Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
Goo.gl, Youtu.be, and Fb.me: URL shortening for ev...
If you’re on Twitter you know that you have to limit everything to 140 characters. Those 140 characters can be pretty difficult to achieve if you want to include a link to the funny article your Tweeting about. So Twitter supported a safe service to shorten URLs for its Tweeters, Bit.ly. Now Google, YouTube, and Facebook are jumping on the bandwagon and have all come out with their own URL shortening services.
Google just announced their new URL shortener on December 15th. The service, found at Goo.gl, is only available for Google products, like Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google’s newly acquired YouTube.com is also creating its own URL shortening site for YouTube videos. With the beginning YouTu.be, these URLs are used only for YouTube videos and nothing else. Facebook is the most recent to join in on the URL shortening fun with Fb.me. This URL shortener is used mainly for pictures and commercial pages on Facebook.
Each of these sites is being very smart by not allowing their services to be used for anything outside their sites. TinyURL was the first big hit Website for shortening URLs but soon was banned by many Websites for distributing spyware. By creating their own URL shortening services, Google, YouTube and Facebook are avoiding that risk altogether. These shorter URLs also don’t disguise the URL, so you know when a URL is going to take you to a YouTube video or a Google Toolbar or a Facebook picture.
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Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
Facebook Surpasses AOL
AOL has faced some tough competition in its lifetime. Google was an obstacle altogether. Bing was hated, which only got worse when it partnered with Yahoo. And yet through all these struggles, AOL always managed to remain the fourth largest Websites in America… that is, until November.
ComScore.com just released their statistics for November 2009 which revealed that Facebook had surpassed AOL in the US for having a larger Website. Facebook has actually already passed AOL in worldwide standings back in February of this year, but now it is officially bigger than AOL both internationally and nationally. The numbers show that Facebook has increased to 102.9 million individual visitors, while AOL only had 99.7 million in November. These numbers have both grown for each company. For AOL, their number of individual numbers grew about 1 million since October. However, Facebook’s numbers grew about 5 million in the same time frame. Facebook’s next goal is to beat Microsoft’s 136 million unique visitors.
ComScore also reported on searching usage for each Website. Again, Facebook beat out AOL by millions. AOL’s search usage actually decreased by 3% over the month of November from 395 million to 349 million searches. Facebook, however, experienced a 7% increase in number of searches from 331 million to 354 million, passing up old AOL.
We got to hand it to AOL for staying in the running this long. And you can’t forget they re-entered as an independently traded company since December 10. Now we’ll wait and see if Facebook has the momentum to take on the high rollers of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.
Read MoreReal Facebook Friends Don’t Ask for Money
Facebook phishing scams have gotten more advanced recently. Our very own Account Manager here at Keystone told me a story this morning. He was on Facebook and one of his friends (a guy he hasn’t spoken to in ten years) started chatting with him. The chat started pretty normal, but then news that the friend had been robbed on vacation while in London surfaced and the friend started asking for money to get home.
This seemingly new Facebook scam did not fool our own Jason Elkins, but it has fooled many others in the past. This scam includes stealing a Facebook user’s name and password, with some basic phishing scam, and then proceeding to ask all his or her friends if they would send money so he or she can return home from a vacation. And with the Facebook Chat feature, it is pretty easy to get in touch with many “victims” quickly. The hackers will even sometimes change contact information of the person’s Facebook they’ve taken over so a phone number or email will actually contact the scammer.
Apparently this scam was very popular back in January and February of this year, so why is it still happening? The first reports of this scam were back in November of 2008! Shouldn’t Facebook have a handle on this by now?
Basically, the moral of the story is: don’t send money to a friend you barely know because they claim to have been robbed in Europe. Why wouldn’t they contact the police or call a family member first? It’s not logical.
If you believe your Facebook account has been hacked or scammed, you can find help here.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Facebook & FriendFeed Are BFF’s Forever
I don’t think we can call ourselves a technology blog if we fail to mention the recent purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook, even though every tech blog and his brother has already covered the story. I’m certainly not breaking any news here, but we have some readers who probably haven’t stumbled upon this news just yet. Thought we’d give our two cents.
FriendFeed is a lot like Twitter, allowing users to share content and information across multiple platforms. It has far fewer users than Twitter, but is run by some ex-Google engineers. This is clearly another bold step by Facebook to compete with Twitter.
What Twitter does that has Facebook so scared is the real-time update/sharing feature. FriendFeed will help them match the technology for real-time updating. In fact, Facebook has already activated a new “real-time search” function just in the past 24 hours.
The price of the purchase is rumored to be around $50 Million in cash and stock.
Look for Facebook to roll the FriendFeed guys in with their existing real-time efforts to create something that not only matches Twitter’s capabilities and popularity, but aims to exceed them as well.
Read MorePosted by Angela | 0 Comments
Facebook’s Continued Growth
Even though we just raved about Twitter hitting 44.5 million users worldwide, Facebook is still far superior to Twitter.
Twitter has landed in the 52nd spot for largest Website. And that’s great! Good for Twitter. But, also reported today, Facebook landed the 4th spot for largest Website worldwide! Surpassing CBS, eBay, AOL, and Wikipedia, Facebook has gained 24 million visitors worldwide in the month of June alone. Now the total number of unique visitors has reached an all time high of 340 million! However, Facebook itself reported that they have only 250 million registered members (which happens to be a great increase from only 150 million in January, 2009), but visitors don’t necessarily need a Facebook account to see most Facebook pages.
These stats make Twitter look not as impressive anymore.
Facebook is just behind Yahoo Websites by 241 million, and the leading Website, Google, by 504 million. So they still have a ways to go to get on top. In the U.S. exclusively, Facebook is in 6th for largest Website, behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Fox Interactive Media sites. And it had 77 million unique visitors in June in the U.S. alone.
There has been a little concern lately that Facebook would soon be biting the dust, or suffering the MySpace crash and burn, but these numbers suggest that Facebook isn’t ready to burn out yet. There are still more people joining the social network while long-time users remain content with its features. It is the perfect medium to continue growing.
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