Agriya Competition Entries
On the 2nd December I announced a competition where 5 lucky readers will be able to get their hands on the software product of their choice, get it installed and a logo designed.
http://blogs.agriya.com/agriyas-bumber-2000-christmas-giveaway
The deadline to enter the competition is today, we’ve gone through and screened all the entrants and made sure that they were following us and retweeted our message. Update: If you don’t see your name on the list, it could be because there are a few problems with the Twitter search function cutting us off at 7 days, we’re using another platform to try and locate everyone! The entrants are as follows:
pleikul
teddirez
Social_Scripts
N1ce0ne
mmc67
MA_Sweeper
bikerblue1972
butchsbitch
carogonza
mon_chi
FLSouthernSaver
jesseneverdie
covarrubias187
irdick666
schupka
Calikitano
opalbaker
Shelliclickedit
RA_TARD
sesynurse
cwcdw
frecklezMOM
lifeonprint
sweepstakesgirl
camper223
dolls123
SchoolsTube
pammlla
jbafaith
MissingLynxx
TeenModel
Teen_Model
Space_News
Mars_News
ibethel
dogbreeder
TheWorldNews
Top10Virals
ReddingNews
DanAndJennifer
Leannegip
minnies779
Momma2qtpies
AbdulMalickIf you don’t see your name on the list, tweet us @agriyanews or reply to this post, we’ll find you
Facebook’s Offensive New Worm
Facebook users are dealing with a new threat; it is a piece of malware that does some embarrassing stuff to its victims. What it does is, to begin with, is to post on your Facebook Wall (and that is an area your friends have access to with or without signing in) a picture of a woman in a bikini. When a friend follow the encouraging words below that exhort you to “click da button baby”, two things will happen. The friend will find the same image clogging up his wall, and he will also be taken to a pornographic site. It could be more than mere mischief that is the motivation behind this worm; it might well be that they get affiliate commissions from the website for putting traffic their way.
Some call it a worm, but Facebook denies it on its press release. So how does this piece of malware get its way? No one really knows, but it is likely that it could be a combination Clickjacking attempt and Cross-site Request Forgery attempt. A Cross-site Request Forgery attack occurs when an infected computer tries to use the credentials that a victim has among his friends to, post information on their Facebook Wall. Clickjackingit is a dangerous thing; and Facebook will find it nearly impossible to effectively block it. Clickjacking is when a website tries to get people to click on buttons on a page that are either invisible or use other methods of stealth. HTML code used in webpage programming basically allows a flaw that permits this; the flaw can allow hackers to create special webpages that will trick users into clicking on buttons without being aware of it.
Facebook declares that it has blocked the attack; nevertheless they warn members do not go and click on links that do not trust. It may be a little hard to find out what you don’t trust, given the kind of humor people usually adopt to stand out on the Facebook Wall.
Chrome Frame: Injecting New Life into Internet Explorer
Most ordinary folk get by on the computer with a few seat-of-the-pants skills. When you don’t really know the difference between an operating system, a browser, a search engine and “The Internets”though, the first sign of a complication could spell trouble. Google estimates that more than half of all computer users have no idea what a browser is, and what kind it is they use. This is a big problem for Google; how are they to get people to upgrade their old IE5 and IE6 browsers to the latest versions that are capable of running the best new Google applications like Gmail and Google Maps, and more importantly, Google Wave , when users don’t even know what a browser is?
The answer is a version of Google Chrome, a browser that has been out for more than a year now, and has seen no more than 3% in market acceptance. People may not aware of what a browser is, they all certainly know what a plug-in is, thanks to Adobe Flash, a plug-in that has achieved a 97% installed base on computers worldwide. Google’s idea in converting the vast numbers of browser upgrade holdouts is, to present their new browser Google Chrome not as a total browser they will need to upgrade to, but as a plug-in for their antique beat-up Internet Explorers.
The thing that will achieve this, is Chrome Frame. Google is working with web developers around the world who are similarly frustrated with the resistance people have to upgrades. From now on, anytime a Web user looks up a page that has complex JavaScript and HTML tag needs that an old Internet Explorer can’t handle, the webpage will serve up a pop-up that will ask the user if they would like to install a Chrome Frame plug-in to better display the page with. When the user clicks Yes, the pop-up will proceed to delete the old Internet Explorer’s coding on the computer, and replace it with brand new Google Chrome innards. It will still look like the old Internet Explorer, but it will function like the brand-new Chrome.
Google Wave is a particularly demanding Web application; it is supposed to work off the Internet, but work with the responsiveness of a desktop installation. This just would not happen with an older browser; and it makes it very important that a way be found to get everyone to upgrade. Google doesn’t actually profit from Chrome; donating its function to someone else’s name really doesn’t hurt Google.
SEO Failings at Large Companies
Corporations have a culture of trying their best at reducing everything important that affects their business down to simple numbers; and getting website or SEO success down to simple figures is a real puzzler. Major corporations just do not have any sympathy for the seat-of-your-pants process that is SEO. To corporate marketing departments who live and die by the focus group and traditional advertising, giving control over to the SEO desk at the IT department must be very difficult – especially the established interests at the marketing departments and the advertising agencies.
