What's Happened in Social Media Over the Year

From WebPro News

The Year in Social Media: 2009 

As we did last year, we have gone back through our archives and picked out some of the most noteworthy social media items we have covered since 2009 began. Now that 2009 is almost over, it was worth going back and seeing what all has happened. 

January 

In January, Twitter announced that it hired Kevin Thau as Director of Mobile Business Development, and that he would be working on a variety of different fronts as Twitter's "first official business development guru." LinkedIn introduced a new Polls feature, and launched a bookmarklet for IE. MySpace Music made dealswith Nettwerk Music Group, INgrooves, IRIS Distribution, and RoyaltyShare to bolster its catalog by hundreds of thousands of songs. YouTube expanded its e-commerce platform and started letting people delete their own comments. Digglaunched the "People who Dugg this also Dugg" feature. 

February 

In February, LinkedIn launched a set of HR Tools and launched a German version. MySpace launched a mobile redesign, and Digg updated its algorithm. Facebook introduced polling ads, changed its terms of service, made some design changesto profile pages for businesses, opened its corporate blog to comments, introduced the comments box widget, and launched the "like" button. Google introduced the Social Bar and launched Friend Connect integration with Blogger. 

March 

In March, Twitter brought its search box to most people's Twitter home page, andchanged the "replies" tab to the "@username" tab. Twitter also adjusted the title tags for member pages. Where they used to go "Twitter / username" they would now go "User's Real Name (username) on Twitter". Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanisoffered to buy a spot on Twitter's Suggested Users list. 

Facebook launched a redesign, started including updates from Pages in the news feed, changed pages to operate like profiles, and changed the status box to the publisher box. They launched the ability to let users chat within apps, added ad spots to Pages, relaunched Facebook Marketplace to be powered by online classified service Oodle, launched Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod Touch, launched some new ad targeting options, and enabled Page owners to let people sign up to become fans via text message. 

Google began implementing Portable Contacts, launched the Friend Connect API,blended user-generated content into search results on Google Maps, madeGoogle Reader more socialwith commenting, allowed forricher Gmail messages, andstarted its own Twitter accounts. 

YouTube changed the name of some video sections, LinkedIn did some redesigning of its own and enhanced Direct Ads, and MySpace was stamped on a credit card. 

April 

Google launched an event gadget for Google Friend Connect, the Digg-like "What's Popular" gadget, and the "Get Answers" gadget for Friend Connect. Google also gave profiles vanity URLS and started putting profiles into search results. 

Facebook made it easier to organize friends, opened its stream up to third-party developers, added electronic signatures for public pages, worked with the blind on accessibility, began making app recommendations, and readied its next steps in governance. 

Twitter started integrating search into its interface more, and CNN showed that you can buy/sell a Twitter account. Scientists created a brain-Twitter interface. 

StumbleUpon broke away from eBay and enhanced its "web stumbling." Digg launched the controversial DiggBar. Reddit launched a video site, AOL launched SocialThing, and Yahoo shifted its focus to social altogether. YouTube launched the beta version of YouTube RealTime. MySpace got some new management. 

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Merry Christmas!!!

I'm not a Christian, but i think that i don't have any problem with greeting you for the Christmas.
Merry X'mas to all the people in the world!!!
And also the next year will be a great year for all of you...

Google Now Has Its Own URL Shortener

From WebPro News

Google made a couple of announcements today that actually combined for perhaps a more interesting announcement than either of them as stand-alone news items.

First, Google has added a new share button to the Google Toolbar, which allows users to share any site on the web via their social network of choice. Second, Google announced that with Feedburner, you can now set your feeds up to post to Twitter. 

The thing that these two announcements have in common is that they both utilize a new URL shortener from Google. They tried to slip that in their quietly a couple of times, but then went ahead and made an announcement about the service itself. 

The shortening service is located at goo.gl, but it is not available for broad consumer use at this point. Google is just using it itself to compliment the aforementioned services. In other words, you can't just go to goo.gl and shorten a URL yourself. However, Google says that in time, it may offer such an option.

"We think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links," Google says. They also say the core goals of the Google URL Shortener are:

- Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
- Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
- Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google's standard privacy policy applies to goo.gl. The company says that it may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end use clicks. 

On a related note, Facebook also now has its own URL shortener. 

