前几天老婆找我要一个可以抓取网页图片的软件，我推荐了HyperSnap，但是自己使用后发现即使滚屏方式，也是抓不全的，又在网上找了找，没有发现合适的，那干脆写一个吧！

原理也很简单，基于.net winform的WebBrowser，首先让WebBrowser去加载要抓取的网页，然后对WebBrowser进行拷屏，生成图片就OK了。原本用的Control类的DrawToBitmap方法，但是经常出现空白网页，后来采用萧寒的方法解决。

下载地址：http://www.openlab.net.cn/forums/threads/1207936.aspx#1207936 

截图如下：

2002年，我开始写博客，原因是因为有一个陌生人在MSN上面问我一些关于中国的问题。我以为他是记者，而他告诉我他是一个blogger。我说，并blogger是什么，他把他自己的blog地址给我看。从此，我知道什么是blog，并且知道了MovableType这个工具，并在几个月后在自己家里的机器上架起了MovableType，试着写了第一篇blog，关于如何在Windows机器上上面架设MovableType的经历，从此，我成了blogger。

最近，刘韧邀请我加入5GSNS.com，我发现是自己架设SNS是一个很好的主意，好朋友在一个网络上面更新动态，就像一个自己的facebook。

我试过很多的SNS网络，无论Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn,还有众多的中国SNS，却始终没有办法找到适合我的。这种感觉，就像Blog到处搬家一样，对于真正认真的人来说，总是有种不安定的感觉。

想到这里，我忽然意识到一直困扰我的如何保存我最珍贵的资产 – 我和我的朋友的关系问题 - 或许有了一个完美的答案。

通过5GSNS，我发现UCenter Home的存在。感谢Discuz团队做的这个好东东，让个人的SNS已经开始成为大家的一种选择。我知道，我最好的办法，就是自己架设一个SNS服务器，就像我曾经架自己的blog一样。我并没有野心成为facebook，就像我的blog从来没有想法成为blogger.com一样。Blogger.com或者Facebook.com做的是平台的事情，我做的仅仅是软件使用者来满足自己的需求的事情。这本来就是两码事。

这就是我的自己的朋友圈的诞生（网址暂且保密）。

对于自己安装的这个SNS，我希望有几个准则：

1. 所有人用中文名真名。这个是当然的事情。
2. 我会非常有选择的添加我自己的朋友。我的一个目标，就是所有我添加的朋友，我一定会有一张和他的合影。一定。我希望，我和我的每一个朋友，也因此至少有一张合影。
3. 每天添加不多于一个朋友。我可以坚持六年每天写blog的一个重要的原因，就是得益于很久以前我给自己定的一个准则，每天不可以写超过一篇blog，这样我在开始的两个月里面，总有写东西的冲动，所以脑子里的话题永远大于我写blog的天数，等到想写的话题都写完的时候，写blog已经和吃饭一样是戒不掉的习惯了。所以，我希望添加为我的朋友的，都是我严肃和认真的认为是自己宝贵的朋友的人，而不是直接把我的通讯录里面上万个人一下倒进去。
4. 我的朋友也可以使用我的这个服务器，就像我的一些朋友也在公用我的这个MovableType安装一样。不过，我建议我的朋友如果有技术能力和资金能力的话，还是尽早在自己的域名下用自己的软件架设自己SNS，因为以后你不会因为早期把blog建在别人的域名下而后悔。不过如果你愿意使用我的这个，欢迎。但是，希望你可以同样坚持我所坚持的上述三条。这不是强制，比如你可以加任何人，也可以每次添加多个，但是，不希望你添加任何你自己不熟悉的人为自己的朋友（为了你好），每天最多也不要多过三个。拜托。

好了。我的朋友们，欢迎来到王建硕的朋友圈。我为认识你而感到高兴！

注：下午和陈实聊天，他倒是提到这个主意，给了我很多启发，所以擦有了我的这个主意。

原文：http://home.wangjianshuo.com/cn/20080626_ccc.htm

Multilingual search is one of the growth areas of our industry and Google has added its own help in the space by launching its Latin American AdWords Blog. Written in Spanish, the launch today introduces itself and gives an overview of its intentions and direction.

