The Daily Feed Issue #49: Highlighter, Twitter ads, optimizing forms and luck

Welcome to Issue #49 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. The Daily Feed is published several times a week when we have news, information and helpful tips to share. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of this message. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Friends of ours launched a great service today called Highlighter.com. It's a wordpress plugin that lets you visitors comment on text in your blog entries. It also lets your visitors share your content via Facebook and Twitter, driving more traffic to your site. You're hearing about Highlighter a full week before the press launch, so if you're an early adopter, be sure to give it a try. [Disclosure: Neither I nor Feedjit have received any compensation for mentioning highlighter. They are good friends and part of the Techstars program where I am a mentor.]

AdAge is reporting that Twitter today started injecting paid ads into tweet streams. Initially you'll only see the ads if you use HootSuite. Twitter have a revenue sharing deal with HootSuite where Twitter sells the ads and they split the revenue with HootSuite. I'm sure this will quickly expand to every Twitter client including Twitter.com. My guess is that this will be their business model going forward. 

If you ever thought small changes to your web form didn't yield results, read this article about how Expedia earned $12 Million more per year by removing a single text field. Their "Company" field in the checkout form was confusing customers, so they removed it and saw a huge increase in the number of completed transactions and revenue.

And finally: From the luckiest-girl-alive department, the BBC is reporting today that an 18 month toddler fell from a 6 story building, bounced off an awning and was caught... wait for it... by a doctor. She was completely unharmed, shed a little tear and then quickly calmed down. 

Have a spectacular Wednesday!

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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