Google's Nexus One is being promoted on a piece of prime online search real estate that no advertiser normally has access to. U.S. users going to Google.com today can see a promotion for Nexus One right underneath the search box. Next to a tiny icon of the phone, are the words, "Experience Nexus One, the new Android phone from Google."

The placement is significant, as many analysts have had doubts about Google's ability to sell many units of the Nexus online. Today, most Americans buy their phones directly from carriers. The carriers spend millions to advertise the phones in TV, radio and newspaper ads. Google, meanwhile, announced it will promote Nexus One online only.

If, however, Nexus One gets promoted on the Google.com page, that could be more effective that even the TV ads in driving traffic to the new Google phone store. The page accounts for more than 71% of all U.S. online searches, according to consultant Hitwise. Several hundred million people access Google properties daily. If even a small percentage of them checks Nexus One out and buys the device, Google could beat all cell-phone sales records.

More people are accessing Wi-Fi hotspots at cafes and airports via handheld devices, according to a new study from In-Stat. While, last year, devices like smartphones accounted for 20% of total connects to Wi-Fi hotspots, in 2009 that number jumped to 35%. And by 2011, smartphones should account for half of hotspot connects -- and challenge laptops' dominance of Wi-Fi hotspots, In-Stat estimates.

It's clear why this is happening: More smartphones feature built-in Wi-Fi capabilities. More carriers are promoting these features. More places, such as bookseller Borders, have recently made Wi-Fi access available for free. All that is contributing to increased use of hotspots with all devices. Hotspot usage has increased by 47%, to 1.2 billion connects in 2009, In-Stat estimates.

The findings may also indicate that people increasingly use their smartphones to do many of the things they used to reserve for their netbooks and laptops. The handsets are now larger than they were only several years ago, with easier-to-use keyboards and screens. So consumers increasingly find they can use them for everything from surfing the Web to typing e-mails to gaming. When tablets debut some time next year, they could further accelerate this shift from laptops and netbooks to handheld devices.

Early this morning, Google is launching a new feature that lets you view what data is being stored on a range of Google services. Google Dashboard also will let you control at least some of that data and how it's used by Google and even delete it.

Dashboard provides a summary of the data in Google products you use while signed in (if you're not signed in, that data isn't associated with you). For now, Dashboard aggregates Gmail, the photo service Picasa, Calendar, Google Docs, Alerts, YouTube, Web history, and some others. As early as next week, Google will start adding more services, such as Checkout, Google Groups, and SideWiki.

Google says Dashboard wasn't prompted by rising concerns about corporate use of people's data. But I don't doubt that Dashboard is intended to blunt complaints that Google collects so much data. In fact, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for trust and safety, made a point of telling me that the company had briefed some regulators around the world on Dashboard.

Before television there was radio. Before radio there were books. And before books there were storytellers. No matter what the medium–stone tablets, movies, grocery store tabloids, the internet–the story is central.

A good story stays with people and compels them to share it with others. It’s as true today as it was 2000 years ago–and it’s especially true of success stories. Everyone likes to hear them; everyone likes to have one. Do you see how this aligns perfectly with word-of-mouth marketing, where referrals are based on thousands of individual success stories? You see, every time one networker passes a referral to another, she is telling a story about a need fulfilled successfully or a problem solved effectively.

You can empower your network by writing down success stories about your business so that they won’t be forgotten and they can be told to other people. You also want to encourage your networking partners to swap stories with you so you can each keep the stories on file and use them to help find and refer great business opportunities to each other.

The key is to capture a truly compelling story–one that practically begs to be shared, one that the people in your network would actually have trouble keeping to themselves. The anatomy of a successful word-of-mouth story about your business is quite simple. It has a captivating beginning, an action-packed middle and a happy ending (and, conveniently, it will in most cases naturally outline for your referral partners what your perfect customer looks like). If you’re expecting other people to act on your story and share it, it must be a compelling story–and must have a positive outcome.

Chances are you have several great success stories about your business but, if not several, I’m sure you have at least one. So to start with, I’d like to challenge you to write down your business’s most compelling success story, ask at least one person on your word-of-mouth marketing team to do the same, and then share your stories with each other.

The more stories you share with other people, the more high-quality referrals you’ll get and the more success stories you’ll generate as you continue to network your business.

A year ago, most U.S. ebook publishers predicted a bright future for ebook reading on mobile phones -- in other countries. The going assumption had been that, in the U.S., people will buy special ebook readers, like the Amazon Kindle, instead, while mobile ebooks will become a hit in emerging markets, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, where people don't have the money to buy specialized devices. Well, it looks like the publishers had been wrong.

According to Oct. 27 report from Wattpad, the maker of the world's most popular software for ebook reading on mobile phones, the "US replaced Indonesia as the leading country in mobile ebook consumption in [the third] quarter."