I used a machine translator to get the English version of the opening post - but its seems to be pretty good (guess the translators are improving).

All the Team of AdWords of Google for Latin America welcomes you to our Blog: Inside AdWords for Latin America.

We are very happy to announce the launch of this new channel of communication that will permit us to share with you all our news. In it you will find counsels to improve your campaigns, information on the network of contents, launches of products and tools, dates for special training, strategies for attract clients in important dates, events of our region in which we been present and a lot more. Besides, the entrances will be in charge of the own Googlers and of some special collaborators of the industry of the marketing and the publicity.

But also we invite you to that participate, responding the surveys and sending us your comments, whether in the same blog or by mail to blog-adwords-latam@google.com

Set the date aside, July 8th, if you want to get the inside scoop on Google"s website tools. As announced today over at the Official Google Blog, they will be holding a webinar about Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Webmaster Tools.

These Google products have become an invaluable set of tools for most serious web owners and marketers and it will be a great opportunity to see if there are any methods one is not using at the moment.

It will be interesting to see what numbers sign up for this and if Google can handle the potentially huge crowd signing up for this event.

Apparently Chicago-based firm LimitNone is suing Google for misappropriating the trade secrets of its "gMove" application that Google allegedly used to develop its Email Uploader.

The two-count lawsuit also claims Google violated Illinois" consumer fraud laws.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP - "the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company"s online advertising system," SlashDot noted.

Details of the suit can be found in the press release sent out by the law firm.

“Its shocking that Google would engage in this type of conduct; particularly when the other party is a small software company that built its business specifically to help Google sell its existing and future products,” said Susan Greenspon of the Chicago office of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. “People need to realize that Google is just another large publicly traded corporation that will do whatever it takes to increase its revenue, even if that means risking its reputation among developers.”

The lawsuit alleges that in February, 2007 Google launched a suite of business software applications called Google Apps. The software was designed to challenge Microsoft’s Office suite of products (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.) which has 500 million users. According to the lawsuit, unlike Microsoft’s products, Google Apps does not require a customer to download software onto his or her computer. Instead, Google Apps is a collection of web-based applications that reside on Google’s servers. The lawsuit alleges at the time of its launch, however, Google did not have a workable way to enable Microsoft Outlook users to easily migrate their email (called gMail), calendar and contacts to Google’s platform.

In early 2007, LimitNone developed just such a product to solve this problem and in March confidentially demonstrated the migration tool to senior members of the Google Apps team. According to the complaint, the Google Apps executives invited LimitNone to be part of the Google Enterprise Professional Program, to further develop and market the tool, and assured the company that it had no intention of developing a similar product.

The lawsuit alleges the tool, which was originally named “MY GRATE” was later renamed, at Google’s insistence, “gMove”. Though the product retailed for $29, Google asked that LimitNone sell it to Google’s customers for $19.

The lawsuit claims that throughout the remainder of 2007, Google promoted LimitNone and gMove and repeatedly told company executives that it would not develop a competing product. Google highlighted gMove on its website and introduced the company to its largest customers (including Proctor & Gamble, Intel, Orbitz, Morgan Stanley and Toys “R” Us). In addition, Google asked LimitNone to present the product to its technical sales personnel, to meet with the Google Open Source team and to continuously share updated versions of gMove.

In December, 2007, as detailed in the complaint Google told LimitNone that it would, in fact, be releasing a competing product and giving it away for free to its “Premier” customers. The lawsuit alleges that Google’s product, called “Google Email Uploader” steals gMove’s look, feel and functionality.

According to the complaint, Scott McMullan, a senior executive in the Google Apps partner program, told LimitNone that the potential for 50 million users – was “just too big to come from someone else” and that “this is how Google operates.”

Confirming recent rumors of another coming reorganization, Yahoo today announced its plans to centralize many of its product and engineering teams into one regional group in the U.S., rather than maintaining separate divisions for each set of products.

Yahoo is creating three new teams that will report to President Sue Decker:

1. An Audience Products Division will assume responsibility for companywide product strategy and product management. It will be led by Ash Patel who previously managed the company"s Platforms & Infrastructure group.
2. A U.S. region with accountability for all go-to-market activity in the U.S. will be led by Hilary Schneider, who previously headed the company"s Global Partner Solutions group.
3. An Insights Strategy team will assume responsibility for centralizing and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo. The company plans to name this group"s leader within the next few weeks.

