Last week, Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle in Australia. Today they have made them available in the US. Well, they'll be gradually rolling out starting today, anyway. The social gadgets let users share, collaborate, and play games with their friends. There are 19 of them at this point that have been debuted today. They include things like: - Who has the biggest brain?

In the session "Facebook Ads: Reaching Prospects Earlier In The Decision Cycle," Sarah Smith, Manager of Online Sales Operations, Facebook, offered tips on targeting your audience, creating compelling ads and getting a solid return on investment. Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos . Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Last Friday I tested and wrote in detail about the iGoogle social gadgets Google launched in Australia. These social gadgets and more just became available to the millions of U.S. iGoogle home page users, allowing people to play games with each other, share news content and to-do lists from their iGoogle Web pages. While only 13 are available in the site targeted for land down under, there are 19 on the U.S. social gadget site as I write this.

Efficient Frontier Insights shares some data that indicates Bing continues to grow significantly. In June, the firm reported that Microsoft experienced a 13% increase in paid click share. Now they say for the first week of August, Bing has lifted click share by 44% since the beginning of June. "They did particularly well in both the Travel and Finance categories showing an 11% and 22% click share lift in these categories," says Justin Merickel, VP,

The days of not being able to go ten minutes without hearing the term "Twitter" may soon come to an end. According to a new report from Gartner, the site is moving towards the trough of the tech hype cycle. Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said in a statement, "Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and Internet TV (for example, Hulu),

Google has joined the board of directors for the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA). Google's board of directors seat will be held by the company's Head of Anti-malvertising, Eric Davis. Davis leads efforts to develop and implement policies, processes, and tools to protect the Google network, the company's consumer and advertising products, and its users. "For Google, there is no higher priority than the safety and security of our users," Davis said.

CC Image by radcarper . Do you remember the term link bait or link baiting? While 2006 and 2007 link baiting was all the rage in recent years it seems people don't talk or write much about this practice anymore. Has link baiting vanished? Not at all. Link baiting is daily business right now, it's the norm. Indeed I would go as far as to state that link baiting is currently the most important link building tactic or strategy (depends on the bait really).

A few stories ClickZ's editors are reading: How Microsoft Faked the Waterslide Viral Many have cried foul on the above video, which shows a man in a neoprene suit riding down a hillside water slide, soaring through the air, and landing safely in a kiddie pool 100-plus feet away. Turns out it WAS faked, as part of a viral campaign created by Microsoft Germany. (NewTeeVee) Notice Those Ads on Blogs? Regulators Do,

I've just returned from a trip to Paris with my family and have to say that I found the use of my iPhone on the trip pretty transformative. For those of you who haven't travelled as a tourist in a foreign city before the iPhone, it used to go something like this - buy a travel book (or two or three) and plan out what you'd like to see, as best you can.

Google is giving a sneak preview of its future search engine. That's nice. Here's how they explain what they've done: For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.