What gives? Apparently, ebook reading is super-popular on the Apple iPhone, and neither Indonesia nor Vietnam offer the device, according to Wattpad. "In the non-iPhone market, Indonesia and Vietnam together contribute to more than two third of the market," according to the report. Currently, iPhone owners consume 42.1% of all mobile ebooks served up via Wattpad, which tracks ebook usage in 160 countries. And 78% of all iPhone ebook usage comes from North America.

Today, blogs tracker Technorati released a new report on the state of blogging, and it appears that a respectable number of bloggers out there manage to eke out a living.

According to a survey of 2,828 bloggers nationwide, 13% of the respondents do blogging full time. Another 15% blog to supplement their income. Basically, 28% of the people who blog get paid for it -- which is a staggering number, if you think about it. Every fourth blogger out there is getting paid for promoting brands or driving new leads to their businesses. That -- at a time when most advertising- and marketing-dependent businesses, such as traditional media, suffer. Clearly, bloggers are doing something right.

People who criticize companies like Microsoft and Apple for pursuing their own de facto standards instead of working through formal standards bodies might consider the long, strange history of Wi-Fi. The IEEE has finally ratified the latest longer range, higher speed version of the wireless standard. The move came seven years after the process began and more than two years after an all-but-final draft was approved and companies started deploying 802.11n gear.

In fact, Wi-Fi has succeeded, and has improved steadily, only because hardware and software companies have regularly given up of the pokey IEEE standards-setting process and have forged ahead on their own. There have been occasional issues of incompatibility, but it has been better than the alternative of waiting forever.

Apple and Lucent launched Wi-Fi products back in the 1990s before the IEEE ratified the original 802.11b standard. Even the Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade group more conservative than the hardware makers, has certified new standards long before the IEEE formally adopted them.

It's impossible to tell from the anecdotal reports showing up here and in other forums just how serious Snow Leopard compatibility problems are. My gut feeling is that they are widespread but not pervasive, certainly nothing like the problems people had upgrading from Windows XP to Vista. Still, in reflecting on the reports, I think there are three things Apple should have done differently.

• Apple should have provided a pre-upgrade compatibility checker like the one Microsoft offers for Win 7. This would have allowed people to find out what wouldn't work and then make a choice whether they wanted to upgrade or wait.
• Apple needed a public beta with a release candidate to detect the sort of problems that are turning up now but apparently did not show up in the tightly controlled betas.
• Apple did not give third-party software and hardware vendors enough time with the final code before general availability. Microsoft released Windows 7 to manufacturing at the end of July with general availability on Oct. 22. Apple sent out final code about week before Snow Leopard went on sale. Microsoft has been using this period as a sort of extended beta; setting up a new Win 7 machine today with the gold master code, I discovered that there were already three updates available. I didn't check what they were, but my guess is either bug fixes or new drivers.

Snow Leopard is a great product, but an ambitious one; the relatively unchanged user interface belies a major revision of the underlying code. A little more testing would have been a good idea.

Starting on Sept. 6, AT&T will require all new smartphone users to subscribe to the carrier's wireless data plans, the company confirms to BusinessWeek.com.

Today, some of AT&T's smartphone customers can chose not to buy a data plan, or they can subscribe to MEdia Net, a cheaper service that offers wireless e-mail and news access for as little as $2 per Megabyte. Currently, AT&T's data plans range from $5 to $60 a month.

While I suspect that most people who buy smartphones subscribe to data plans already, there's probably a hefty percentage that get smartphones for voice calls and good looks. They figure they might use them for data later. That's the category of users AT&T is now hoping to rope into buying more services. And the move likely means increases in data revenues for the carrier -- and slower sales growth for smartphone vendors.

Heavier monthly charges could deter some people from buying smartphones. For AT&T, that's no great loss. The carrier spends a lot of money on subsidizing handsets so consumers get them at a lower price; and those subsidies may not pay off when expensive, feature-rich smartphones are not being used for data services, as intended.

The move, which is likely to be copied by other U.S. carriers, could slow down smartphone sales, however. So far this year, handset makers Apple, Research in Motion and others have booked double-digit revenue growth on smartphone sales. Well, that sales growth should come down as service plan prices go up, and consumers that only want the handsets for voice may opt for a cheaper option: a feature phone.

As more baby boomers take to the world's most popular social network, the average age of Facebook users has risen steadily. But the site's bread and butter, kids in college and high school, haven't gone anywhere. Have they?

On Monday, iStrategyLabs posted numbers Facebook supplies to advertisers which show a decline in members identified as high school and college students from January to July. The 16.5% drop in high schoolers and 21.7% drop in college students appear particularly surprising, because they coincide with a 513.7% rise in users age 55 and older.

But before everyone goes searching for the new cool site where all these young people are flocking, I suggest looking at what these numbers really represent. They are not survey-based -- no one asked Facebook users whether they're in school. Rather, the data is based on which Facebook users choose to identify the school they attend on their profile pages.

