do not have to start from the scratch every time you need to setup an ad for your web sites.

I use to test the ads in a localhost web site before publish the ads to the real web site, while this localhost testing works fine in AdSense, AdCenter Publisher does not deliver ads in the localhost testing web site. I had to publish the ads in the production web site to be able to see the ads without testing.

The ads started to display immediately, even though the relevance of the ads related to the web site theme was disappointed. The web site www.bbpctv.com is a TV guide to watch Television shows online, and most of the web pages have a title like "Watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars Online" for example, and this title is also in the meta tags of the web pages. Instead of receiving TV related ads as expected, I started to receive ads like "Men's Watches", "Luxury Watches", etc as you can see below.

 
I also notice that no ads images were delivered to my web site.

 Having this kind of ads, it is not difficult to predict the conversions or Click-through rate the will provide. Obviously compared with Adsense CTR, the Microsoft AdCenter CTR collapsed. But the few clicks I received produced a revenue per click higher than the average adsense revenue per click for this niche.

Microsoft is just starting with this AdCenter and the application is fantastic, but the ads delivery needs some extra work in the relevance related with the publisher's web site. You have to understand also that Microsoft does not have the Google Ads inventory yet, so they will deliver a limited inventory of ads available to my web site. Another reason for the ads delivered to my web site could be simply that my niche does not have enough relevance in the MS AdCenter Publisher Beta. This does not mean that other niches Microsoft will perform the same. 

Actually, I'm looking forward to test AdCenter Publisher in other of my web sites, but for now I getting back Adsense in bbpctv.com.