Facebook URL Shortener Makes Appearance

From WebPro News

Long URLs cut into character limits, are difficult to remember, and simply look awkward.  Quite a little industry has sprung up in response.  Only it looks like a major player is now entering the game, as a URL shortener created by Facebook has been sighted.

Ryan Spoon first wrote about links built around the characters "FB.me" this weekend.  Since, then, more and more examples have been found, and although Facebook has yet to announce anything official, there's no reason to believe that FB.me won't go live for everyone at some point.

This could spell doom for entities like Bit.ly, Is.gd, and Ow.ly.  FB.me works as a standard shortener, but with the backing of Facebook, it's likely to prove more reliable, and will also have a marketing/name recognition head start.

Then it's got one extra trick: as Saad Kamal noted, "[I]f your Profile URL is say - http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks, now you can even write it as http://fb.me/starbucks and it will still go to the exact same page."

Of course, Facebook isn't guaranteed victory in the URL shortener field.  Aside from the existing competition, it's possible that Google (or Goo.gl, if you like) will act as a rival.

Facebook Tests "Many" New Design Changes

From WebPro News

Reports and screenshots have surfaced indicating possible further design changes to the Facebook home page. These changes would include an altered header with drop-down menus for things like chat, messages, and notifications (Via SAI). 

There would also be greater emphasis placed on the search box. It would be moved further to the left, and more into the center of the page. Such emphasis on search would make sense, as Facebook has greater real-time search functionality these days than what it once had (particularly since its acquisition of FriendFeed).

Screenshot from French publication PCInpact.com (they have several more).

Let's not get too carried away though. These changes are only tests at this point, and may or may not ever see the light of day for Facebook users at the mainstream level. 

A Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews, "We are continually experimenting with new designs on the site that are meant to simplify and improve the user experience. These are just a couple of the many changes we're testing."

Whenever Facebook makes design changes, there is usually some amount of backlash from users. That doesn't stop them from continuing to make tweaks, however. In the end, users are likely to get used to or accept the changes either way. I don't think the world is ready to abandon Facebook for the next big thing just yet. 

Yahoo Releases Top Searches Of 2009

From WebPro News

Yahoo has released its top 10 overall searches for 2009, based on billions of queries over the past year.

Michael Jackson garnered the most searches of 2009, after his death in June of a drug overdose. Jackson bumped Britney Spears from the top position where she had dominated for the past four years.  Spears still made it into the top 10 landing in the fifth spot on the year.

"We saw consumers escape to the Web hoping to pursue news and their guilty pleasures: vampires, political implosions, how to moonwalk - you name it, people went online to find it," said Vera Chan, a Yahoo! Search trend analyst. 

"And with economic uncertainty looming, people looked for ways to find stability by searching the Web for new jobs, unemployment benefits, and ways to save through old-fashioned coupon hunting."

Here are the Top 10 Overall Searches for 2009 according to Yahoo:

1.    Michael Jackson 
2.    Twilight 
3.    WWE 
4.    Megan Fox 
5.    Britney Spears 
6.    Naruto 
7.    American Idol 
8.    Kim Kardashian 
9.    NASCAR 
10.  Runescape

For comparison you can checkout Bing's most popular trending topics of 2009 here.

New Film Website Offers 12,000 Clips From Major Studios

From WebPro News

Clip sharing site Movieclips.com has launched in beta with a catalogue of more than 12,000 two-minute streaming clips.

Movieclips has struck licensing deals with six major Hollywood studios including 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. The clips are available for free on an ad-supported network that links to third-party sites where users can rent or purchase full length films.

Movieclips features a video player that can be embedded in social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and shared on blogs, Twitter and other personal websites.

Users can search the site based on dialogue, mood or actor as well as browse by subject such as best kiss, tearjerkers, birthdays, holidays, awkward moments, scariest bad guy and best fight scenes.

"Our goal was to build a place where we could easily find, watch, and share all the best movie scenes," said Co-Founder and CEO Zach James.

"Our content partners are incredible. They made it possible for us to build the greatest collection of licensed movie clips online today. It's pretty cool to be able to send a clip from Sixteen Candles to my sister on her birthday or a Wayne's World 'Party on!' clip to my friends on a Friday night."

