The original social networking site, Friendster, has dumped Yahoo’s search and advertising services in favor of a new deal with Google. Friendster has been struggling to rebuild itself, and has fallen far behind MySpace and Facebook in membership and visits.

Some of the researchers behind the now closed Google Answers have launched a new question and answer site. Uclue.com is in beta and requires payment for answers from their researchers.

Yahoo executives told an investor conference that the work they did through 2006 has fixed the company. They have been seeing improved relevance from the new Panama ad system, which has led to better results for advertisers and for Yahoo.

France has banned anyone but professional journalists from filming or publishing violent acts. Citizen journalists who record incidents could face jail time. The proposed law is part of a clamp down on violence and people who film it for their amusement.

The RSA security conference in San Francisco suffered a moment of irony, thanks to Oracle C-E-O Larry Ellison. He had been scheduled to give a keynote address at RSA, and that would have been his first ever keynote speech at the conference. But instead of Ellison taking the stage, another Oracle executive stepped up to the microphone to explain why the C-E-O could not be there. He had caught a flu virus. Shouldn’t he have gone to RSA anyway? There would have been some anti-virus researchers in the audience, right?

There’s a reason why people at Digg and other socially oriented sites hate S-E-O’s. Muhammad Saleem at Pronet Advertising found a video by a guy giving advice on optimizing one’s website, and the video is so cheesy and creepy that it makes you understand why Digg hates S-E-O so much. Jason Calacanis has called ninety percent of the S-E-O market “snake oil salesmen” and videos like this one just make his point for him. Said Jason:

“Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as Digg and Google close the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.”

Mark Cuban wants you to upload your porn videos to YouTube! He claims it is quite coincidental that somehow YouTube somehow can keep porn and hate videos off of their servers but not copyrighted clips from TV. Cuban comments in his blog … “Is there anyone out there who really believes that the Google and Youtube “communities” scans all 60 thousdan daily uploads to protect those that might be offended by a nipple flash or two ?”

He claims it must be done by a sophisticated Google algorithm … and if they can stop porn they could eliminate copyrighted videos before they appear ed on YouTube. So Mark Cuban has issued this challenge…. “Everyone should upload their personal porn collection to Youtube and see what happens.” Of course, that assumes you have a personal porn collection … I don’t!

Florian Reichling at SEM Punch lost her Yahoo Panama account and they don’t know where to find it. When she noticed that her ads were conspicuously absent, she got a hold of Yahoo technical support, and her day didn’t get any better.

Reichling says: “It turns out a system glitch due to a bulk submission I’ve made turned off the account, but now comes the best – Customer support cannot turn the account back on.”

The complaint cited by Florian Reichling is actually false according to Yahoo. We’ve had several conversations with this client and have informed them multiple times by phone and email that the account was turned offline because of keyword spamming… it has nothing whatsoever to do with Panama or the bulk upload tool at all. Once an account is turned offline for keyword spamming, it is no longer available to the client, but they are allowed to create a new account and add keywords appropriately. Reichling was provided the opportunity to open a new account, but declined.

Our reps have made every effort to make it crystal clear to this customer that the issue had nothing to do with our new system or import tool but rather due to the lack of quality with his keywords, which were not tied to any content. This is standard procedure for handling advertisers who spam our system.

Thanks to some help from the crew at Search Marketing Gurus, Florian received a quick fix. First, you have to take a shot and pray. Second, remove all campaign negatives from the bulk upload file, because Yahoo doesn’t understand those yet. Third remove the CSV file and upload at will. Take another shot and pray Yahoo figures out their own system.

Do you love your iPod? Did you know that it could kill you? I’ve heard some pretty bad music on some people’s playlists, but nothing I thought was lethal. But a state Senator in New York thinks it’s time to ban people from using iPods, cellphones, Blackberries, and any other gadget while crossing the street. Violators would be fined one hundred dollars. How would they enforce this if fifty people cross a busy street in Manhattan and they’ve all got iPods? Half the city would be standing around on corners waiting for a cop to write them each a ticket. At least they wouldn’t be stepping in front of an oncoming bus because they were paying more attention to Britney Spears.

Mona pointed out obvious improvement, such as a redesigned (much more intuitive) interface, convergence of feature sets (geo-targetting, etc) into one application and improved metrics.

After having had a couple more months of testing, she now spoke with even more enthusiasm for Panama’s evolution from the previous system.

“The forecasting tools which were incorporated into Panama are excellent. They’re very granular, they give you a lot of information. Specifically, the tool will show you the percentage of missed clicks. If you bid a dollar, and the dollar got you 25 % of the traffic, the tool will tell you, ‘You’re missing out on 75% of the traffic, you may want to increase your bid.’”

Once again, touting campaign groups and monitoring additions, Mona points out that Panama also allows for rapid campaign deployment.

“Fast Ad Activation puts ads up on the entire network… in about five minutes.”

Currently, AdWords won’t run ads on the entire advertising network until a lengthy approval process has been satisfied… giving Panama advantage in this arena.

Once Yahoo! is out of the migration process and new advertisers are allowed to employ Panama, we’ll be waiting anxiously. Perhaps the delay will give Mona time to draft a new book?

With Panama, users can expect a sleeker, more intuitive interface with which to interact. The software has been completely revamped not only in terms of functionality, but also enriched to decrease the learning curve so that advertisers can quickly familiarize themselves with the major features and subtle nuances of the platform. Panama also integrates previously separate features, such as geo-targeting, into a single application to provide a more centralized element of control for the user.

Another feature that Mona touts about the new platform is the increased metrical/analytical functionality built into the Search Optimizer tool. A major component of Search Optimizer is a feature called The Assist, which acts as a keyword pathing mechanism to provide advertisers with a broader picture of user behavior and the keyword chain that leads to conversions, rather that merely looking at the last keyword before the conversion.

To learn more about Mona Elesseily and the Unauthorized Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook, visit Page Zero Media‘s site devoted to the search marketing platform. Mona will also be presenting at next week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.