Retailing is really beginning to bite the dust these days. Why is it then that when you search for a product they might carry, the only thing that shows up at the top of the search listing is Amazon and eBay? Why not the regional discount majors? Perhaps those businesses think that getting their AdSense spot next to the search listings is enough. But it so happens that almost all searchers find it difficult to trust those ads.
Search for Sony Ericsson on Google; the first natural listing you get will be the global homepage where you to choose your region, with nothing else interesting going on. Search for Nokia, and you’ll straight away get your regional website , lots of content with no country select. Putting much content on the main authority page is good SEO. Another mistake made has to do with how there ends up being a lot of product information that is duplicated across dozens of pages. This makes it easier for a customer to search, but it is confusing for Google’s bots – and they turn their nose up at duplication.
The thing to do on an enterprise website design is to give each product page with similar content, a unique URL. Google needs to see which page of a bunch of similar ones is the main focus. Google also hates to see that there are not as many pages as promised on the website, or that there are as many pages as promised, but the pages are mostly empty.
There are many major companies out there that really need customer love on Google.And still, they do not make it to the top ten. SEO is an important resource that these companies could invest in.
In Japan, Tweets Cost Money to Read
Successful social networking sites haven’t exactly found a plan to turn their popularity into reliable revenue. Twitter in Japan operates through a local partner, Digital Garage, that is launching a paid Twitter service there. Twitter users in Japan are able under this plan, to close their tweets to followers unless they pay up. Digital garage of course, gets a commission. Why does Twitter imagine that anyone would pay to read a tweet? The answer lies in the way the Japanese Internet industry is built.
To begin with, paying for online content is pretty much established in Japan. People access premium content through their cell phones regularly, and pay through their monthly mobile bills. Why, Internet on cell phones is even more popular in Japan than Internet on PC. Japan is also a considerably more celebrity-crazed culture than elsewhere, and people will happily pay to keep up with the latest on their favorites. They don’t have to be international superstars or anything; a Twitter recipe feed by a celebrity chef for example, attracts fanatical following. And value for money is somewhat easier to provide in the Japanese script; the Japanese script allows more information to be packed into 140 characters than does English.
Keeping up is much easier when there is a proper and official Twitter client to use on the cell phone, as there is in Japan. Twitter’s 2 million users in Japan can certainly give the paid model enough momentum. All eyes rest on this preliminary foray into turning social networking into a paying business model. Time will tell how successful it is.
Is Facebook’s “25 Random Things” the Latest Incarnation of the Chain-letter?
On the terrible morning of the 9/11 attacks, the news crawls related pieces of the grave news all day; until someone decided to put in the crawl the following words: ”Beyonce no longer likes the word Bootylicious”, right next to news of how people were trapped in the burning buildings. The world has been moving towards context-free, reason-free information for a decade now: sound bites, news crawls – all trailers of parts of the world of news you will never see – served up predigested. And now, this: Facebook’s 25 Random Things. It goes like this: your Facebook friends will send you an e-mail of 25 obscure, maddeningly irrelevant facts about themselves. They’ll say things like how “ I watched the 17th episode of Friends 700 times”, or “I taped back my eyelids and tried staring at the sun three hours straight in the middle of summer”. What’s more, they’ll show you how to do much the same yourself, and will encourage you to compile a list of 25 banalities to send to 25 other people. No one really knows what will come of this, but this has to be the latest in the chain-letter concept that refuses to die.
This then, is how Internet bandwidth is used; just try this if you will: search for “Facebook’s 25 Random Things” on a search engine; your trouble will reward you with tens of thousands of such lists, all cleverly brought together by Facebook – they’re the ones who embrace this the most enthusiastically. Facebook’s reasoning is that such an exercise helps you contemplate the meaning of your existence. The Random Things meme is certainly sweeping the Internet up ; there were 5 million notes created last week for Random Things compilations. Facebook admits that this is a kind of record in note making. The whole “Random Things” concept has been around ever since the dawn of email: the 100 questions fad. Some things just never die.
Text-link Advertising – Sneaky, and Possibly even Illegal SEO
Have you heard of InLinks, the new SEO product from the advertising company MediaWhiz? This is how it works. Businesses or anyone who wants Google to think of their website when anyone types in certain keywords into the search box, start by buying advertising from MediaWhiz. The advertising company will use the advertising to pay blogs around the Internet to look up those keywords in their stories ,and and turn them into proper links (not ghost links that can tip off Google) to the advertiser’s website. With lots of links pointing inward, Google will think the advertiser’s site is pretty important and rank it high.
There is just a little problem with this scheme though: it is against the law in many countries, to manipulate search results with payments made. It is considered an unfair trade practice. Google certainly seems to have no real way of identifying when websites do this. But one wonders, what could happen if Google does find a way. Those advertisers could suddenly find their websites blacklisted. One way they could find out right now, is to compare an old cached copy of the website to a new version with many new links suddenly pointing inward. What if it puts them in the sandbox? This kind of maneuver is known as Text-Link advertising and Google is already asking Internet users to report these websites.
