Yesterday, news broke that Google was acquiring social Q&A site Aardvark for about $50 million. Aardvark sent its users an email today saying:
Dear friends,

Aardvark has just been acquired by Google!

Aardvark will remain fully operational and completely free, providing quick, helpful answers to all of your questions. For more information about how the acquisition affects Aardvark users, check out the FAQ that we've put together....

"We want social search to reach hundreds of millions people around the world, and joining with Google lets us reach that scale — we’re also excited to work with the team at Google: our company has a culture that was inspired by Google in many ways, and we have a lot of respect for the folks who work there," the company says in a blog post.

Aardvark is already available in Google Labs. Users will keep the same Aardvark account. It will continue to work under Google.

The company says it will continue to keep introducing new features, fixing bugs, and improving speed and quality. They say the main thing that is going to change is that they will be able to move faster with the support of Google.

User questions and answers will show up in search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search results if you choose to share them publicly.

Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) thinks Google is coming after its business.

AT&T has introduced its FamilyMap App for the iPhone, which allows users to track the location of family members.

Users can download the FamilyMap the App Store on iPhone or at iTunes. Users can track tow phones on an account for $9.99 a month or up to five phone for $14.99 per month. The FamilyMap App can also be used on most other AT&T smartphones. Previously the app was only available via a desktop.

Features of the FamilyMap App include:

• Interactive Map: View whereabouts within an interactive map, including surrounding landmarks such as schools and parks; and, toggle between satellite and interactive street maps.
• Personalize: Assign a name and photo to each device within an account, and label frequently visited locations such as "Bobby's house" and "School."
• Schedule Checks: Use the app to see if a family member is on schedule. Parents can schedule and receive text and email alerts.
• My Places: Set up and view a list of landmarks within the app. Users can display the landmark on the map, edit the landmark's details, and remove or add landmarks.

You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don't count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.
Google's Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist.The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.

"In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time," he says. (Emphasis added)

Now, this isn't exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the ever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn't resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn't mean your content will continue to perform well based on that. WebProNews has discussed the value of "link velocity" and Google's need for freshness in the past:

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.
So how do you keep getting "fresh" links?

If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.

Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.

Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.

Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don't want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content?