As most of us headed back to work yesterday suffering from a case of the January blues, the fortunate employees at Facebook will have been skipping back to their desks. It was just announced that their site attracted a record-breaking amount of traffic over this Christmas and New Year.

For the first time ever, Facebook received more traffic on Christmas Eve and Christmas day than Google did.

Whilst we don’t expect Facebook will continue to attract more traffic than Google, it is still testament to the social networking site for managing to close a huge gap that opened up around the 5th December.

We also wonder if Facebook beating Google will become a holiday tradition. Valentines Day, Easter, Halloween? Or maybe, it is just the particular holidays when people have time off work that they have the time to socialise with their friends online – maybe posting a few Facebook comments here and there.

Maybe it is no coincidence that Facebook traffic began to peak as soon as all of us 9-5’s finished work for the Christmas break. We know Facebook started with students but is it the full time workers that have lead to this surge in traffic? Or do we all just feel the need to socialise more over Christmas?

What do you think? Do you head for Facebook as soon as you’ve finished work? Was your Christmas all about turkey and Tweets? Share your thoughts.

Coming to a search engine near you… Google launches their real-time search.

Last week Google signed deals with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace which will allow your status updates to be indexed in their real-time news. The real-time news should be appearing anytime now, so you never know when you could be seeing your Tweet appearing on Google’s first page.

Before you start celebrating your new found fame, you should be aware that this real-time news is updated instantly, so without even refreshing your webpage, you’re likely to be scrolled down within twenty seconds or so.

From now on, when you search a word or phrase, you’ll receive real-time updates from a variety of social media sites, as well as the usual list of search results. You’ll be able to see comments that have been made with regards to what it is you are searching. These could be Tweets, a new Facebook group or MySpace photographs.

The real-time search will appear on first page of Google – a privilege that most companies end up investing a lot of time and money into. The pressure is now on top news providers who will have to update their news content regularly if they want their story to be included in the scrolling news.

This new development comes after searchers began to complain they could not find the latest updates on fast-moving stories.

For example, during the protests in Iran last summer, if you searched Google you would have been delivered the Wikipedia entry for Iran or a recent news article about the clashes at best. However, when you searched Twitter you were shown the latest news from people who were actually on the streets of Tehran at that moment in time.

So now you can see that Google needed to make a partnership with the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to make their searches more relevant and faster.

For now, you can’t get your news any faster than Google real-time.

Visa Europe say that yesterday, Monday November 30th was the busiest ever day for online shopping in Europe. Over 3,000 transactions were carried out every minute on a Visa card across Europe yesterday alone.

The volume of transactions was also expected to increase by 13% compared with the same day of last year. This figure was in fact a whopping 16% growth rate for ecommerce, despite overall consumer spending being down to 7% in general.

Around 4.5 million transactions took place on November 30th, with the busiest period for online sales around lunchtime and another peak around 7pm.  Over the course of the day, approximately €220,000 was spent on Visa cards every minute.

Last year, December 1st was the busiest day for online sales with over €280 million spent on Visa cards across Europe. The continued growth in online spend is further shown by the fact that spend on Visa cards has already surpassed 2008’s peak on November 2nd, 2009.

Visa bases its predictions on up to the minute spending data and previous years’ Christmas spending trends. Over €1 in every €9 spent in Europe is on a Visa card, making this data one of the most reliable indicators of trends in consumer spending, Visa has said in a release.

On the High Street, the last Friday or Saturday before Christmas is usually the busiest shopping day but with Christmas falling on a Friday this year, Visa Europe predicts the busiest day will actually be Wednesday, December 23. Visa expects to process over 27 million transactions across Europe worth around €1.4 billion on this day alone. This represents a 9% growth in spend on 2008. The busiest time is expected to be from 11am to 12pm on Thursday, December 24 when Visa will process up to 850 transactions per second, compared to 731 in 2008.

Speaking with a Director at a leading credit card brand, it would appear that the trend for online spending is set to continue outweighing high street splurging.  Many individuals are currently being more savvy with their money, paying off debts and saving their salaries in the run up to Christmas.  It is now common for smart shoppers to head to the high street to assess and select luxury goods in the flesh, then return home to find a better deal online. With the vast array of comparison sites, options to negotiate and the comfort of shopping from our own home, it is inevitable that the trend to spend online will continue to rise.

It gives me great pride to announce that last night, Bryan Adams, Managing Director was awarded Young Entrepreneur of The Year at the DLIB Livercool Awards.   

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this award was greatly deserved by Bryan - a true business leader that has made great waves in the creative industry and grown his vision into the huge success that today, is Ph.Creative. 

Ph.Creative would like to express sincere thanks to everyone who voted, and supported us, and say that we are proud to have established long-term relationships with all of our clients and associates. 

I’d like to express my congratulations to both the Ph.Creative team, and to Bryan – a creative genius, an inspirational leader, and a great friend. 

May our dream continue…

Lord Mandelson announced last week that he intends to stop people from downloading music, films and television by cutting off their internet connection if they get caught three times.

Thinking of something else I read last week… in a league of ‘happy’ countries, the UK only ranked 12th due to the high number of rules and regulations we’re all expected to obey. Hmmm, I see another rule coming into play thanks to Lord Mandelson.

France has just passed a similar law themselves; in that anyone caught illegally downloading three times will have their internet disconnected and guess what! France is an even more unhappy country that we are, they ranked 17th!

This announcement has come after months of pressure from the big shots in the music industry who basically aren’t making as much money as they used to.

If Lord Mandelson gets his way, a suspension could mean that parents could be at risk of losing their family internet connection if their children repeatedly use it to violate copyright.

Your internet would only be disconnected after a series of offences but at first you’ll only receive a warning letter and then you’ll have your internet connection slowed down so downloading takes a lot longer.