What kind of blogs are they that sell links to the highest bidder? Well, Engadget and Gizmodo do, charging just a few dollars a month per link. And Google would be able to see there was something funny going on to suddenly have a bunch of keyword links appear on an old article. Keywords are usually there was an article goes online the first time.
If You Call Google’s AdSense Revolutionary, What do you Call Facebook’s Social Maps?
The old Web was bumping along just fine until YouTube, Facebook and the others came along and gave it a shot in the arm and turned it into Web 2.0. But Google & Co. aren’t content with just changing the Web; they’ve turned out to control the Web, and therefore all the advertising that is done on it. The problem that the advertising industry has traditionally been raised to solve is: how do you catch the consumer off-guard and serve him an advertisement, he may not want to watch, or believe? There was consumer resistance in traditional advertising, but at least the companies held some control in their own hands how much money to spend to brainwash the consumer. But barely has the advertising industry caught up to how AdSense and search results work, than Facebook comes along to finish off the traditional advertising premise altogether.
Businesses at least had the consolation back then that the consumer had not much else to turn to for product information other than company-controlled advertising. But they do now: forums, Facebook, and Twitter. People have a hundred Facebook friends, and whatever they feel about a product, they vent their feelings and generate powerful word-of-mouth. When friends receive product information from a “friend”, the advertisers suddenly arte made irrelevant and have nothing left to say. Word of mouth has always found a great friend in the Internet of course; but Facebook and Twitter make word-of mouth particularly powerful.
For instance, when you have your own social networking facility on a company intra-net or a trade group the familiarity and identity felt with other members of your group is particularly strong. Advertised opinions will pale in comparison. Facebook’s social map Loomla, or Connect, for example, bring along you your personal cloud of trusted friends wherever you visit on the Internet. Any place you visit on the Internet, Loomla or Connect will tell you how many of your Facebook friends have visited before, read it, and said something about it. It’s like travelling with your own crowd of friends no matter where you go. And if any advertiser is going to want to get to you, he’s going to come through your friends. Perhaps Facebook is going to overtake Google and its AdSense after all in online advertising.
Social Networking When Things do not go as Planned
Facebook posts, rants in cyberspace, personal e-mail, are all a part of the good life. Exactly how will we feel about all our digital tracks when life isn’t that good though? It is all over the news how a little careless Facebook mistake by a woman in Canada put her disability benefits into doubt. Well, what else could happen if you were careless with your Facebook revelations?
Let’s say in happier times a couple had a crazy party; one of them is just very proud of the partying he is capable of, and impulsively posts pictures of his wild hijinks on Facebook. In a child custody battle, how would party photos of him in drag strike the judge? If you personally manage to be discreet with your own profile, what do you do about descriptions of your life that your friends have on their page? They may not be too discreet themselves; they could open your life to one and all.
After a particularly sad event like a death in the family, what does one do with the online presences used by the deceased? One could plan for such an event, by placing all of one’s passwords on a service like Legacy Locker; they allow you to record all your important passwords, to be turned over to family, when they prove that an unfortunate event has occurred. Facebook will help you keep the account of the dearly departed, but will help you make it less live, by removing status updates and such. Some e-mail companies like Hotmail, will help you out by sending you a CD’s worth of the entire e-mail account held by the departed.
Internet services like social networking are so new and so full of life now that no one really wants to think of how reality can spoil the party. But as people like to repeat a lot these days, these are parts of your digital life; you wouldn’t want it to just get lost in space, or get into the wrong hands, now would you?
Information Security on Facebook – Learning to be Aware
It gets people all hot under the collar thinking about how the social networking sites might be careless with members’ personal friend lists and personal information. But what if those same privacy-jealous social networking members freely pass out their friend lists themselves – on other websites? Social maps exist now, like Facebook Connect, that allow members to carry their Facebook experience, to Amazon, to the New York Times, to Netflix or on any of 10,000 participating sites, and find out what their friends like on those websites.Do the people who connect with social maps realize that those websites they go to with their social maps can actually completely look into their profiles and those of their friends too? When they find out where you go, what you do, who your friends are and what you look like, who knows what they will do with it? Digg for example will use your Facebook profile picture to publish next to recommendations. Other websites will try to share the information they harvest on your viewing habits among fellow businesses. Your Facebook information properly analyzed, can lucratively help them target advertisements to you wherever you may be in the world signing in through that Facebook account.
Only two years ago, the Facebook Beacon app brought all kinds of privacy concerns up; when a user went around the Internet while signed in into Facebook, Beacon was able to record all the places visited and phone home to Facebook. The biggest problem there was, that Beacon was turned on by default; Facebook’s Connect on the other hand, has to be turned on manually.
Facebook Connect also allows you to use your Facebook username and password to log in into participating websites; and then you can choose to have Facebook publish all your Internet meanderings on your profile. They are all doing it these days: MySpace with MySpaceID, and Google with Friend Connect. Of course, there are larger concerns here than having some private company look at Facebook’s information to send you advertising. The courts could subpoena your personal information from Facebook any day if they have reason to believe there is incriminating information there.
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