Google News is experimenting with allowing some users enter their Twitter username and receive personalized news based on what their friends are reading and their friends interest.

Google calls this feature yet another experiment. Of course, you won’t be able to see articles that are not included in Google news even if they are shared by your friends.

In the open text box, enter your Twitter username and click “Save.” Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow. Please note that Friends only shows you articles that can be found in Google News. If someone you follow has shared an article or a link that cannot be found in Google News, then you will not see that update in the Friends section.

This is how your search page could look like (I have not been able to replicate this):

Credit: search engine roundtable

Time to start making those connections. Social networks are becoming extremely important and will be integrated in the search results in the future. We are not talking about just Twitter and Facebook. That’s why being involved in all these sites can open new doors of opportunity for your business even if you are not seeing results today.

You won’t do any dominating unless you spend some time optimizing your Twitter profile for on and off page factors. We’ll discuss the off-page factors (e.g. link-building) in a separate posts, but here are 5 on-page things you can do right now to optimize your profile for the search engines.

User ID: the name you choose for your Twitter account matters. It is one of the most important decisions you make before committing to your Twitter strategy. When your account become more popular, you’ll have an easier time dominating the search engines for the term you used in your Twitter profile. It won’t be the only thing you need to worry about but you’d be surprised how having the right name can help you in the long run

Twitter Bio: it’s nice to have a chance to tell the world about yourself and your business. But don’t forget about your SEO efforts when doing it. Your Twitter bio gives you the chance to add your top keywords to your Twitter account and give yourself a better chance to show up high for those terms (relevant keywords are key).

Tweet Titles: there are a lot of people who use tools such as Tweetmeme to find and tweet stories. There is nothing wrong with that, but you should always aim to be in control of what goes on your Twitter page. So pay extra attention to the title of things you tweet (and customize them if you can).

Tweet Keywords: don’t forget to add hash-tags and any additional keyword that you see fit per each tweet you post on your profile. Your Twitter page is your web property, so don’t underestimate the power of hash-tags.

Twitter Lists: this is something I started testing a while ago. Your public lists do show up on your profile and give you yet another opportunity to add your relevant keywords to your page. It won’t be a decisive factor, but it never hurts to organize your Twitter friends into groups and add your keywords in the process too.

These tips are so simple to do but they can make a difference for your Twitter profile. You shouldn’t forget about the quality of content your tweet and those you connect with (will discuss those in a future post). Get the above steps right, and you are on your way towards pushing your Twitter profile to the top.

One of the best way to figure out where the demand is by using trend tools that are all over the Internet. Google Trends, WordTracker trends, and Google Insights all can show you what people are searching for and where your niche may be going. These are some of the classic tools available. But Twitter trend tools are perhaps the most exciting way to figure out what people are talking about right now and what you can do about it. Take Twendz for example. It’s a cool little tool that gives you a live overview of what going on Twitter. It shows you what the hot tags are, and whether people are talking positively or negatively about your specific topic.

Yahoo! Sidebar is yet another top twitter tool that lets you keep track of things on Twitter and find out where the demand is. It’s simple economics. If you can identify the demand, the need and desires of your prospects, you can certainly create content around those.

A lot of SEO professionals and gurus like to talk about how you need to pay attention to link building and title tags and all that good stuff. I am not going to argue that there is a lot of things one needs to do to get ranked high for highly competitive terms. But on-demand content is the future of the web. What do I mean by that? Everybody is searching for something on the web. People are creating content on the social media sites and blogs in an astronomical rate. In the future, it won’t be enough for you to have decent content to address what people have been searching for months ago. You need to be agile and create content that people need and want right now. By watching Twitter trends and other top social media sites, you are going to have an easier time developing content pieces that are relevant today. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on long-term content strategies. You will need to have the right balance. Thanks to the top social media sites, you are going to have an easier time getting your content research done, so you can spend more time providing value to your readers.

If you have been paying attention to the news in the search engine industry, you know Bing, Google, and Yahoo-Microsoft partnership are the talk of town. But what people need to be talking about is Topsy. Topsy is a search engine based on tweets that lets you find out what people are talking about on Twitter, who’s tweeting what, and who are the influential players in any niche. Twitter is still growing fast, and a lot of people are jumping on the ship, making the community stronger than before. It’s true that Google has almost too many pages in its index, but tweets are easier to create than web pages, and that’s why Topsy comes in handy.

You only need 140 characters to create a tweet, so millions of tweets can be sent back and forth on a daily basis. That means there is a lot of data out there, which Google and other modern search engines can’t keep track of for now. That’s where Topsy comes in. Tospy keeps track of top tweets across the board and lets you know which ones are more popular than others. It also shows you who has tweeted and retweeted what stories, and how influential each twitterer is.

So as you can see in the above picture, you can find out who’s been talking about your keyword over the past few weeks, month, or the past hour. Next to each story, you are going to see the number of times people have tweeted about that specific story. Another feature that makes Topsy so exciting is the ability to find out more information about each twitterer. You can not only use Topsy to find new people to follow, but you can also retweet stories easily and same time in the process.

Finding more about influential twitterers makes it easy to figure out what these folks are doing right, and how you can achieve similar results on Twitter. You can also connect with these folks and expand your Twitter network dramatically. And if that’s not enough, Topsy shows you the other top stories by source. So if you are looking for the top tweets about CNN stories, you can easily find them on Topsy.

As you can see, Topsy provides you with a whole lot of information that you can use to take your game to the next level. Twitter is a fast growing community, and a lot of people are already using Twitter to get their news, communicate with each other, teach and learn new things. With Topsy, you spend more time doing and less time searching and wasting time. Bing may have the spotlight for now, but I’ll stick with Topsy.