As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Facebook acquired photo-sharing application Instagram for an astonishing $1 billion dollars in cash and stock this morning. The social Web was abuzz with excitement, but also much confusion. One billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a company that generates no revenue.

But there’s a lot that Instagram offers Facebook. For starters, Facebook was said to be working on its own photo-sharing app. Instagram offers them an excellent platform with an active user base. Then, there’s the defensive benefits. Google was also said to be interested, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was an angel investor of the start-up.

But there’s one more advantage that Instagram offers Facebook, that could be far more lucrative than the rest. It’s not so far fetched to think Facebook could serve ads on Instagram at some point. This acquisition just delivered Zuckerberg an extra 30+ million potential ad viewers. That’s not a small figure for a company hoping to trump Google in the $2 billion mobile ad space.

I suppose only time will tell what Facebook’s true intentions are with Instagram (and I’m fairly certain Zuckerberg will take as much time as he needs). But all in all this looks like a very good deal for both sides. Congratulations to Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom.

TheNextWeb reported today that Google plans to launch a third-party commenting platform to rival Facebook’s. In recent years, many sites have adopted Facebook’s commenting platform, hoping to take advantage of the company’s Open Graph data push. 

The Google comment system, which will almost certainly rival that of Facebook, will have deep links to Google’s network of services and websites, indexing comments in Google Search, and most significantly, the system will be available for use on third party sites.

This is likely an effort to draw Web users one step closer to Google+, but that won’t be must of a perk to site managers. Indexing comments in Google Search, however, could provide publishers more opportunities to surface in search results. Will be interesting to observe early adoption of Google’s comment platform. My company uses Disqus, which I’m generally very happy with. 

Amid slow adoption, and the loss to two managers, Google is rethinking its strategy for mobile payment system Google Wallet, reports Bloomberg News. The company is considering a revenue-share program with Verizon and AT&T to encourage the two carriers to embrace the technology.

Google hopes the payment system will become a goldmine for the company’s display ad business — targeting ads, promotions, and coupons at consumers, based on their shopping preferences. The carriers, too, see the monetary potential in maintain control of the business, and are working the ISS system. In December, Google claimed Verizon was blocking consumers from downloading Google Wallet on their phones.

Google plans to give its Web-search formula a bit of a face lift. In addition to displaying the traditional list of URLs, the search engine will begin to surface more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of top of the search results. 

The change will make Google search more closely aligned with “how humans understand the world,” Amit Singhal, a top Google search exec, told WSJ.

While this move will likely present Google with new real estate on which to serve search ads (which currently generates $37 billion in annual revenue for the company), it will be interesting to see how this shift will affect SEO strategy for indexed companies. It will also be interesting to examine those companies’ click-through-rates, as users will begin to see more answers on the search page, itself. 

How Facebook Will Put Google Out of Business

A fascinating study of how Social Search may one day put Google out of business.

Anyone that has published a website knows how frustrating it can be optimize your sight for Search Engine relevance. This feat has been particularly tough, because until today many of the largest Search Engines and Indexes has used different criteria to rank pages.

At last, the major players - Google, Yahoo, and Bing - have announced a major move in the right direction. Today, the three companies collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners to gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site will provide a standardized collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize and display their sites.

For more info, here is Schema’s description of the tool: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

TechCrunch has just reported that Google’s +1 Button for websites will launch tomorrow. The news was prematurely leaked by the PR firm representing Clearsping, Google’s partner in the venture.

“The +1 button is designed to help publisher’s content stand out in search results by giving users the ability to +1 content. The more chances users get to +1 content, the more likely publishers’ URLs are to show up in search results with +1 annotations. This helps users highlight which results are most useful and helps publishers better engage with their audience”

The arrival of the button is potentially big news for publishers, as it can potentially alter the way Google search results will be served.

We’ve all seen those awful “Roast of…” specials on Comedy Central. Well College Humor decided to take the concept digital with this “Roast of Facebook.” Familiar voices include:  Gilbert Gottfried (as Twitter), Penn Jillette (as Google) and Lisa Lampanelli (FourSquare).

Bloomberg reported last night that Apple, the largest U.S. music retailer, has reached agreements with three major record labels (Universal, Sony and EMI) to let users access song collections from mobile devices, via the Web.

The iTunes Cloud Server will allow users to store their music on the the Apple Server, rather than loading songs on the device’s memory. Additionally, unlike the Amazon and Google cloud ventures, which preceded Apple’s announcement, the Apple server will not require users to upload music online to the “cloud.”

The “iCloud” server is a sage move for Apple, who is facing increasing competition from Google’s Android phone. Similarly record labels are hoping to jump-start sales, after millions of users have flocked to internet radio services like Pandora and Groove Shark. 

Sources report that the server could be officially announced as early as Apple’s developers conference, which kicks off on June 6.