WebProNews has put out a great video interview with Google’s Rick Klau, at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, about how to use blogging as a great supplement to Twitter and how the two can be a great communication tool for people and businesses. Rick points out great points about how blogging isn’t dead. In fact it’s still a very important part of the Web and communication.
Google Wave Invites: How To Get Them – The web is buzzing with excitement and anticipation. In less than 24 hours, Google Wave will launch to 100,000 early adopters. The real-time communication platform has been making headlines ever since it was announced back in May as a result of its potentially game-changing features.
Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go – Dropbox, the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud.
Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors – Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors.
FCC’s Broadband Plan: A Need for (Actual) Speed – U.S. broadband policy must take into account real network speeds, which lag advertised speeds by at least 50 percent, according to the FCC task force charged with helping to develop a national broadband plan. But just how policy should address the differences between the two is far from clear.
Metered Broadband Is the Future: Verizon CTO – Verizon Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch said today that in the coming years, wired broadband will likely be sold in packages based on the amount of data a person wants to consume, much like wireless broadband is sold today. In comments made to press at the 2009 Fiber to the Home Conference Expo in Houston, Lynch stressed that he wasn’t announcing a shift in pricing for Verizon, but that: “We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable.”
STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me – Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.
SEOmoz | Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage – This post focuses on a design style that's both retro (it's been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it's on the rise) – the single-purpose homepage.
Twitter Tips to Help Brands Stay Authentic and Transparent – Online Marketing Blog – Any marketer who’s successfully made the move to social media will tell you the rules of traditional marketing have to be reexamined. That’s particularly true with Twitter, where brands have just 140 characters to inform, evoke emotion and inspire action. One of the most basic and critical rules for brands on Twitter? Be authentic and transparent in all you do.
Five Search Marketing Tips For The Holidays – What is unique for holiday season 2009 are the specific strategies online retailers must take this year to reap the most sales possible. With lessons learned from last year’s bloated inventories and fire-sale prices, many retailers this year are restricting inventories and fine-tuning merchandising in an attempt to lure shoppers to purchase earlier and at higher prices. And, of course, the best way to get potential shoppers to your site is via search engine marketing. 82% of holiday shoppers polled by Google said they find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.
Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki – By 2001 web startup Third Voice, which let people annotate websites via a browser plugin, was done. Website owners just didn’t like the idea of people “defacing” their websites with comments they couldn’t control. But the idea has lingered (really), and now Google is taking a shot at their own version of the service. It’s called Sidewiki, and it just launched.
Microsoft’s Courier Tablet Is ‘Astonishing’ – Technology News Briefs | Newser – Microsoft’s foray into tablet computers looks to be “astonishing,” Gizmodo blogger The Paperboy raves after getting a look at leaked photo of the Courier, which has two screens and opens like a book. It has touch-screen and stylus capabilities, and is in the “late prototype” stage, sources say.
Courier: Microsoft Has an Apple Tablet Rival, And It Looks Impressive – microsoft courierAlthough the Apple Tablet remains one of the most hyped (and mysterious) upcoming devices, it’s now not expected to launch until February. In the meantime, a variety of other innovations are looking to steal some of its thunder.
STATS: 84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI – We talk a lot about the rapid adoption of social media in a wide array of industries. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.
Google Crowdsources Reader, Docs and Search Features – Google has just opened the floodgates. With millions of users, it's only natural that the company is prioritizing features and crowdsourcing new product ideas. In a recent blog post, the company has revamped Google Product Ideas as a series of separate feedback pages for iGoogle, Google Docs, Google SketchUp, Google Ad Planner, Google Custom Search and as of today, Google Reader.
Picasa 3.5: Ruining Your Good Name with Face Recognition Tagging – Say goodbye to your controlled web presence and say hello to Picasa 3.5. Google released Picasa 3.5 with a slew of new features including facial recognition and name-based batch tagging, faster geo-tagging and better web uploading functionality. The service is so good at finding your mug and tagging it that wild photos from yesteryear can resurface and wreak havoc on your reputation.
Yahoo! Search Gets a Massive Revamp | Search Engine Journal – There you go, Yahoo has just announced a major revamp of its search portal, particulary the search results format. According to the Yahoo Search blog the new Yahoo Search format aligns with the previous changes recently made on Yahoo’s other products such as the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messengers video calling feature.