YouTube Gets Faster With "Feather" Beta

from WebPro News

YouTube's supposed to be fun and easy to use; people want to visit the site and, in short order, view all sorts of interesting clips.  Making things load more quickly is a solid goal, then, and Google's pursuing it with the launch of a new project called "Feather."

The official explanation states, "The 'Feather' project is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible.  It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser."

By Alex Chitu's count, Feather's quite effective, too, taking that total from the neighborhood of 400 KB (391 KB, to be exact) to 52 KB.  And it'll probably be a rare person who can't live without search suggestions, the option to make a comment, and the couple of other things it cuts.

Perhaps the one issue would-be users should watch out for is the fact that Feather doesn't yet work for all videos.

Otherwise, this development counts as a very nice step forward in Google's march to make the Web faster.

Will a Lack of Editors Affect Wikipedia Accuracy?

From WebPro News

Wikipedia is a very useful site for anyone looking to find information on any given topic. Chances are that you have used it for research at one time or another. Even if you don't start by going directly to Wikipedia, results from the site are often at the top of search results in Google, and you'll get there anyway. 

Those Google results likely play a significant role, but Wikipedia's popularity is as great as ever. Right now, it is cited as the fifth most popular site in the entire world. It gets 325 million monthly visitors, and the number of visitors grew 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing data from comScore. 

The WSJ also says that the number of editors Wikipedia has is dwindling. They say thatWikipedia lost over 49,000 editors in the first three months of 2009 alone. During the same period the previous year, Wikipedia lost only 4,900 (WSJ attributes these figures to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega. His thesis on the subject can be found here [pdf]). 

The accuracy of information on Wikipedia has always been something to be leery of, simply because of the open format of it. If you give the public access to things, some people will abuse it. Even if their intentions aren't bad, they may still just post inaccurate information. Wikipedia's has taken measures over time to try and weed out the bad, by making stricter policies for content addition. These days, altering or contributing to Wikipedia content is no easy feat. 

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Google Wave Gets a Feature for "Following"

from WebPro News

Google has added a "follow" feature to Google Wave. The feature is designed to let users stay up to date on public waves of interest. In other words, if there are waves out there that are available to everybody, and you want to follow it, simply click the follow button for that particular wave. 

When a user adds you to a Wave, or if you contribute to one, you will automatically be "following" that wave. You can remove waves from your inbox by hitting the "archive" button, but they will come back when they are updated. Users can switch between unfollowing and following waves as often as they like.

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Google to Show Off Chrome OS This Week

From WebPro News

Update: According to TechCrunch, Google will be holding a special Chrome OS eventon Thursday morning, where they will show off demos and give an overview of the product, now said to be launching next year.

Original Article: Michael Arrington from TechCrunch claims to have heard from "a reliable source" that Google will be launching the much-anticipated Chrome OS within a week. The tech industry media has been punked on Chrome OS in the past, but as Arrington notes, Google has said to expect it in the fall, and fall is running out. 

Chrome OS is Google's attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." It's an open source, "lightweight" operating system to be initially targeted at netbooks.

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS," Google said upon the Chrome OS announcement. "We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform," the company continued. "All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

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Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

From WebPro News

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google? 

Don't worry, it hasn't had an impact...yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google's Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor. 

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

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5 Less Obvious Online Reputation Management Issues

from WebPro News

There are a lot of elements to online reputation management. Really, depending on how far you want to take it, the elements are basically limitless. Any web property out there that gives people a voice caters to potential reputation smearing. 

There have been entire books written about online reputation management, and countless articles, but I just wanted to take the time to point out five things to keep track of that you may not have considered (or maybe you have...if so, good thinking). 

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YouTube Connects News Outlets With Citizen Reporters

YouTube has launched a new video platform called YouTube Direct that allows users to submit relevant videos to participating news organizations for broadcast.

All videos submitted to news organizations and approved by their editors will appear on YouTube with a link back to the news site.

