SEO News
Facebook Sets New Traffic Record
It was reported some weeks back that Facebook was growing by a rate of 600,000 users per day. As if this were not enough, CNET has reported that Facebook set a new record for traffic on Christmas Eve.
Throughout the month of November, Facebook had 1.42% of all the traffic in the US. On December 24, the site hit was at its best ever at 12.18% of the market share. These figures mean that there was an increase by 54% over the November average, with a year over year increase of 53%.
According to CNET, the same pattern was repeated in the UK. Here, visits to social networks had a market share of nearly 4.65% which equates to roughly one in every 22 visits to the Internet. What may be causing this massive increase in the flow of traffic? According to Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, the bad weather and general boredom seem to have been the main causes.
Facebook’s entire primary markets of New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia were massively affected by bad weather. Hopkins also states that people may have used their PC’s to keep their families entertained.
Blogging Platform JournalSpace Is No More
The blogging platform JournalSpace has recently demised, due to its entire principal database being erased. It appears that JournalSpace had no back up system in place. A statement on the blog site of JournalSpace claims that the database was wiped out as a result of a vengeful act by a ticked off former JournalSpace employee.
The following is a quote by JournalSpace on its blog site:
“It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutably, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.”
JournalSpace put into place a Twitter account which it utilised for making updates. Once the messages are read in opposite date wise order, the story becomes quite clear.
In the case of those people whose blog was put on JournalSpace, go to http://andrewtheart.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-recover-mostall-of-your.html. The link provides directions for saving the majority of the user’s data and comments by making use of Google Cache.
Power Twitter now launched
The Firefox plugin ‘Power Twitter’ v1.0 was recently launched. The plugin was formed by Narendra Rocherolle of ‘83 Degrees’. It is intended for all those who utilise Twitter and relish applications like Tweetree.
Power Twitter shifts Twitter Search directly onto the Twitter website. Twitter Search was unsuitably placed on a separate sub-domain. People making use of this service can simply look for current information on an individual user via the Twitter page of that user.
Twitter should have combined a search box straight onto its logged-in homepage a long time ago. Power Twitter resolves this problem and even takes care of the ‘@replies’ element that currently only displays Twitter messages focused on the user. These messages are the ones which start with ‘@yourusername’.
When utilizing Power Twitter, a user is able to view all messages that have their user name, taking care of a huge Twitter gap. ‘YouTube’, ‘Flickr’, and ‘TwitPic’ have been placed in-line to Twitter messages. This enables users to view their messages without being forced to click outside the site. This often demanded service is also provided by ‘Friendfeed’, a competitor of Twitter.
Tweaks Required At Twitter
Many Twitter users have been grumbling about the difficulty that they face while trying to follow a discussion. If the users wish to refer their answers to a Twitter message, they are expected to put a “@” sign to that Twitter. Only doing this, would route it back to the original Twitter message. However, while a user goes through the entire drill, the original user proceeds to another topic. The communication is, thus, very distorted.
On the morning of the 28th of December 2008, Twitter initiated a solution with a service called “Tweetree”. Tweetree has been introduced to thread the discussions at Twitter. The service is however not foolproof as there are errors that occur in matching the response to the original message at times. Also this service is not very effective for more than one response. Hence, this service hasn’t proved very successful. Prior to Tweetree, a service by the name of “Quotably” had been employed. Although it did have its set of errors, Quotably had shown better results.
Sources comment that in an attempt to maintain its hassle free nature, Twitter has overlooked the clarity in communication. It would greatly help the users if Twitter did find a way of tracking the comments.
Social Search: The Next Gen Search
Google is the most preferred search engine, but social search is something that is changing the way we search online. Combining search results from engines with friendly suggestions is what social search is all about. Now you can expect your search for eateries, holiday destinations and books tagged along with friends’ recommendations.
All search engines big or small have been trying to enable a robust social search. However, there hasn’t been much success. When Yahoo tried its hands at social search, the results weren’t very fruitful. Even Facebook gave up the chase while the torch has been taken over by Microsoft. Even then, social searching hasn’t got any easier. One has to go through a lot of hassles to be able to find information.
If the experiments on social search prove successful, Facebook is certain to profit, but the biggest winner would be Google. Considering that Google is the leader in searches, the greatest impact of social searching would be on the search engine giant alone.
If developers got it right and aced the social search, Google would have the widest smile. Just to give you a peek at what social search could do for you, sources recommend Sidestripe. It searches for the choice of movies, books, songs, restaurants, etc. recommended by the people.