Fancy fifteen minutes of power? Then you may want to send David Perez a tweet this week. This hapless Advertising Recruiter is promising to do everything – provided it’s legal – that his Twitter followers suggest, for a week. What’s more, he’ll be wearing webcam enabled glasses so you can follow his escapades.

Hmm. We’d be the first to say that our lives were sometimes ruled by social media: we can’t resist dipping in to see what people are up to, perhaps that little bit too frequently. And there’s no doubt it can act as a hive mind, helping influence our decisions on everything from where to eat, to the best holiday destinations – but we think that Perez may be going just a little too far. Will he really do everything he’s told to, by bored office workers looking for a cheap laugh? We suspect he’ll fall at an early hurdle. Naturally, we’ll enjoy watching him do so.

From today, Google offers users the option to see properties for sale and rent as an overlay to UK maps.

This free service is clearly of great benefit to the many small businesses who operate as estate agents or letting companies: Google says “We are completely open to working with any company”. A link will be provided back to the property website at no charge.

It’s good news for Google’s users, too: surely anyone in the market for a new house these days consults Google Maps, Streetview and the satellite view to fully case out a property and its location before making a visit.

See the new overlay by going to Google Maps and selecting the ‘more’ drop-down beside the search box.

Google’s homepage is the most-talked about blank space on the internet. Renowned for its one-option interface and clean minimalism, the page is often cited as a great example of ‘less is more’.

It came as a great surprise, last week, then, to see that Google had transformed itself. The page that logged-in users saw was taken over by a large photographic image, much in the style of its rival search engine, Bing.

Even more of a surprise came a few days later, when the white homepage returned. “Remove Google background” was apparently the seventh-most searched for term during the intervening days (the image can be removed, but a bug had prevented the link giving this option from displaying).

Read it how you will – panicking behemoth trying to imitate its competitor, then pulling the move when it realises it has blundered? Or service that listens to its users, and is uniquely positioned to do so, given that they are revealing their inner thoughts with every search?

Either way, it’s good to know that Google responds to the people who use it. The story, while amusing, shows us one of the strengths of the web – that you can try out something new, and change it sharply if it turns out not to be working for you and your business.

Microsoft’s search engine product Bing was a year old on Sunday. Setting aside the question of whether we’ve got any more used to its rather silly name (no), has it become a proper contender in Search during that time?

Well, according to Thinq, Bing has managed to grow Microsoft’s search share from eight to almost 13 per cent over the past year but has barely made a dent in Google’s dominant position. Microsoft’s gains have largely been at Yahoo’s expense.

Does this mean we can largely ignore Bing, and Yahoo for that matter, and optimise purely for Google? Absolutely not. 13% may not sound like much, but given the vast quantity of searches being conducted at any one moment, we’d be fools to let it go.

Don’t forget, too, that these figures relate purely to UK usage. OK, fine if you trade purely within these shores. If you don’t, be assured that Google’s dominance is by no means replicated across the world: in Japan, Yahoo has it. In China, Google has all but given up and Baidu is king. In the States, Bing is much more commonly used than it is here.

Many SEO firms will talk of Google as if it is the only search engine worth optimising for. It’s easily done, especially when the word ‘Google’, like ‘Hoover’, has become a verb describing the very act of searching. But the savvy optimiser will know that the best benefits in all search engines will be found by putting high-quality, relevant content on your web pages, signposting it clearly, and attracting decent links from the sites that matter. That way, no matter which search engine is dominant at any one time, you’ll be properly represented.

According to recent news reports, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, will occasionally reply to emails from any old man in the street (or rather, at a keyboard). You have to admire that degree of accessibility from the top level of a company. It reminds me of when I’ve experienced quite the opposite.

Now, Apple may not be immediately comparable with a small holiday rental place in Weston Super Mare, but the truth of the matter is, when you make online contact, you do expect a reply. That holds true for a global corporation as much as it does for a small business.

Having identified a slick, attractive website promising everything we desired for our week by the beach, I submitted my enquiry. And then I waited, and I waited, and I waited. Eventually, I picked up the phone, spoke to someone immediately, and made my booking.

They were lucky I did – if I hadn’t liked the look of their place quite so much, I might have tried a few competitor websites and the first one to reply would have got my trade.

Fast forward to the day we turn up at the lodging, to be met by the friendly owner, who wants to know how we found out about her place. I tell her how impressed I was with the website, but that I was disappointed not to receive a reply to my online enquiry.

Oh yes, she beamed, my friend set up that website for me, including the enquiry form. I don’t know the first thing about the internet! Enquiries go into my email but I don’t know how to access them.

Let’s hope that she has plenty of word-of-mouth and brochure trade, because that website, no matter how impressive, is not doing its work, due to one fundamental (if quite incredible) oversight.

The moral of my story is, first, imitate Steve Jobs and make it easy for your customers to contact you… and second, make sure you prioritise replying to those customers.

Steve Jobs might be lauded for his willingness to engage like this – for you, it should be the first principle of running a website.

Strong words from Barack Obama this week:

With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

All of this is not only putting new pressures on you. It is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.