Well, here is another move that gets Google closer to their quest for world domination. Now, using Gmail you can call your friends and family on home phone or cellphone.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will remain free through the rest of the year. The unlimited voice plans for top providers Verizon and AT&T are $69.99 per month. The international rates, too, seem reasonable for now: 2 cents a minute for calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China and Japan. Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours, as per tweet from Google.

Google has plans to release this feature for businesses soon….with a fee of course. Google has been generally slow to tap the corporate market — which could be a driver for Google to offer Gmail calls at a competitive rate.

Here is an excerpt from CNN:

“Google is taking the easy road of arming their army of fans and users with something just good enough to use — but not necessarily good enough to meet enterprise requirements — and standing back and watching to see how they can shape the market,” said Tom Austin, Google applications analyst at Gartner.

As a result, Austin said he believes Google’s paid revenue stream for the service will be quite small: just $20.3 million per quarter, or 0.3% of Google’s second quarter revenue.

What are your thoughts?

Who wouldn’t like to get influential on Twitter? But, having most followers means you have the most influence? NO, says a recent HP Labs study. The study suggests that most Twitter users are passive and the Twitter users with the most influence are those who retweet. Here are also some FAQs on the study.

According to the research, it is important to separate the concept of “influence” from “popularity.” While a user on Twitter may have a large number of followers, his or her influence is more strongly associated with their engagement with the network, rather than the total number of followers or retweets. To identify Twitter influencers, the authors devised an algorithm called the IP Algorithm. This algorithm assigns a relative influence score and passivity score to every user:

• “Influence” depends on both the quantity and quality of the user’s audience
• “Passivity” is a measure of how difficult it is for other users to influence him or her

The algorithm makes the following assumptions:

• Influence score depends on the number of people the user influences as well as their passivity.
• Influence score depends on how dedicated the people the user influences are. Dedication is measured by the amount of attention a user pays to a given one as compared to everyone else.
• A user’s passivity score depends on the influence of those who he’s exposed to but not influenced by.
• A user’s passivity score depends on how much he rejects other user’s influence compared to everyone else.

2.5 million users were included in the dataset show that the influence measure is a good predictor of URL clicks, outperforming several other measures .

The study concludes: “This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.” The authors also see their measure of influence applicable to other social networks.

If you are running a small business and have questions about anything related to your business. Ask.Sprouter.com has a panel of entrepreneurs who are available to answer questions. ..including some celebrity experts.

So, all you entrepreneurs, if you have any questions about your business, then, jump into this forum by answering a simple question in 140 characters or less: “What are you working on?”.

If you looking for a complete Social CRM solution, then, definitely look at JitterJam.

Some benefits for your campaign

• Gathers information about social contacts — JitterJam collects the brand’s contacts from their social accounts (Twitter friends and followers, Facebook contacts, etc.) and automatically imports them into their JitterJam database.

•  Social listening and engagement — Brands can create social searches to find conversations on the real-time web about their brands, their products, their markets, their competitors and more across a number of channels. JitterJam collects the results and stores them for the brand to review. Each of these conversations is immediately actionable. JitterJam also highlights the most important conversations for prioritization.

• List of key influencers — The integrated Jitterater Social Rating Engine estimates the influence and reach of individuals and assigns a numerical rating for each person based on the various elements of their social profile, including Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs, websites, etc. This information is available for each social conversation found in the brand’s social searches and in each of the social profiles for the brand’s contacts.

• Puts privacy in the hands of the users — JitterJam has developed the Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system to let consumers set the rules of engagement — and to enable the brand to send only the information that each individual wants

Additional Feature summary

1. Jitterater™ Social Rating Engine: Rates influence and reach for each individual and allows brands to easily identify key influencers

2. Enhanced Make Me Happy™ Permission Marketing System: Create customized opt-in forms and pages for different channels, campaigns and markets

3. Streamlined User Interface and Social Search Hot List: Get to your most important conversations and contacts quickly and easily

4. Enhanced Metrics: Measure reach and impressions per message, identify those sharing your updates, more buzz and trend analytics

5. Additional Enhancements: YouTube, automatic database development, Twitter favorites and more.

JitterJam has four pricing tiers ranging from $290 to $1,290 per month. Pricing packages are based upon the number of social contact points in the database and the number of social searches that are defined/in use by the business.

The people polled in the Center for the Digital Future’s annual report on the impact of the internet on Americans answered a resounding “NO” to paying for tweeting. Not a single person who said they used Twitter responded in the affirmative to the question of whether they would pay for the privilege to tweet.

“Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

Other interesting findings from the study are:

• Internet usage in US – 82% Americans go online regularly,
• Hours/week online – Americans spend 19 hrs/week, on average, surfing the web.
• Top 10 online purchases – 59% of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 %), travel (53 %), electronics/appliances (47 %), videos (46 %), computers or peripherals (41 %), software or games (40 %), CDs (40 %), and products for hobbies (38 %).
• Newspapers no longer at the top as a source of information – Newspapers rank below the Internet or television. Only 56 % of Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them – a decrease from 60 % in 2008 and below the Internet (78 %), and television (68 %).
• Low adoption rate of new media for older generations – 79 % of internet users do not blog and 85 % know little or nothing about making phone calls online, the vast majority of whom are above 24. Those under 24 use these and other new services regularly.
• Reliability of Information Online: Views of Internet Users -For the third year in a row, a declining percentage of Internet users said that most or all of the information online is reliable. 61% of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable.

What do you think?