Google Wave has not been a big hit so far – everyone though it would be…but it hasn’t. The interface is complicated, buggy and unpractical. People aren’t staying long enough to build a community and worst of all – nobody is quite sure what exactly it’s for yet. However the development team are still making strides.
They have just opened up Wave to third party companies by releasing an API package. This allows companies to host their own Wave like services on their own servers and interact with other companies API Waves. This is currently only in sandbox testing and isn’t live on the internet as of yet.
One thing which concerns me is that this could mean the start of SPAM on Wave. Since its launch people have been confined to specific waves but now we’re seeing a growth in access. Although this growth isn’t enough to start a spamming campaign it could be the start of it. I’m pretty sure that soon the hackers and spammers will descend on Google Wave – then it’s up to Google to stop them on a platform which will supposedly be more open than e-mail.
This article was just written over at TheNextWeb. I didnt want to just rewrite the article for everyone so here is what they said. I was wondering if anyone has any answers, mainly because this is a Gmail account and could affect millions of people.
BBC Watchdog is British TV program that investigates viewers’ reports of problematic experiences with traders, retailers, and other companies around the UK. A recent investigation has discovered that wi-fi hot spots across the country are not secure – leaving tens of thousands of users at risk of fraud.
In this particular case they reveal how easy it is to hack into someones GMail account over Wifi, sending emails and changing their password. According to Danny Sullivan who shared the link on Twitter, if he’d signed via secure https, he’d probably have been safe – can anyone verify?
Here at Crenk we have noticed that our page rank has gone up to a PR 5, and a lot of other people have also been writing about the update. However, does anyone still actually care about Page Rank? or is it now all about building a brand and hitting the long tail keywords?
Over at Techcrunch they reported yesterday that the New York Times are now receiving nearly a quarter of their total revenues from online advertising.
The New York Times announced third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were down 17 percent to $571 million. Of that advertising revenues decreased 27 percent to $291 million, and the online advertising portion was down 8.2 percent to $68 million.
Last quarter, advertising revenues declined an even steeper 32 percent, and online advertising was down 15.5 percent. So maybe this is the first step on its way back to positive territory. Here are the year-over-year declines in online advertising revenues for each of the past four quarters.
Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues
4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
3Q09: -8.2%
Another interesting data point is that because its print advertising revenues are shrinking at a faster rate than its Internet advertising revenues, the Internet portion is actually a bigger percentage (23.5%) of the New York Times’ total advertising revenues than it was year ago (when it was 18.6%).
I have been a firm believer that print business will slowly leave only the major players in each market and all the smaller business will have to move online or close. However, with these latest figures I now think even the major players could be in big trouble!
I noticed this morning that in the Silicon Alley Insider RSS feed that they were not just promoting Techcrunch content, but linking directly to their articles!
Have these two key rival in the technology news space partnered to try to catch up to Mashable in terms of traffic numbers?
It was just reported by Om Malik that Apple has approved yet another VoIP application. The application in question is Stockholm based Rebtel. Currently, Rebtel is now available to download from the iTunes store, as well as other VoIP applications like Skype.
I still think there is a distinctive difference between the VoIP service and what Google Voice offers. Google Voice offers free calls with no cost at all with the USA and Canada. However, on the VoIP service there is still a cost associated when calling phone numbers (only online calls are free). Thus, AT&T and other mobile carriers of the iPhone feel that VoIP services dont harm their call costs, because they think users are too lazy to open the VoIP applications then call, instead of just calling using their phone carrier.
How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
It has been reported over at Techcrunch that the Feedburner CEO has decided to leave the ship and is now becoming the Twitter COO. This has really made me think about RSS and where it is heading and is Twitter the next big thing in terms of keeping track of your favourite resources?
Steve Gillmor stated:
“Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”
Everyday I head over to my Google Reader and see what all the major sites have been talking about and for me there is simply no other alternative to easily read over 200 sites in one place. I know I can follow a lot of major sites on Twitter, but it is very difficult to keep track of more than 200 follows, plus you have to be online and watching when they post or you just miss the news (bad thing about real-time).
Why do people go online? I know, it is a general question that could lead to several answers and also might depend on several factors as well, that also is dynamically changing according to the day or particular moment. But at Ruder Finn Intent Index are trying to simplify this question, analyzing common areas that men, women, youths and seniors could choose to go online.
The results are very interesting, here are some quick facts:
More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%).
72% of people go online just to become part of a community.
More men (42%) than women (36%) go online to do business.
Women (91%) are much more likely to go online to socialize than men (73%).
A majority of youths 55% go online to just to play games.
More than half of seniors (65%) go online to be a part of an online community.
Almost half (48%) go online to entertain others.
And even more, if you want you can also review the full results with more specific data.
How do they collect this data? Well this report is updated on quarterly basis, the sample is a minimum of 500 American adults. The index is calculated on the basis of how frequently this people is going online for 295 reasons or intents.
82% go online to socialize. No surprise there, where it would be Facebook if that wasn’t true?
72% go online just to become part of a community. What can you say about it? Maybe a constant feeling of people to be included in some group, or self esteem issues?
55% of youths go online just to play games. Well I didn’t see that number coming, I was hoping around a 30% maybe? And the rest to socialize.
65% seniors go online to be a part of an online community. I’m not sure which age represents “seniors” but it is a great thing that elders are always trying to catch up with technology.
Well I guess bad guys sometimes just get caught. That was the case for this Chinese guy that trying to attack a rival using a Denial-of-Service attack generated an Internet collapse in most of China (People = 1.300 millions, that’s right 1.3 billion people). The attack occurred last May,and the responsible of this attack: 23 year-old that owned private gaming servers and since he wasn’t doing so good in business decided attack his rivals, ending up taking down primary DNS servers in China.
To make a quick review about the story: A Chinese guy (with the surname of Bing) from a cotton factory offered online gaming with some private servers that he bought. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, there are thousands of these types of unlicensed gaming servers. And of course, this underground business usually involves some underground behaviors; Bing’s servers were being attacked by other gaming servers rivals, causing him to lose money. So he decided to strike back their rivals with some DDoS attacks.
Bing spent nearly u$s41.000 on these attacks, renting 81 servers only for this task, but they were ineffective. So they decided to ask for more help, that’s when the attacks collapsed DNSPod that not only served for Bing’s rivals servers, also serves several Internet companies in China.
Although police rarely have the jurisdiction or training needed to pursue such a case, officials confirmed the detention of four individuals, including Bing. Here’s the official report.
These attacks are not uncommon in these days, as we’ve said in this previous post. It is a good thing that authorities are tracking down these criminals.
Google Wave has not been a big hit so far – everyone though it would be…but it hasn’t. The interface is complicated, buggy and unpractical. People aren’t staying long enough to build a community and worst of all – nobody is quite sure what exactly it’s for yet. However the development team are still making strides.