According to Decker, these moves have been in the works for several months, and complement last year"s changes to centralize more of Yahoo"s business.

"The changes we"re making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making," Decker said in a statement. "This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products. We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs."

Yahoo has restructured its search group, which recently lost SVP and General Manager of Search Vishal Makhijani to Russian search engine Yandex. Prabhakar Raghavan has been tapped to direct search strategy, and Tuoc Luong is the interim leader of the search product team. Both Prabhakar and Tuoc will also continue in their roles as the leaders of Yahoo! Research and Search Engineering respectively. In addition, David Ku will lead the Advertising Technology Group within Search.

Yahoo is also making changes to its technology organization, devoting resources to developing a cloud computing and storage infrastructure; moving more of Yahoo onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams.

The new Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group will be charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will also move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan.

Google Maps features a very funny Google Easter Egg: If you ask for directions from an address in Australia to an address in the USA the ever helpful "Get directions" tool gives some great tips on how to cross the Pacific Ocean.

Easter eggs are hidden surprises created by programmers.

Tip of the hat to Michael Smith of Technocrat.net for uncovering the Google Maps egg.

Now at least I know how Aussiewebmaster made his way to the USA.

The people who give us WebProNews have launched a search engine for Twitter members - Twellow. Smart move given the popularity of Twitter and one Twitter itself could have launched if it was not already trying to lift a whale with a bunch of small birds.

The site has categories and will be interesting to see the breakdown of users by these categories. Something tells me the search space will be one of the leading categories.

Google has announced their replacement of outgoing CFO George Reyes. Former Bell Canada CFO Patrick Pichette has been offered the position along with an employment package as good as many first round draft picks in sports.

As the San Jose Mercury News details, Pichette will get a $500,000 signing bonus and the rest of the package makes his first year"s pay in the millions.

Welcome to the team Patrick.

Visual search engine Searchme has announced the addition of two new features. The first is Media Search, which allows users to search for videos and images from YouTube and Flickr. The second is "Stacks," a visual bookmarking and sharing features that enables users to share what they find on blogs, social media profiles, email and web sites.

"These visual search applications enhance our core search engine by allowing people to use Searchme in fresh, innovative ways across various media and all over the Web," said Randy Adams, Searchme CEO. "It"s another step in our long-term plan to add features and functionality, improve our beta engine"s relevance and coverage, and create a world-class search experience."

"Until now, most web users have had to check multiple bookmarks every day, click on dozens of links pasted into an email, and hunt multiple times for sites they saw once but didn"t have time to check out," said Adams. "With Stacks, they can now bypass these methods, saving time and creating an organized web experience."

The State of Missouri has launched a collaborative search portal, enabling citizens of the Show-Me state to explore millions of historical documents. The search, dubbed Missouri Digital Heritage, is powered by Deep Web Technologies" Explorit Research Accelerator. Included in the searchable material are nearly 20 "Collections" such as Transportation, Sports, Women, and Agriculture.

"This is a unique project because of the queries this site is designed to handle," said Abe Lederman, CTO of Deep Web Technologies. "A family historian may have only a fragment of a name or a street address that they want to explore. By delivering every hit -- even the most remote -- we significantly increase their opportunity to put another piece of their family tree in place. Missouri Digital Heritage is truly designed to support every local researcher"s needs."

Related Reading:
Google Helping State Government Sites Get Indexed

The hottest Google search of the blockbuster movie summer is "Wesley Gibson."

The film "Wanted" features a Matrix-like opening with star James McAvoy playing a working stiff unaware of his super powers (as an assasssin) just as Keanu Reeves was clueless as Neo at the start of The Matrix.

According to Wikipedia, Wesley Gibson, was a pathetic, cubicle-dwelling hypochondriac. His boss frequently chewed him out and his girlfriend regularly cheated on him with his best friend. His depressing life plodded on interminably and it seemed to him that he would never amount to anything. One day Wes is contacted by The Fox (Angelina Jolie in the film), who reveals to him that his father, who had been absent through out Wesley"s life, was actually a super-criminal called The Killer who had been recently assassinated, and that Wesley had inherited his perfect aim and uncanny skill with any weapon in addition to the name, twenty-five million dollars and his father"s place in the fraternity.

