“But even though the human attention span has become remarkably fickle, much of the web remains slow,” writes Google svp of Infrastructure Urs Hoelzle on Google’s latest Think Quarterly: ‘Speed’ Issue. “The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load – in a world where fractions of a second count, that’s an eternity.”

‘Fast is better than slow’ has been a Google mantra since the company’s early days, and Hoelzle says it’s more important now than ever

“We have one simple rule to support this Gospel of Speed: Don’t launch features that slow us down,” he says. “You might invent a great new feature, but if it slows down search, you have to either forget it, fix it, or come up with another change that more than offsets the slowdown. We have what we call a ‘fixed latency budget,’ which is sort of like a family budget. If you want to go on a nicer vacation but your budget doesn’t stretch, you need to cut back somewhere else.”

And in the quest for greater velocity, the search giant is working on something called Page Speed, an open-source project that helps webmasters speed up their sites (it can even re-write pages to boost performance). It’s also experimenting with a Page Speed service which automatically accelerates page loads without code changes. Publishers simply need to route a page through the service and it gets faster.

“At Google, we don’t plan on stopping until the web is instant, so that when you click on a link the site loads immediately, and when you play a video it starts without delay,” says Hoelzle. “What amazing things could happen then? What else could be invented?”

Thai youth is clearly as heavily into the latest tech as its counterparts in Asian and Western societies, says Sabine Stork*.

What to make, then, of the Thai government becoming the first to endorse Twitter’s move to permit country-specific censorship of content?

Well, Thailand is actually a curious mix of public laissez-faire, modernity and good old-fashioned authoritarianism. The latter can be seen in country’s extremely harsh lèse majesté laws – just last autumn the authorities jailed a 61-year-old man for 20 years for sending four text messages deemed offensive to the royal family. And it’s likely that it is criticism of, or jokes about, the monarchy the Twitter censorship is largely aimed at.

Is the likely to change? A group of Thai academics recently kickstarted an initiative which suggests reforming the law, but now there’s an argument that even this discussion should be penalized. There are moves to try and bring the academics to justice simply for raising the topic.

Clearly, King Bhumibol is a Thai brand worth protecting with the utmost vigour.

*Sabine Stork is founding partner of Thinktank International Research

Close to two-thirds of experienced US marketers plan increased investments in robust social media management platforms, compared to 43% of social marketing novices. Experienced social marketers will also see increase focus on mobile social media presence.

Experienced social marketers also plan continued investments in social reach but at a lower rate, 64% reporting that they plan to increase investment in this area in 2012, mostly represented by expansion into new platforms such as blogs, YouTube, forums, Foursquare, Flickr, SlideShare and Tumblr.

Millennials are highly engaged with the content that they choose to view, within both television and digital environments, says the metrics outfit. So when targeting millennials, it is important to utilise engaging content to help boost returns from investments in advertising.

Ad breakthrough via television advertising for millennials is substantially lower than for older generations. However, millennials demonstrate a higher propensity than other generations to retain a lasting impression of a television advertisement.

The brand dropped the campaign after posts turned too negative. “With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned,” says Rick Wion, McDonald’s social media director.

In other words, ‘we turn off the tap’.

No surprise, then, that there’s now a Schweppes Profile 2.0 to help Facebookers deal with the recently introduced Facebook timelines.

Also, the new branded ‘featured tweet’ function allows brands to highlight specific campaigns or promotions. Consumers get a greater sense of current brand activities and an opportunity to learn more. Featured tweets are also drivers in effective sales and promotion plans, as users will gravitate towards branded pages.

Customisable headers and page layouts enable brands to create their own manifesto and to position themselves on their own terms. These headers are essentially an open invitation for brands to highlight their most important and most engaging content.

Among the most compelling updates to the Twitter user interface are the ‘connect’ and ‘discover’ functions, which allow content to be personalised for each user. Similarly, Twitter extends the opportunity for brands to personalise their own image with its new page interface.

Twitter’s brand pages will also separate @replies from @mentions. This allows for a more sleek approach for brands to filter what people are saying about the brand and what people are asking of the brand, says Ogilvy PR.

“Twitter has, to date, raised over $1 billion dollars and is, following its most recent funding round, valued at over $8 billion,” says WPP. “They have a large audience, high-profile users such as Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, and are increasingly becoming a key part of many consumers’ media consumption habits, as the spikes in tweets around TV shows and events show.

“However, all of those are not going to pay back that $1 billion in funding unless Twitter can increase its revenues. Advertising revenue for 2011 is estimated at, ironically, $140 million, with predictions for future potential ranging from just over $300 million to over $2 billion, but for those to come true, brands need to feel comfortable on the platform, hence the new features.”