Security Threat: WordPress Under Attack – To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.
WordPress › Blog » How to Keep WordPress Secure – Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
Improve Keyword Conversion Rates with Google Analytics – When you check all of your carefully selected and researched keywords, the results put a smile on your face because they are in the top spots in each of the search engines. You then look at your site traffic numbers for these keywords, and they are higher than ever. Then you scratch your head and ask, “Why are conversions so low?” Take a breath: the answer can be found in your Google Analytics data.
Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters – Need to save two characters in a tweet? You could rework your wording a bit (change “people” to “ppl” or “for” to “4” for example), or, if your tweet includes a link, you could turn to a shorter URL.
Bit.ly, Twitter’s default shortener, is already plenty short, but if you want the same experience in two less characters, you can now use j.mp, which appears to simply be bit.ly rebranded with a new URL.
Bad Neighborhood – Link Exchange Tool – Text links are an important factor in today's search engine optimization, and exchanging links with other websites is a good way to get them. However, doing a link exchange with a website that is penalized can have some detrimental results.
Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard? – On one hand Google doesn't abuse your data and personal information, other hand if the government and legal system comes knocking your information might not be safe from their eyes.
Facebook to Introduce Charity Gifts – Last week, we reported that Facebook was opening up its virtual gift shop to third-party developers and also introducing physical gifts, for example, being able to send someone a dozen roses using Facebook credits.
Do You Know Who’s on Twitter? – eMarketer – More than one-half of all Twitter users (53%) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66% are under 25, and another 15% are ages 25 to 29.
Google Now Identifying Businesses in Street View | WebProNews – Google has now made it easier to view businesses in Street View on Google Maps. When a user conducts a local search, the bubble that pops up on business results will show a Street View link.
How Google’s Caffeine Will Impact PPC – ClickZ – Every once in a while Google makes a major algorithmic change to its organic results. In reality, its organic algorithm changes at least monthly, if not more frequently, but the major changes are sometimes announced. Even when they aren't, these changes are quickly named by the industry, like hurricanes named at the time they prove themselves able to do damage.
This morning many of us social media addicts were greeted with a shock (being sarcastic here), Twitter was down. At first I didn’t think much of it, the micro-blogging service has had trouble scaling in the past. Although recently it has been holding up quite well.
But what set this morning’s outage apart from others was that Twitter wasn’t the only social media hub that was down. Facebook the “go-to” social media community online and a major Internet player was also down. The dominate social media community was viewable one second then offline the next. This continued on and off all morning.
After I realize that the outage wasn’t just Twitter having a “fail whale” moment, a slight panic set in. I called one of my associates to ask if his Twitter and Facebook were down… they were. At that point I slumped into my chair and thought to myself, “What are we going to do?! Is this the end of the world?”
No not really. I have to admit it was a bit of an annoyance not having the tools of my trade at my fingertips, but what bothered me most was that finding another service for communicating with everyone wasn’t as easy. Yes there was FriendFeed, which that worked quite well and did cure some of the withdrawal jitters, but it still wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t until two of the most powerful social media players were taken out of the equation did I realize how much we all, me very much included, had become dependent, or dare I say it, addicted to Twitter and Facebook.
These services aren’t just a way for people to waste time. They’re a way of communicating everyday and extraordinary events between people all across the world. Often times, news breaks on these platforms before the traditional media gets wind of it. Social media is becoming ingrained in the fibers of our society. Take that away and panic of varying degrees set in.
We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. Were working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
Below is my latest video that I recorded about the events of this morning. Watch it and please post your comments on how you survive the outage either in the comments or on the video’s Youtube page.
Twitter, Facebook, Social Media, these are all great tools for communicating. It’s natural to want to sell and make money of these platforms, but there is a way to do it and outwardly trying to sell and over-sell is not the way to do it.
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This morning many of us social media addicts were greeted with a shock (being sarcastic here), Twitter was down. At first I didn’t think much of it, the micro-blogging service has had trouble scaling in the past. Although recently it has been holding up quite well.
No not really. I have to admit it was a bit of an annoyance not having the tools of my trade at my fingertips, but what bothered me most was that finding another service for communicating with everyone wasn’t as easy. Yes there was FriendFeed, which that worked quite well and did cure some of the withdrawal jitters, but it still wasn’t the same.
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