The vanity search by McAvoy when he Googles himself comes up with no results. (shown above)

The irony? A search for the keywords "wesley gibson" now shows results for the character in the comic books and film rather than any real-life Wesley Gibson.

Apartment Guide has launched a mobile search application allowing users to find apartments via GPS. They"ve partnered with Mobile Accord to provide the location-based listings, available through participating carriers.

“Apartment Guide makes finding apartments easier through mobile GPS,” said Arlene Mayfield, president of Apartment Guide. “Powered by Qualcomm’s BREW® Platform, the application also enables mobile phone subscribers to search for apartments anywhere in the United States, access prices, photos and property features and contact the leasing office directly.”

“According to ABI Research, North American subscriptions to ‘personal locator services’ using GPS-enabled mobile phones will grow to more than 20 million by 2011,” said James Eberhard, chairman, Mobile Accord. “By enabling consumers to find apartments through GPS on their cell phones, Apartment Guide addresses a growing technological demand and meets the needs of renters ‘on the go.’”

Related Reading:
Google Opens Location-Aware Application to 3rd Party Developers

By 2012, 1.8 billion people will be using the internet, according to JupiterResearch. That will be a 44% increase from 2007. China, India, Russia and Brazil will see the highest growth rates. China will overtake the U.S. in internet use by 2011.

"Even though the emerging economies will have lower online penetration rates compared to the developed countries, JupiterResearch believes that they will ramp up the learning curve in adopting sophisticated online activities compared to the developing countries," explained Vikram Sehgal, Research Director and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch.

Recent moves in the search industry seem to echo those projections. Yahoo"s reorganization is mostly focused on a global strategy, likely building on their success in Asia. Last November, Yahoo added 9 countries to its mobile search, and recently expanded partnerships in the Asia/Pacific region. Yahoo has also invested heavily in India. They have a research lab in Bangalore and recently began testing "Glue Pages," a different way to view search results.

Meanwhile, Yandex, the leading Russian language search engine, has hired a Yahoo exec away to lead their San Fran-based operations.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft and Google have their eye on the big enchilada by staffing up in China, a market that is currently dominated by Baidu.

Was the more seasoned Hillary Clinton presidential campaign out-Googled by the more search savvy Barack Obama 2008 campaign? According to Kate Kay, senior editor of ClickZ, our sister site, Clinton Spent Far Less Online Than Obama.

And there are lessons here that every search engine marketer is going to want learn regardless of his or her political stripes.

BNN (Business Network News) recently interviewed Kate Kay, who explained that the Barack Obama 2008 campaign also used pay-per-click advertising on Google for different purposes than the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. You can watch the video interview with Kate below.

Obama Ads Online: Search Advertising Analysis by Kate Kaye

So, are you using geographic targeting? Are you using a soft offer in your PPC advertising and then using an email marketing campaign to follow with direct response marketing?

If you are trying to out-Google your seasoned PPC competitors, consider borrowing a couple of SEM techniques from the search savvy people working for the “skinny kid with a funny name.” Yes, yes, I know they’re from Chicago, not New York. But, there’s nothing “Second City” about their approach to search engine marketing.

In April, Li Evans reported that Barack Obama was Rocking the Youth Vote. In May, Kevin Heisler reported that the Obama campaign was advertising on the Search Engine Watch Jobs Board. In June, Nathania Johnson reported that Google’s Peter Greenberger had tied the Obama and McCain victors to their AdWords spend.

And, now the Barack Obama 2008 campaign is getting ready to make history in American presidential politics. To borrow a line from Abraham Lincon, find out what Chicago-style deep-dish pizza they eat and give it to your other generals.

The beauty of certain industries -- and the challenge -- is they"re international, national, and local all at the same time. Such is the case with auto dealers. In today"s Link Building column, "Link Building Ideas for Local Auto Dealers," Justilien Gaspard shares two link building ideas for a local auto dealer that can be applied to various types of local businesses.

