Here's what's making waves at KAYAK this week.

From insightful articles that can help you improve your online marketing, to fun videos, news and infographics. No matter what it is, though, we want to make it easier for you to find the really good stuff. Check back each week to learn what's "making waves" for the team at KAYAK.

Lyndsay's Pick of the Week:

Twitter Considers an Awkward Interface Change

[Read the Article on Mashable]

I'm going to confess something that surprises a lot of people I know: I use the native Twitter app. I use Twitter by Twitter, Inc. No Plume, no Tweetcaster, no Echofon - I use Twitter. Maybe because I use it so much, maybe through nerdy lottery, they offered me access to their beta app. As such, I end up seeing a lot of their interface tweaks early. Usually this means I can get my nerd hate good and ready for when the feature gets pushed out in full. Remember when they made the app's swipe function totally useless, by making it not taking you to notifications? I was there hating it a week before all of my followers.

This week, they're at it again. At one point in my app, my @-replies stopped being visible. I did a double take, thinking it was just my followers being a bit strange. But no, they were gone. It seems that Twitter thinks it can smooth out its interface by taking this context out of tweets. I can see this getting someone in trouble VERY quickly - a cheeky joke said to a friend suddenly looks like it's being sent to everybody to someone using the app! 

The @-replies will still exist, they just don't show up to you in the app. Context will still exist thanks to Twitter's conversation threading "blue lines" and your notifications tab. It sounds like Twitter is thinking about rolling this out everywhere, but it's all speculation at this point. Twitter is under a lot of pressure to get profitable post-IPO, and that leads to a lot of experimentation. Some of these experiments have me wondering if anyone at twitter uses twitter's native services, though.

Twitter has said before that it is always testing changes to features and rolling them out to small groups of people before they see the majority of users - remember the new profile view that quietly disappeared, or the time they essentially killed the block function? Twitter is still acting like a small agile service, which is a blessing and a curse. Weird experiments are one of the curses we have to suffer through when we are using a platform that's still learning what it's going to do to stay afloat. Happily, a lot of the especially bad ideas get ushered out the door fairly fast.

SPECIAL EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT!

Rich Snippets Workshop with Tracey Nero (Woods), formerly of MSN Microsoft's internal SEO team

Please join me for a special event in Calgary for SEOs, Marketers and Bloggers.

In this workshop, you'll learn about rich snippets – complete with how to integrate them into your business website for maximum effect.

If you are an SEO, Blogger or Marketer who wants to stand out more in Google and Bing search engine results, our HUG Lunch n' Learn is designed just for you.

Presented by HUG Canadian Prairies (and Calgary's own Kayak Online Marketing), this session is going to teach you what you need to know about one of the most exciting search optimization strategies out there today.

Registration via Eventbright for this one-time luncheon is only $20, and your fee includes a light lunch. Be sure to bring your laptop, because attendees will be learning – and doing – it all, beginning with an introduction to rich snippets and then moving into the technical setup details.

You can register for your seat now. Don't miss out on this chance to learn about an important SEO strategy from an industry expert! First come, first served.

Eager to get a head start? Then check out KAYAK's blog article: The 3 Must Install Rich Snippets for Content Marketers and Bloggers.

Mark's Pick of the Week

Tourney Time!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year - yes, I sang that part. Forget Christmas, forget birthday’s, the next 3 weeks are most wonderful time of the year for every hoops fan. With 48 games being played between Thursday morning and Sunday evening, there’s never a dull moment. March Madness has already lived up to it’s name with a last second shot deciding the very first game of the tournament, and successfully ruining my chances at a perfect bracket once again.

While all of that is commonplace, this year things seem to be a little different. Statistics and numbers have always been associated with sports, but generally in very simple terms: averages, wins, losses, etc.. In recent years we’ve seen data and analytics come to the forefront of business and online marketing, so why not basketball? From efficiency ratings and usage stats to RPI and BPI rankings, basketball is now a data driven sport.

Speaking of numbers and basketball, did you see Warren Buffet put up $1 billion in prize winnings for a perfect bracket!!

When trying to predict the outcomes in a 64-team tournament wild guesses can only get you so far. Many potential match ups have not occurred earlier in the season. Data can now help determine who will win between two closely matched teams.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who gained international recognition of the predictive capabilities of data when he was the only political pundit to correctly predict the voting outcome of all 50 states in the 2012 US Presidential election, has weighed in on the NCAA tournament. His interactive bracket highlights each team’s odds of advancing to various stages of the tournament.

[View the interactive bracket]

Good luck in your bracket! Go Gators and Wildcats!

Randy's Article on Social Media Today

Positive Negativity: What to Do When People Say Bad Things About You Online

You don't have to be a sociologist to realize that reviews as a whole – and especially negative reviews and comments – are on the rise. Part of this has to do with the Internet culture we now live in, where reviews aren't just helpful, but expected. The more reviews a company, person, or product has, the easier it is for buyers to make the right decision. And so, leaving reviews, positive or negative, has become part of an Internet user's "civic duty."

On the other hand, the somewhat-anonymous nature of the Internet gives some people the freedom to write things they would never say to another person face-to-face. They may even stretch the truth to make their comments more notable, or to inflict damage on a business. In that way, so-so experiences become terrible, and minor disappointments become major tragedies.

[Read the full post on Social Media Today.]