Fifty-five percent of Americans communicate with their friends via the Internet, compared with real life, and 68% say they have been distracted from completing work by checking emails, browsing the Web, and engaging with social media, up 9% compared with a year ago. The 2015 survey of 5,000 U.S. adults published by a company called Stop Procrastinating found that people are more likely to spend time communicating with friends on the Internet or through social sites, text or instant messages rather than real life. Of the 68% of people who said they had been distracted at work, 39% said it …

Muslim Face, a social site, will launch this spring to connect Muslims in a "socially responsible network," per Onislam. The site -- which is in beta being tested by more than 1,000 global users -- will be available in English, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, the Malaysian language Bahasa, Turkish, and Indonesian. The founders got the idea for the site from a Halal search engine called ImHalal, which launched September 2009. The unusual feature of the site is that if a user comes into contact with offending content, the engine filters the content from the query.

Most search marketers wouldn't pay attention to Ford setting up an innovation center in Silicon Valley, but they should. The 25,000-square-foot innovation and mobility center sits in the Google's, Yahoo's and Facebook's backyard, although not far from Microsoft Bing. The move will no doubt integrate social and tech features, from automation to Internet access, into more Ford's cars. The company's CEO called the area "a marketplace of ideas," per The Detroit News. 

Know what the audience want before going through the effort to create the content. Rand Fishkin explains how marketers can find that knowledge first before creating something that doesn't work. He suggests getting to know the industry, listen to chatter in community forums, and validate the creative uniqueness of the content. Think visual and interactive content. Fishkin provides tips.

Google plans to launch a new mobile phone service for U.S. consumers, according to reports. The company will purchase bandwidth from cell phone carriers Sprint and T-Mobile, making it a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNOs, similar to Ting, Tracfone, and Republic Wireless.

SAP also wants marketers to know it's in the business of supporting cloud services. Earlier this week it reported fourth-quarter and full-year earnings. The company beat its revenue guidance attributing growth in its cloud business and the continued success of SAP HANA, an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system. SAP has spent more than $20 billion on acquisitions, including SuccessFactors and Concur Technologies, to compete with Salesforce, Oracle, and others.

Odd as it might seem, consumers now considers search engines to be more trusted sources of information than traditional media, Quartz reports, citing a global survey of 27,000 people by Edelman. “The striking thing is that Google [and other search engines don’t] actually report on anything, but instead serves up links to stories on a mix of other sites that users, apparently, trust less than the aggregator itself,” Quartz notes. 

Google's security team Friday disclosed three new bugs in Windows, keeping pressure on Microsoft to fix flaws within 90 days, but Microsoft said it would not patch the bugs with a security update, per Computerworld. Since Dec. 29, Google's Project Zero, a team consisting of several Google engineers tasked with identifying flaws, has revealed several bugs in Windows. Gregg Keizer explains.  

comScore announced Tuesday the U.S. launch of Video Metrix Multi-Platform to provide desktop, smartphone, tablet and over-the-top (OTT) video audience measurement. It will let clients sell, plan and buy digital video at the video media property and show level using TV-comparable metrics for both video content and advertising.

TechCrunch reports that tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Crimea, a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, are affecting tech developers. They report that Apple is sending out notices of termination to people whose accounts are registered in Crimea, citing sanctions that the U.S. has ordered against the region as a response to Russia annexing it in 2014. It prevents developers from creating or publishing apps in Apple's AppStore.