Key features of YouTube Direct include:
   

• Built on the YouTube API, this 100% open-source solution provides you with an easily-integrated audience engagement platform for your website
• The customizable interface allows you to tailor the look and feel of the tool precisely to your audience
• Visitors can answer your call for content by uploading their videos to YouTube via your site without leaving the page
• A moderation panel enables your editors to review and approve/reject all submitted videos, deciding which ones meet your organization's editorial criteria

Read More >>>

YouTube Talks Up Social Side

from WebPro News

YouTube wants you to know that it's not just a place for individuals to watch videos.  This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

As usual, YouTube kept a bunch of numbers to itself; don't go looking for either a whole lot of data or many specific digits (think "1.63 million" as opposed to rounded-off descriptive words).  Still, the first fact that a post on the YouTube Blog shared was that "[o]ver one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader," which is an interesting detail.

Then here's another one: "Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com."  So it's not like a bunch of people are just spewing out clips into a void.

Finally, "Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature."

YouTube's turning into quite the little community, then.  And since it plans to keep introducing new social features (and probably reminding us about the existing ones), this aspect of the site is liable to grow.

Google Chrome For Mac May Hit Beta In December

Mac users who've been feeling left out since the introduction of Google Chrome (which occurred way back in September of 2008) may finally be set to receive a sort of nod of inclusion.  A Mountain View-based product manager has indicated that a beta version of Chrome for Mac will launch in December.

Nick Baum wrote yesterday in a Google Groups post, "The extensions team has been working hard to get BrowserActions ready, and they're already working great on Windows and Linux.  We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI.  We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well!"

Then Baum got to the Mac-related heart of the matter, continuing, "Why make the switch now?  The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December.  We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that.  If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

And since it took Google about three months to remove the beta tag from the first version of Chrome, that may mean that a finalized Chrome for Mac will available before February.

This isn't a firm timeline, of course, but it at least looks almost certain that Google is going to ramp up its efforts.  Hat tip goes to Stephen Shankland.

Thin Film's Solar Share to Double by 2013

from Semiconductor International

With the price of polysilicon cut by more than half last year, thin-film photovoltaics has lost its edge against crystalline silicon technologies. Nonetheless, its share of the solar panel market is expected to grow from 14% last year to 31% in 2013, according to iSuppli. more » » »  

8 Reasons You Need to Stop Ignoring Twitter

There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter's place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.


1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.



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Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

from WebPro News

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese. 

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point. 

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

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By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

from WebPro News

Twitter has introduced a new widget for the Lists feature. If you are unfamiliar withTwitter's widgets, there is one that lets you display your most recent Twitter updates on a web page, one that lets you display search results in real time, and one that lets you show off your favorite tweets. 

The Lists Widget is fully customizable. You start off by selecting the username of the account you want to pull lists from, then choose the list name, title it, and give it a caption.

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Thinking Beyond Facebook and Twitter for Social Relevance

from Web Pro News

When you think about social media marketing or building your social media presence, you probably think about Facebook or Twitter, or perhaps YouTube or MySpace. That's good. These are some of the top places on the Internet where people are spending their time online.

That said, there are probably plenty of places that you are either overlooking or just plain ignoring. They might not have the broad user-bases of the aforementioned services, but there are people there, and the more people you can reach and engage with, the better off you may be in some cases (depending on your goals for social network use). 

According to Hitwise data, the top ten social networking websites and forums by US market share of visits looked like this:

To be clear, the Hitwise data from which MarketingCharts compiled the above graph is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from Hitwise's sample of 10 million US internet users. It's unclear exactly what all kinds of sites fall into the social networks category.

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Help to save a valuable life...

Please read this and help to save this valuable life

 Dear Sir / Madam,

 Asanka Bandara Alahakoon (21 yrs) is a first year student of Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa reading for BSc in Fashion Design and Product Development.  He is one of the very few students who was lucky enough to get the opportunity to attend University of Moratuwa from Anuradhapura district. He is the second child of the family of four, and two of his younger brothers are still schooling while the elder brother is following a short term course at the Technical College.

Unfortunately, Asanka is suffering from a kidney failure (End Stage Renal Failure). He has to undergo dialysis treatment every five days. Doctors treating him have recommended for a kidney transplant surgery which costs around Rs. 700,000. But his parents cannot afford this cost by themselves given dire economic circumstances experienced by the family. (His father is a farmer and mother is not employed)

We, The Engineering Faculty Students' Union (EFSU) are helping our fellow student in collecting this large sum of money as soon as possible. All the documents regarding this are attached with this mail. We will be grateful if you could remit your donations to below mentioned bank account and help to save this valuable life.

