The patent application lays claim to the methods and software "in which an indication of a telephone call being placed from a calling number is received, and a determination is made of an audio advertisement to play based on the calling number."

Essentially this looks like an expansion of the pre-existing Audio AdWords. While Google closed down its broadcast radio ad program in February, the company continues to work with advertisers on online streaming audio and radio sites. Basically Google already has a slew of pre-produced audio ads sitting in its ad serving engine. Depending on the fit of the advertiser, it may be a no-brainer for companies to throw Google Voice into their mix of marketing efforts.

If this project takes shape, the really interesting part will come a month later when advertisers are billed. With streaming audio ads, companies get a relative amount of assurance that the audience is listening to the entire ad, including the call-to-action. While audience members can always mute advertising or pull out their headphones, a site's main audio content often will not play without the obligatory intro advertisement.

Telephone ads are different. Three days after going on a date, haven't you ever been a little too eager to pick up the phone? You know nobody's advertising to cutie pie. Meanwhile, on other days it's tough to even find the phone. Many callers would have to listen to at least two 30 second advertisements before hitting the voicemail box. After the first month of the program it would be extremely interesting to see how many partial ads will be served, the cost difference between a first place and second placement ad, and even how the company deals with multiple-language advertising.

Thanks to Staska for the tip!

Now Google's deep dive into U.S. TV viewing habits will go even further. In a partnership with Dish Network, also a TV Ads partner since the launch, Google will be able to give their customers data involving which programs are time-shifted versus which are not. The time-shifted viewership data breaks the TV ad impressions down into "live," "live + same day," "live + 1 day," "live + 3 day," and "live + 7 day" categories. This additional data will be provided free of charge to advertisers.

Unlike with Nielsen, who samples a small, opt-in portion of the TV-watching American population, Google's DVR data comes from EchoStar's Dish Network. The data is "anonymized," of course, but it's entirely possible that most Dish customers don't know they're providing data to Google at all. The metrics reported reflect viewership of the specific TV ad commercials, says Google, not just general program viewership. That can only mean that Dish is providing Google with details on who fast forwards through the commercials versus who does not.

Google isn't just handing over the data they're retrieving from the DVRs, either. They are actively analyzing it, too. According to the company's blog post, they "love digging into data" and have been "excited to investigate how time-shifted viewing differs from live viewing." Their initial findings suggest that niche programming tends to get a disproportionate percentage of its viewing through DVR.

At the moment, Google TV Ads are sold on the Dish Network for some of NBC Universal's cable channels, Bloomberg, and the Hallmark Channel. Dish Network is the U.S.'s third largest pay-TV provider.

But recently, something changed. Now, we're suddenly seeing a renaissance for the display ad. Today, Google is getting into the mix with the release of do-it-yourself display ads.

Once the creative is complete and you've chosen your preferred formats, you will be dropped into the now intimately familiar AdWords purchasing and placement interface.

As with most of Google's offerings, the new service is quick, easy, and relatively painless. What's more, it offers a whole new realm of expression that will help advertisers differentiate their offerings from their competitors.

I'm sure that many online advertisers will love the new creative freedom that these quickly built animated ads provide. We're likely to see quick uptake.

But will this new creative freedom for advertisers translate into more clicks?

This week, we saw MySpace launch MySpace MyAds, a service that allows any user to quickly build and deploy display ads targeted at MySpace users. Seeing Google quickly following the MySpace lead with a similar service begins to feel like a trend.

Part of the reason for Google's success with text-based ads had to do with the fact that users had grown weary of display ads. In fact, they had begun to ignore them. People just weren't clicking.

Now, one has to wonder if - with the recent resurgence we're seeing in display ads - that same fate has begun to plague the text-ad format.

When Google unveiled simple - and more importantly, relevant - text ads in the context of search, it seemed to be the silver bullet for online advertising. Will a return to the display-ad format prove to be an equally compelling shot in the arm? That remains to be seen.

Some marketing analysts, like Marketing Sherpa, claim that display ads are "back with a vengeance." Others, like Starcom MediaVest Group, maintain that display advertising metrics are inconclusive because less than 10% of the users "account for 50% of all display ad clicks."

Whatever the opinion, one thing is sure: For companies that live and breathe on advertising click-through rates - and that support an even larger ecosystem of companies relying on ad-based revenue - cracking the code of "the modern Web user's advertising preferences" will be the key to survival.

If anyone has the potential to crack that code, it's Google.

The best is yet to come, though, as Yahoo! also said today that MyYahoo would open up to outside developer applications in the next few months. That's among the changes we've been waiting for since the company's big announcement in April about a shift towards whole scale personalization and data portability.

MyYahoo's market share in the startpage field is massive, Comscore estimated in January that the site sees nearly 50 million unique visitors each month. Google's iGoogle startpage is a distant second with just over 20 million. Facebook, however, is destroying both services - it's at an estimated 80 million active users worldwide and growing fast.

The Facebook platform hasn't shaped up as well as was hoped, however. While Facebook's platform faces growing problems with privacy, decreased developer interest and lower than expected user engagement - a MyYahoo platform would be hot. The placement of Facebook apps on the public facing profile pages instead of the user facing admin pages is a problem that MyYahoo wouldn't suffer from. Additionally, while Facebook users arguably use the service for communication more than for the other type of activities that so many Facebook apps facilitate - MyYahoo is already a full-service, multi-use portal for millions of people.

