These are my links for December 30th through December 31st:
Digg Takes a Dip In Traffic, Half The Size Of Twitter – But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
In 2009, Social Media Overtook Web 2.0 [GRAPHS] – While its definition is not yet etched in stone, most believe it describes a new type of media and communication that creates a world conversation and dialogue. Instead of being fed news (a one-to-many dissemination approach), everyone is welcomed to be a content creator and to generate a debate around that content. While its focus is the web, it goes beyond it as well.
FCC Chairman’s Facebook Account Compromised – The New York Times’ Bits blog is reporting that FCC head honcho Julius Genachowsi — the man in the middle of the net neutrality initiatives and the Google-Apple disputes — has fallen victim to the fraudulent activity of scammers on Facebook.
Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 – Facebook has been around for more than five years, but it hit critical mass and exploded in 2009. As the new decade begins, the fallout is blowing over the entire web. Facebook Connect is everywhere, in case you hadn’t heard. We’re talking 60 million users on 80,000 web sites
Facebook App’s Password Data Breach Turns into Lawsuit – Facebook and MySpace app maker and advertising network RockYou isn’t having a great December. Earlier this month, 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker going by the alias of “igigi.” That’s more than half of RockYou’s monthly active users.
The Androidification of Everything – GigaOM – A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)
Is Microsoft’s DRM Patent for P2P Networks Too Late, or Ahead of Its Time? – If Microsoft’s freshly granted patent for a digital rights management system sounds like a 2003 idea coming to fruition in 2009, that’s because it is — the patent that was granted yesterday was filed six years ago. The newly codified bit of intellectual property is a DRM system that’s distributed over peer-to-peer networks, decentralizing a processing mechanism that traditionally resides on a central server. The entertainment industry has used DRM to prevent unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material, but it’s been largely abandoned by the music business in response to customer demand for unprotected files.
Twitter Gets an Unofficial App Store [INVITES] – One of Twitter’s fundamental strengths is its third-party ecosystem. From sending tweets, tracking stats or sharing media, there are web apps, desktop clients, mobile apps and services that add value to the microblogging juggernaut.
Google Wave Team Gives Up on Internet Explorer | Smarterware – After “countless hours” of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released Google Chrome Frame, an IE add-on that puts Chrome’s backend inside Internet Explorer. Next week another batch of Google Wave invitations will go out, and IE users will have to install Chrome Frame or switch to Firefox or Safari to try Wave. (The screenshot is the prompt IE users will get when they try to log into Wave.)
Why Your Company Needs Social Media | Search Engine Journal – There are case studies abound of how big brands such as Zappos, Jet Blue, Comcast, etc. have put social media into action and the success that they’ve had with it. Can small businesses be just as successful using social media? Absolutely! There are many advantages of using social media during the sales process for customer service, sales prospecting and customer retention for small businesses.
Google Says, Referrer Spam Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings – Referrer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer's site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.
This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer's site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use.
Apple: New Nano Not Banned By Health Club Chain – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – The hot button topic of the day among Apple (AAPL) obsessives was the theory that the new video-camera equipped iPod Nano might be banned in health clubs. That would not be good news, given the number of people that buy iPods specifically to listen to music while working out.
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 Grew Twice As Fast As Twitter In July – Facebook not only bought Friendfeed this month they grew twice as fast as twitter in July. Making them the clear dominant market leader.
YouTube Launches Its Redesign – Now that redesign is going live for all users. If you take a look at YouTube (YouTube).com, you will see the new interface for yourself. YouTube has also blogged about the redesign, explaining some of the new features and a few that were removed. Here’s the text and a screenshot:
Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Caffeine Injection Gives Google Search a Boost – For instance, Caffeine is undoubtedly faster than the current Google Search, often coming back with results in about half the time. It also appears to crawl many more pages–sometimes twice as many for a particular keyword. And according to some pundits, Caffeine's results suggest that it also uses a more complex combination of keywords to rank pages.
Pixorial: Bringing Sexy Back to Online Video Editing? – Put together by former executives from Netscape and Oracle, Pixorial has been in private beta since January of this year. Its mission is to “help people do more with video memories than ever before,” and to that end offers an interesting mix of digital and analog video services.