A/C No: 9773893 (Bank of Ceylon – Anuradhapura Branch)

A/C Holder: A.M.N.B. Alahakoon

Contact for more details:

Home

Father of Asanka:   K.P. Alahakoon

                                    Keda Rathmale,

                                    Parasangaswewa,

                                    Anuradhapura.

                                   

Mobile: +947 12750256

Engineering Faculty Students' Union

University of Moratuwa , Katubedda, Moratuwa , Sri Lanka .

President:     Kavinga Karunasekara

Mobile: +947 79147481

E-mail: ane750@yahoo.com

Secretary: Lasantha Rawisanka

Mobile: +947 16038786

E-mail: sec.efsu@gmail.com

Faculty of Engineering batch mates

Wenuka Chathuranga (+9478 5507623)

Kalinga De Silva (+947 18054726)

Please pass on this message to everyone you can.

Thanking you,

Lasantha Rawisanka

Secretary

Engineering Faculty Students' Union

Faculty of Engineering

University of Moratuwa

Sri Lanka.

Google Connects Friends on WordPress Blogs

Google has developed a plug-in for WordPress that adds the social features of Google Friend Connect to WordPress blogs. The plug-in allows visitors to these blogs to authenticate using any OpenID account, including Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on posts without having to register. When a visitor authenticates, it creates a WordPress account.

"You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages," explains Mauro Gonzalez, who developed the plug-in. "If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments gadgets. In this case, no WordPress account is created, since Google Friend Connect handles both the rendering of the comments as well as comments moderation. Regardless of whether the Google Friend Connect comments gadgets are enabled or not, comment entries display the user profile picture and link to the user’s profile."

There is a set of social gadgets available that includes the Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global Conversation gadgets. "When recommendations are enabled, a 'Recommend' button is displayed below your posts allowing the site members to choose the content they like most," says Gonzalez. "The most popular posts will surface to the top of the list within the recommendations gadget."



More >>>

Microsoft and Google Score Deals with Twitter

Update: Bing has now made the announcments and Google has announced a deal with Twitter too. Google's Marissa Mayer writes:

...we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Original Article: Microsoft is expected to announce two separate deals today - one with Twitter and one with Facebook. From the sound of it, the deals would be similar in nature, both giving Bing access to index status updates from both social networks. 

Kara Swisher at Boomtown says that both deals are confirmed and are expected to be announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 summit. The deals are non-exclusive, however. And you know what that means. 

Google has been reported to have been talking with both Twitter and Facebook too, and it would be no surprise to see deals made there as well. 

But this is Microsoft's moment. But what will it mean as far as status updates from both Twitter and Facebook?

Read More >>>

Facebook Really Wants You to Integrate it Into Your Site

from WebPro News

Launches New Create Application API

Facebook has launched the Create Application API, which is aimed at making it easier for users to integrate Facebook on their websites and widgets. 

"Many websites are looking for ways to integrate Facebook Connect, such as commenting using Facebook identity or showing visitors their Facebook friends' recent activity," says Facebook software engineer Vishu Gupta. "Companies like DISQUS offer widgets to such websites, providing off-the-shelf Facebook integration with just a few clicks."

"Every website that wants to integrate with Facebook needs an API key. The Create Application API allows widget providers to programmatically generate this API key and other necessary settings," says Gupta. "For example, a fourth party comment system like DISQUS can now more easily enable bloggers to integrate commenting with Facebook into their blogs."

There are two ways developers can call the Create Application API:

- FB.Connect.createApplication -- the JavaScript Client Library method.

- Facebook.createApplication -- the FBJS method.

Documentation for these methods can be found here. 

Facebook says it wants to see a "strong ecosystem" of developers giving others the ability to make great Facebook integrations. This API is designed to do just that. Facebook has done a pretty good job of getting itself integrated into more and more aspects of the web. With the release of this API, that is a trend that is likely to continue.

An equation for getting more traffic from Twitter

The Math of Optimizing Tweets for Increased Retweeting

Back in June, Hubspot shared data, which indicated that about one and a half percent of all tweets were retweets. I'd be surprised if that number hasn't increased in the last few months. More people are adopting Twitter and becoming familiar with the Twitter culture. More tools have come out, which cater to the easy re-tweet. More sites have adopted retweet buttons, such as the one from Tweetmeme. I seriously doubt people are retweeting less. 