BT and Carphone Warehouse are two big names who have complained mainly because they’ll lose customers who lose their internet connection. If you’ve ever tried to get out of a contract with BT or Carphone Warehouse then you know how much they hate to lose customers, so it looks like Lord Mandelson could have a fight on his hands!

More than likely though, we’ll follow the French and implement another law. Before you know it we’ll probably rank even less than them in ‘happy’ lists. I wonder if there’s anything you can get for free anymore that doesn’t come with the risk of a secret charge or prison sentence. 

After 15 long years we finally say goodbye to GeoCities forever.

GeoCities was an instant hit when it first opened in 1994. This service did more for the web than almost all other Internet services ever designed, and it played a major role in the web’s popularity. Many believe that the Internet wouldn’t have become so popular if it weren’t for GeoCities.

GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML.

In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3 billion, which is probably one of the worst deals ever as the service is closing today, 26th October 2009.

You will no long be able to develop a free website using this service. Yahoo already announced that GeoCities is closing many months ago as the service is no longer helping its customers.

Yahoo is developing other services to allow users to build relationships online. Many are happy that GeoCities is gone because the service is “so 20th century” and we’re moving towards a new Internet with new services.

As they say, all good things must come to end!

Great, another strike is just what we all need. Finally, just as it looks as we’ve got a bit of an upturn in the economy; businesses now have this to contend with. Give us a break!

The sham, that currently is our postal service, has a backlog of 25 million letters already and the strike hasn’t even begun. I can pretty much cope without a Christmas card but companies such as moonpig.com rely on this time of year. What should be their busiest time is now in serious jeopardy.

And why is this protest happening? Erm, because of pay cuts and job losses! Sorry hold on a second, aren’t we all dealing with that right now? Well, I’m sorry but you’re damn well lucky to have a job at the moment! Welcome to the real world, businesses all over the country have had to let people go or cut hours; it’s a matter of survival. You don’t see any of us stomping our foot and walking out on our jobs. If you did, it’d pretty much be the case of keep walking and don’t come back.

We really need this Christmas to be a good one, we all need the business and we all need the customers. In fact many retailers are relying on this time to turnaround their sales figures. Whatever the industry we all need this Christmas to be brilliant and ultimately that means we need our postal service. So Mr Postman, help us out, instead of letting the team down can’t you just work with us? We need to stick together for this economy to stand any chance of recovery.

(Not that I was paying particular attention, as I continued to scroll through my Facebook page as the evening news warbled away in the background…)

Yep, we’ve done it – the UK has become the first major economy where online advertising has overtaken TV advertising.  

The boffins state that online spending rose by 4.6% in the first half of 2009, as TV spend declined by 16%.  In real terms, due to the credit crunch forcing us to leave our expensive taste at the front door, us mere mortals spend less time being compelled to buy the latest Cheryl Cole endorsed facial anti-gravity serum, and more time poring over the Fashion First Lady’s Twitter page.

Gone are the days when we’d discuss Saturdays’ Stars in Their Eyes Live Final over Monday morning coffee.  Now we’re thrashing out tips for FarmVille, debating ‘Which Hollywood Actress Are You?’ and blushing in shame that we accidentally ‘Poke’d the CEO.  Following the birth of the social networks that now consume valuable hours of our day, it was inevitable that the diversity of the online Google box would surpass the entertainment capabilities of the good old Goggle box.   As a nation, we’d rather get our kicks from our HP than our HDTV.

Since the influx of reality TV shows that now seem to invade every channel, it’s not surprising that we have grown bored of watching twenty-something’s frolicking in hot tubs in hope of launching a TV career.  We’re more concerned with our own reality show – and where better to find out who’s doing what. With regular updates every four minutes. Until 4am in the morning. (You know who you are – no one cares if ‘Dave is making a brew’. Go to bed)

In a nutshell, TV is slowly being replaced as our heightened senses seek our more interactive forms of entertainment. Along with it goes our interest in adverts and our ability to be sucked in by airbrushed B-Listers that blatantly don’t use the product anyway. We have even gone so far as to create a set top box that allows us to skip the adverts between our beloved Big Brother shows. 

On the other side of the pond (you can always rely on those guys to come up with something extreme) ad makers in the US are experimenting with ads that only make sense when watched in fast forward. 

Personally, I have seen the light since my days of being a bona fide sucker for advertising…  Who cares if you’re wearing Dior lip gloss whilst you’re sat home alone Tweeting?

In recent months the Search Engines business has become a little more difficult for Google with the release of Microsoft Bing, the Microsoft / Yahoo deal and newer players to the market such as the revamped Ask Jeeves and Wolfram Alfa. Google also faced competition from Facebook with their acquisition of the much heralded Friend Feed, praised for its ‘real time search’ engine.

In many ways although Google have been dominant in market share, when it comes to innovation they have consistently been a poor performer, especially over the last few months. Back in May Google Founder Larry Page even admitted that they had fallen behind the likes of Twitter that boasts 45 million users worldwide.

However today Google lifted the lid on its answer to all of the above, Google Caffeine, as it has been knick named. The change lies under the hood of Google and as such we will not see any change to the way that Google looks. Although still in testing phase, it is the beginning of a major change to the architecture of Google providing the “first step in improving the speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of search results".

The Golden Goose of the Search engines has always been relevance. This is the reason why real time search is such a popular concept. Its lets you know what is happening right now on any given subject. That is what Google promise to offer with Google Caffeine.

While only in testing at the moment this new development promises to put Microsoft’s Bing in the shade. The trouble with Bing is that is it an alternative to something that users are happy with. Can Google deliver on its promise of something new?

Why not try for yourself and let us know www2.sandbox.google.com