2009 Facebook and Twitter Growth by Age Group | Ignite Social Media – The following chart by Nielsen shows that audiences above 25 have experienced a whopping 84% growth in Twitter adoption over the past 6 months. Also interesting is the 20% growth happening within the 55+ age range, compared to the 16% increase in 2-24 year olds. This slight discrepancy in growth doesn’t mean that younger audiences aren’t interested in Twitter, but suggests that they have already adopted it. (Also, after seeing the age ranges listed on this chart, I now want to see what a two-year old would tweet.)
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) – Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, weve learned. Were gathering details now.At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but its clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has borrowed quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the Like feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.
6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To – Everyone is always looking for new ways to get more Twitter followers. Well, one of the best ways to do this is by getting discovered through Twitter directories. There are many out there to choose from and its very quick and easy to add yourself to them. So, here are a few to get you started. Feel free to share your favorite (whether listed or not) in the comments.
What is a Natural Link Growth Profile? | SEO Book.com – 3 Common Link Building Strategies1. spiky. if the spikes are associated with news and viral marketing then that is not a big problem, but if they are sorta bought links, low quality links, etc. then this is sorta the worst way to do it.
2. linear. not as bad as spiky…but not as good as geometric. this is where a webmaster tries to build the same number of links each month.
3. geometric. this is where link building starts off slow, but then keeps getting better each month.
Company Boasts it Sold Twitter Followers to Michael Jackson – With the increasing popularity of social media sites and the power of marketing on them, more and more people have been investing in services which can increase their rankings faster than they could do on their own.One such service is the highly-controversial paid Twitter follower service which has been offered by web promotions company uSocial.net for several months now. Now theyre claiming theyve had the attention of some of the worlds largest names, including one interesting one in particular.
Reporting SERP Spam: Know How to Report & Reclaim Your Rankings – Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, theyre at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
Twitter Co-Founder: Attacks Continue to Change in Nature and Intensity – Apparently, were not out of the woods just yet. While Twitter itself has been working reliably for most of the day, some third-party applications remain impacted by measures the company has taken to defend against DDoS attacks.
Here are some tips the Googlers gave to make sure you site is safe:
What can you do?
This isn’t an easy problem to solve – the bad guys are attacking a wide range of sites and seem to be able to adapt their scripts to get around countermeasures. Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through. Here are some things you can do to make their lives more difficult and keep your site clean and useful:
Make sure you have standard security features in place, including CAPTCHAs, to make it harder for spammers to create accounts en masse. Watch out for unlikely behavior – thousands of new user accounts created from the same IP address, new users sending out thousands of friend requests, etc. There is no simple solution to this problem, but often some simple checks will catch most of the worst spam.
Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts. We often see large numbers of fake profiles on one innocent site all linking to the same domain, so once you find one, you should make it simple to remove all of them.
Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and other security holes that allow spammers to inject questionable code onto their profile pages. We’ve seen techniques such as JavaScript used to redirect users to other sites, iframes that attempt to give users malware, and custom CSS code used to cover over your page with spammy content.
Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages. This makes your site less attractive to anyone trying to pass PageRank from your site to their spammy site. Spammers seem to go after the low-hanging fruit, so even just nofollowing new profiles with few signals of trustworthiness will go a long way toward mitigating the problem. On the flip side, you could also consider manually or automatically lifting the nofollow attribute on links created by community members that are likely more trustworthy, such as those who have contributed substantive content over time.
Consider noindexing profile pages for new, not yet trustworthy users. You may even want to make initial profile pages completely private, especially if the bulk of the content on your site is in blogs, forums, or other types of pages.
Add a “report spam” feature to user profiles and friend invitations. Let your users help you solve the problem – they care about your community and are annoyed by spam too.
Monitor your site for spammy pages. One of the best tools for this is Google Alerts – set up a site: query along with commercial or adult keywords that you wouldn’t expect to see on your site. This is also a great tool to help detect hacked pages. You can also check ‘Keywords’ data in Webmaster Tools for strange, volatile vocabulary.
Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries. It’s always great to see the line on your pageviews chart head upward, but pay attention to commercial or adult queries that don’t fit your site’s content. In cases like this where a spammer has abused your site, that traffic will provide little if any benefit while introducing users to your site as “the place that redirected me to that virus.”
Has your site ever been hacked? Have you ever fallen for a fake profile? (You can admit it, we won’t tease you.) Share your experience in the comments.
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