I thought I try a facebook page

lol, appreciator, it drives me to despair! Farmville requests and business spam...

But a lot of people do love it, and it's another marketing avenue. I can see it going only 1 direction, although I suspect it also needs to mature further.

I'm looking forward to the results of your pondering...

We are about to set it up with a couple of clients.

Being forever negative on the topic - will it go the way of 'article marketing' and the like? Everyone jumps on the bandwagon, the system becomes abused, and the emphasis placed on it by search engines is reduced still further?

Next time you get one, you can set it to receive no further notifications from that specificapp, I know because 2 members on here were hammering mine with them all day lol!

I advise you to ask to your customers/clients to join or become fan your business on Facebook rather than you ask for others to join you. It would be irrelevant don't benefit to you.

Must admit, it's been about 12 months since our last article submission, and looking around, it does seem to be the key generator of internet flotsam and poor content.

I think it will be an interesting year, will FB step up to the challenge and live up to the current hype, will Google counter it, will social search really taken on traditional search?

I think non updated pages could be the next battle ground, with out of date content and old news articles choking the search results. This is where realtime search stands a chance.

Maybe we need a new kid on the block with only current content, and not some sprawling worldwide never archiving document collector.

At least all this uncertainty keeps us on our toes

I must admit I use the date option more and more these days when searching google i.e. Pages updated in the last week, last month etc. You choose the date range (pick it up from left menu).

totally depends on the usage over social medias and other networking sites by the way!

Can you explain that point in more detail?

Not sure I agree with that. A lot of the 'old' stuff is as relevant now as it always has. And some kid coming along and plagiarising it for his own ends adds nothing to the picture.
Then again, I have a vested interest in that many of my top ranking pages have not changed over almost 10 years !!!!!

Indeed, as a directory owner, I'd end up in the middle of any content aging battle ground, with some listings that have no need to be updated for years and still relevant.

But there is a sea of unloved and out of date content. I suppose the recent Plus 1 rollout could be an attempt to sort this, but at what point does an old piece of content fall off the index? Or is it there for eternity?

Here's a good example, the site owner has freely stated the content is now out of date and won't be updated.
WINDOWS 95 HELP

How about a Google search archive for historical content? The above link could be useful for a student doing a thesis on Windows 95 in 10 years time.

Maybe we will end up with an approved time and date stamp, with this content was approved, or reviewed by it's owner once a year? Who knows...