We're still waiting on Twitter to incorporate the retweet feature onto Twitter.com. Once that happens, retweeting is almost certainly going to go up significantly. According to the rough sketch Twitter provided a while back, there will be a retweet option by the reply option on all individual tweets.




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Sun Losing $100 Million a Month as Oracle Waits

By Chris Crum - Tue, 09/22/2009 - 09:57 for WebPro News

Regulators May Not Approve Deal Until January

Sun Microsystems is losing about $100 million a month according to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the company that's set to acquire Sun. Oracle is waiting to get clearance from European regulators before the deal can go through and Oracle can step in and try to put an end to this loss. 

Though understandably frustrated, Ellison is optimistic about the deal being approved. He conveyed this to his audience in a speech at a Churchill Club event in San Jose last night. 

If money is really being lost at the rate Ellison says, you have to think he is tapping his foot quite rapidly. This is after all a $7.4 billion deal, and $100 million a month is not exactly small potatoes. 

The deal was announced back in April. Oracle would acquire Sun for $7.4 billion at a rate of $9.50 per share in cash. The two companies have been long-term partners, for over 20 years. The acquisition was originally expected to close sometime in the summer, and it was unanimously approved by Sun's board of directors, but they're still waiting on the EU to approve it. 

The longer it takes to get the deal approved (assuming it does eventually get approved), the more jobs could be in jeopardy. "Analysts have predicted Oracle will have to make major cuts in Sun's workforce and spending, to achieve its goal of increasing operating profit from Sun's business," notes Brandon Bailey at Mercury News. "Some analysts have said an extended delay could lead Oracle to cut more deeply, since uncertainty over Sun's future may be driving more customers to rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM."

The EU is worried that Oracle acquiring MySQL would discourage competition, but Ellison maintains that it would do no such thing. He says that Oracle has no intention of spinning that unit off, which would greatly improve the chances of getting the deal approved. 

The EU says that it may take until January to complete its review of the deal. If Sun keeps losing money at the same rate, the deal may look significantly soured.

Site Hacking Facebook Accounts for $100 a Pop

By Chris Crum - Mon, 09/21/2009 - 12:25 for WebPro News

Says Only 1% of Sites Unhackable

Security company Panda Labs has discovered an online service that promises to hack into Facebook accounts for $100. They claim they will provide "clients" with login and password information to access any account on the social network. Do you feel like your information is secure on Facebook? Comment here.

"The service's real purpose may be hacking Facebook accounts as they say, or profiting from those that want to try the service," says PandaLabs Technical Director Luis Corrons. "In any case, the Web page is very well designed. It is easy to contract the service and become either the victim of an online fraud, or a cyber-criminal and accomplice in identity theft. Once an intruder hacks into a Facebook account, all personal data published on the site can be stolen."

"Similarly, those accounts can also be used to send malware, spam or other threats to the victim's contacts," adds Corrons. "In the case of celebrities or other well-known entities, they can be used to defame the account holder, spread information in their name, etc. In any event, this is criminal activity."

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Internet Users Spend Majority Of Time With Content Sites

By Mike Sachoff - Thu, 09/17/2009 - 09:47 for WebPro News

Despite social media

Content sites continue to grab the attention of the majority of Internet users, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009, a 24 percent increase, according to a new report by the Online Publishers Association (OPA).

The OPA has released a six-year analysis of its Internet Activity Index (IAI), a monthly gauge of time spent with commerce, communications, community, content and search. The analysis found Internet users are spending significant time with community sites (social media), it's coming at the expense of their time spent with communication sites whose main functions are email and instant messaging.

"In the six years that the IAI has reported on how consumers are spending their time online, we have seen some significant shifts, most notably the emergence of Community," said Pam Horan, president of theOPA.

"While Community has grown, data from the IAI proves that Content is still king; these sites continue to be a place where consumers spend the majority of their online time and provide an environment for brand marketers to reach and engage with consumers."

The percentage of time spent online with websites providing news, information and entertainment (content sites), has grown even in the wake of community sites like Facebook. Communication sites offering email and IM have decreased in the share of online time spent due to the ability to conduct these activities elsewhere.

"In 2008, we introduced the Community category based on the emergence and popularity of sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn," continued Horan.

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