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Social Media
Security Flaw found in Twitter’s Flash Widget
A recently discovered security flaw in Twitter’s Flash-based website widget may have allowed attackers access to the login credentials of any Twitter user. According to Mike Bailey, an analyst at Foreground Security, the problem involves a known vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash programming language, the language used to code the Twitter widget. In response, Twitter has disabled the widget in question while they research the issue further.
Oddly enough, the vulnerability in question was initially discovered back in 2006, but many website operators have yet to address it says Bailey, according to a Reuters UK news story about the potential Twitter security hole. After analyzing Twitter’s website, Bailey says the site may have been open to attack from hackers attempting to exploit this particular security hole for over a year.
Facebook Blocks Defriender, App for Tracking Friend Removals
An iPhone application released this week from a company called i-Doodz tracks those who have “defriended” you on the social networking site Facebook. Defriended, as the app is called, takes its name from the slang word that means “to remove from one’s list of friends (e.g. on a social networking site)”, according to Wikitionary, an open content dictionary that operates like Wikipedia for words.
The Defriended app gives you an easy way to track these defriending events since Facebook itself doesn’t provide this feature – or at least that’s what the app did until Facebook blocked its operation. Apparently, the social network thinks defriending should be a private matter. As of now, the app is no longer available for download in the App Store …
When NOT to Use Social Media
These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal [...]
Big Changes Coming to Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg posted an open letter today about some possibly far reaching changes: the phasing out of regional networks. This will affect over half of the 350 million Facebook users. While sites like Twitter seem to be releasing a feature a year, Facebook has been experimenting with different designs and features at what some may consider an alarming pace.
I personally respect a company with such scale taking the risk to improve their product with radical changes. And make no mistake, removing regional networks is quite potentially the biggest change Facebook has made since opening up registration to the world …
Twitter Made a Profit in 2009
According to a report by Business Week’s Spencer E. Ante, Twitter’s search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million – enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports – which Twitter did not comment on – the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.
The idea that Twitter made a profit from these deals is based on the assumption that the company’s annual operating costs are roughly $25 million. Twitter, of course, doesn’t release any information about its operating costs or the revenue it made from these deals, so we have to take this estimate with a grain of salt …
RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline
One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don’t check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me.
Frankly I’m more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts [I should note however that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily]. So what’s happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them? …
Why Online Bookmarking is Good for You?
Web bookmarking is similar to remembering the pages of your favorite paperback novel. If you find a website that has interesting content and wish to revisit it again in the future, you press the “favorites” tab in your web browser and the link to that site will be kept in your computer until you prefer so. The hassle with web bookmarking, however, is that our favorite sites tend to multiply as time passes, and the folder in which we store them becomes too cluttered.
To solve the problems with this mess, online bookmarking was invented. Through this, users can save their links not in their hard drives but within bookmarking sites on the net. This convenient technology allows users to organize their links more effectively and access them in any place anytime. Thanks to the people created open source social bookmarking php scripts, you can now find many social bookmarking sites on the net.
When online bookmarking becomes an essential net strategy, it eventually turns into a social activity. Bookmarkers in one site become connected in one network sharing links to one another. This led to the establishment of accounts wherein bookmarkers are given access to connect themselves to the accounts of family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, and basically anyone who wants to be linked.
Social bookmarking sites are undeniably numerous, and it is important that you have an account in all of them especially if you want to widely promote your bookmarks. In this era of online marketing boom, businesses offering products and services take advantage of these sites to gain free publicity and item promotion.
Bookmarking sites require users to post in the title of their link, the keywords that strongly describe the link, and a short description that summarizes it. Doing this repeatedly in all social bookmarking sites however can take so much time and typing efforts, that’s why most business owners and marketers use social bookmarking software to solve this concern.
OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users
At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of.
With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it’s not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID’s praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too.
OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites …
Facebook Violates Privacy Contract with Users
Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.
Personally, very early on I made my friends list explicitly not viewable. Why? Because I didn’t want everyone to be able to see who I am friends with. This change is a violation of the social contract that the service had with me. I should, at the very least, have been given warning of this impending change and been allowed time to “defriend” people …
YouTube and Universal’s Vevo Music Service to Add Last.fm
Next week will see the launch of the Vevo premium content music video service from Google and Universal Music Group, slated to bring Universal’s extensive video assets into one new destination.
Now CBS is getting in on the action as well, announcing today that both Last.fm and CBS Radio stations will also be available on the Vevo service this Tuesday, December 8.
The deal will bring live concert performances, in-studio artist appearances, interviews and behind-the-scenes coverage from more than 90 CBS Radio stations around the country, as well as from Last.fm. It marks another significant injection of content into the new portal site for premium music video content as well as another significant distribution platform for social music discovery service Last.fm, which recently launched on the Xbox 360’s online Live service to the tune of a million new subscribers …