If the Facebook platform was a first run for the social networking app platform paradigm, and the LinkedIn platform is the most sought after place for developers seeking a professional userbase, then a MyYahoo! platform would be the sweet spot for mass audiences of mainstream users.

We hope that the general availability of the new MyYahoo will be one of the last key steps before the platform opens up. In response to our inquiry about the time frame for the platform, Yahoo! sent the following response:

"This strategy involves opening up Yahoo! in three phases throughout this year (2008) and next: the first is to open up internally, and you will see products like Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Mail open up and become more integrated, sharing content and data. The second phase is to open up the Yahoo! platform to third party developers, which will be happening throughout this year, starting already with SearchMonkey. The third phase will be to allow the Yahoo! experience to be accessed off the Yahoo! network and you can expect progress on that phase throughout this year and into 2009."

The idea of using a tag cloud to track memes on Twitter is obviously not new, but having the tag cloud update dynamically makes for a whole new experience. While testing Twitscoop this morning, for example, the news about Carl Icahn's newest letter to Yahoo's shareholders was breaking on Twitter and made it onto Twitscoop's tag cloud within less than a minute.

Sometimes, the items on the tag cloud seem to appear more because of serendipity than because they are real memes. If five people write the 'dumb' or 'w00t' within 10 minutes of each other, for example, it will show up in the cloud, even though the tweets are not related at all.

If a tag cloud seems especially noteworthy, you can easily send a tweet with a permalink to the cloud. While this might only be useful in a very limited number of occasions, it is a nice feature to have nevertheless.

As of now, Twitscoop does not feature an API, nor does it have a widget for its live tag cloud that you could put on your blog or your desktop.

Search

Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine. While it is pretty basic, in that it doesn't feature live updates like Summize, or organize conversations like Quotably, it does show a nice graph of how often a search term has been used on Twitter in the last 6 to 72 hours (see screenshot). Just like on Summize, you can reply to a tweet from the search page and there is a link to the original tweet as well.

Twitscoop picks up new tweets very fast - most appear in under one minute.

Verdict

The ideal Twitter search engine would combine the live updates and API from Summize, the live tag cloud from Twitscoop, and the conversation tracking from Quotably. As of now, we still have to wait for this, but Twitscoop's live updates are definitely worth taking a closer look at and its search engine is a good alternative to Summize.

"So, we had an idea. We had been sponsoring Kiva.org for the past few months as an organization we really admire and believe in - they're the online micro-lending site that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world. And, we wanted to figure out a way to funnel the dollars we were sending to Google ads over to Kiva loans," wrote Jama's Director of Customer Outreach & Marketing, John Simpson in a blog post today.

The idea is the same as the original "You try. We give." program. Jama is hoping that press coverage of their unusual marketing plan (such as this), as well as word of mouth, will send as much traffic -- perhaps higher quality traffic -- as Google AdWords. And because Kiva loans are theoretically repaid (currently 97.97% of the time), any traffic Jama receives via this experiment is bound to end up being a lot cheaper, and perhaps even free.

"In the pursuit of growing our own business, we decided we'd much rather help a small store owner in Uganda feed her village than support the Google billionaires' hobby of flying to space," said Eric Winquist, CEO and founder of Jama Software in an emailed press release. Simpson told us he's excited to see if innovative social marketing tactics can out perform traditional search marketing.

"This program just gives people an added incentive to try our product versus the traditional enterprise tools from IBM and Telelogic, or to pass it along to a colleague or friend," Simpson told ReadWriteWeb in an email. "We're going up against 'the institutional big blue' so we differentiate ourselves by being a company with personality and more of a personal touch - we could never outspend them. The Kiva programs serves as a positive first impression and it illustrates our commitment as a company to giving back, whether big or small."

According to Simpson, eventually Jama might supplement their social public relations strategy with more traditional ad buys from Google or elsewhere. Once loans start being repaid, Jama could theoretically put last month's ad budget toward traditional advertising while this month's ad budget is being used to fund a microloan in the developing world.

Kiva co-founder and chief marketing officer Jessica Jackley Flannery was overjoyed by Jama's decision to choose Kiva over AdWords. "We're thrilled when a company like Jama Software develops an innovative program that supports both our global mission at Kiva and their own goals. It's such a simple concept, but that's the beauty of it," she said. We tend to agree, and we wish Jama the best in their efforts, and luck to anyone who receives loans via Kiva.

Surely the teachers in those classrooms will at least give a passing nod to competing ad networks, right?

According to a good write up on ClickZ Google's initial goal was to have a modest 200 schools participate. So far more than 700 schools have signed up, though, and there's two weeks left to register. The Challenge has been open for some time but was just announced officially this week. A Google Map of the participating schools show that the program has extended to every continent on the planet. Janet Driscoll Miller visited a participating school yesterday and has a good write up on MarketingPilgram.

If there are 30 students at each of the 700 schools, that's 21,000 students consuming the Google curriculum. A global crop of newly experienced students and small businesses introduced to AdWords for a mere $140k in free "product"? Sounds like a good program for Google. While I'm sure all of these young people were likely to pay very close attention to Google advertising programs anyway, there's something a bit funny about this kind of corporate influence over the souls of...marketing students. Ok, so maybe this isn't as ominous as many other corporate sponsorships in schools these days.

Contest winners will receive a Golden Ticket good for a week long trip to the Googleplex. It's a little bit creepy, but it does sound like a very good idea.