And what happened between January and July? Millions of young people graduated from school, giving them reason to drop online affiliations with their alma maters accordingly.

Graduation alone might not explain the drop. Perhaps because of increased concern over privacy issues in the past year, many users may simply be choosing not to identify themselves with specific schools. These "networks" which were so instrumental to the site in its early days (when you had to belong to a particular to school to even join) are losing relevance as more of the general public enters Facebook and people cross-pollinate with many different groups. The company itself decided to place less emphasis on networks in June, when it announced it would be eliminating geographic networks from the site altogether.

Facebook today introduced a test of new ways for its members to set and adjust their privacy settings for any piece of content they post on the site. The changes follow the recent announcement of new settings for publishing content that allow you to choose to post items that everyone, not just your friends, can see. Many see both moves in part as Facebook's attempt to blunt the rapid rise of microblogging service Twitter.

The changes, which will be tested with 40,000 members in the U.S. in the next week and around the world the week after that, don't add a lot of new options so much as make them simpler to access and set. Facebook hopes the new system, which consolidates 40 different settings on six separate pages, will encourage people to become more comfortable with posting items as freely as they do on Twitter and other services.

The gist is this: You will be able to go to one page to set whom you want to see whatever you post or personal information in your Facebook profile: from just friends to people in a chosen network you're in to the whole world--which means people who aren't Facebook members too, unless you're a minor. And if you want, you can change those settings for each piece of content you post--such as a job complaint you want only close friends to see, not your company network. A "recommended" setting will make your basic info and content posts public--in other words more Twitterlike--but provide more privacy for other things like Wall posting from others and contact info.

You can get the details on the privacy enhancements at a slide show here (and embedded above), as well as on the Facebook blog, which you can also read after the jump here.

The upshot: While the new system is clearly simpler, and will be presented by default when people initially try to post content, I suspect it will still be too much for some people to bother with. The basic problem is that Facebook aims to offer many kinds of messaging, from intimate posts to friends to rants you want the world to read. That inherently involves people making choices, sometimes post-by-post, inevitably making the process more complex. (One blogger, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, thinks the new system is a looming disaster because too many people won't realize the implications of public sharing. I'm not so sure it will be worse than it is today, though.)

Twitter is popular partly because it's so simple: Posts are public, or they're not. It's to Facebook's credit that it's providing choices, and to its further credit that it's now trying to make those choices simpler. But it's no sure thing yet that the new system will keep Twitter from becoming the Internet's biggest community bulletin board.

I've never been a big fan of toolbars, those strips just above the Web page on your Web browser where search engines and others place a series of buttons to reach their services quickly. For awhile, I had three or four from eBay, Google, Yahoo, and others, but I rarely used most of them, and finally uninstalled them to clear out the clutter.

Apparently a heck of a lot of people still use them, though: A startup called Conduit has made a profitable business out of helping 200,000 Web publishers and businesses--mostly small (like the Pretentious Pooch pet store in Baltimore), many overseas, but some large ones like Major League Baseball--offer them to some 60 million active users. The publishers like them because they can essentially syndicate their Web sites right onto people's browsers. That way, the publishers have a better chance to get people coming back to their sites to use their various services--that is, if they can get past the reservations of people like me.

(To get a taste of what the toolbars look like, here's the promo for Major League Baseball's toolbar, and here's TechCrunch's, as well as a gallery of many others.)

Now, Conduit, which lets publishers create custom toolbars, is looking to blow open toolbars so that they may become more attractive both to publishers (and maybe to me).

After being pounded for a week by iPhone fans who want a discounted iPhone 3G S and want it right now, AT&T has retreated from its original upgrade pricing rules. But the only way for customers to figure out whether they will benefit from the change is to check their upgrade eligibility in their online AT&T account information.

Under the revised rules, the lowest price of $199 for a 16 gigabyte phone and $299 for a 32 GB version will be available immediately to anyone who is scheduled to become "upgrade eligible" by the end of September. But upgrade eligibility is a complicated business. You automatically become eligible at the end of your two-year contract, but that would not help any iPhone 3G owners because that phone has only been sold for a bit over a year. (Customers who preordered at a higher price and are now eligible for the full subsidy will get a credit for the difference.)

But AT&T uses early eligibility to reward its best customers. Full eligibility, says a company spokesman, "typically occurs anywhere from 12 to 24 months into a two-year contract based on your spending levels, how promptly you pay your bill, and other factors. If you spend more, as iPhone customers tend to, you become eligible for an upgrade earlier. If you spend less, you become eligible later."

iPhone 3G owners who become upgrade eligible in October or later may be able to get half of the full $400 subsidy, that is, buy an iPhone for $399 or $499. People who don't qualify for any sort of subsidy, which would include those who bought an iPhone 3G recently, pay the full freight: $599 or $699. But again, checking your account status is the only way to know for sure what class you fall into.