» Full story

A look at Google Trends comparative data can help guide companies in making strategic decisions. In today"s Building Brand Equity column, "Can Google Predict the Next President?," Erik Qualman shows how the same can be done in the political world, as McCain and Obama are trying to build up their respective "brands" in the eyes of voters.

» Full story

VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company. Our sources have been saying this deal is highly likely since May, but hasn’t actually been signed yet and could still be disrupted by the [...]

What does Yahoo’s latest reorganization all mean, especially in light of the situation with Microsoft still being up in the air? Like yesterday’s assertive letter to shareholders defending its Google deal, Yahoo is trying to show that it is getting on with its life, thank you very much. The announcement is clearly aimed [...]

Have you submitted your application to launch at TechCrunch50 yet? The deadline is tomorrow, Friday, at midnight, so you have about another day and a half to send it in (the application page is here). Three more experts join our panel this week - Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Don Dodge. They, along with our previously [...]

Google employees are so special that they even get Japanese space toilets on which to rest their stock options. SFist found these sexy Japanese Toto toilets in Google’s headquarters. They feature front and rear cleansing along with a dryer and some sort of insane wand cleaning system that may be part of Google’s 80-20 projects [...]

Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system. The new Clickpass system requires [...]

Yahoo has announced its anticipated reorganization. As expected executives Hilary Schneider and Ash Patel are consolidating power under president Sue Decker. All product development will come under the responsibility of Patel, a Yahoo veteran and Yang loyalist. Schneider will take over all the advertising sales teams across the company. A third [...]

After looking for a nearly a year, Google has finally found a new chief financial officer to replace outgoing CFO George Reyes. So who’s job will it be to count all of Google’s cash? The lucky winner of what must have been one of the most intense executive searches of the year is [...]

Israeli-based animation site aniBoom is about to announce a $10 million B round, a source tells us. We believe the round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, although the company won’t confirm this. An announcement is expected on Monday. The company previously raised $4.5 million in February, 2007. AniBoom wants to be the [...]

MySpace was the first of the Big Three to announce tools for third party sites to integrate MySpace user data into their services (called, collectively, Data Availability). A day later Facebook announced Facebook Connect, then came Google Friend Connect three days after that. Today MySpace is fully launching Data Availability (look for it this afternoon at [...]

Last week Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang literally dropped off the grid for a couple of days, leaving his top execs (other than, presumably, President Sue Decker) in the dark. As I wrote on Saturday, no one could locate Yang, and, given the sheer number of high level departures and looming reorganization, those remaining in their [...]

CrunchGear’s Peter Ha got a chance to spend a day at the Dyson test labs in Malmesbury where he spoke with James Dyson about his design and engineering principles. One of his most important principles? The CEO of the company shouldn’t be able to easily break the products. Watch this hilarious/stunning/crazy video and ask yourself: [...]

Citizen journalism seems all the rage these days, with normal people breaking news to the world with their mobile phones and portable computers. News sites like GroundReport and CNN’s iReport are offering users outlets for their eyewitness stories, and with emerging mobile broadcasting products like Twitter and Qik, we’re only going to see the [...]

MySpace used to be notorious for simply banning third party widgets that didn’t play nice (”not playing nice” generally meant any kind of advertisements in the widgets, but it was very arbitrary). Those days are long gone. Maybe now, though, Facebook is having a go at it. Until now Facebook combated black hat applications by [...]

New startup Instinctiv launches today and simultaneously announces a first round of angel financing. The company’s product, Instinctiv Shuffle, is an iPhone application (jailbroken iPhones only, for now), that watches your listening habits to make a smart guess about which song you’ll want to listen to next. It claims to guess your mood and [...]

Jingle Networks, the operator 1-800-Free-411, will announce tomorrow that they’ve become profitable on a per call basis - a huge milestone and proof of concept for a startup that is trying to destroy entrenched competition by offering free 411 calls. This is a company we’ve been tracking since 2006 when call volume really began to [...]

Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar. Xobni’s sidebar [...]

Eyealike, a video and image recognition company, has released an update to its ‘Eyealike Faces’ product that makes it easier for users to find their ideal match on dating sites. Eyealike Faces uses image matching technology to compare faces across databases consisting of millions of photos - the idea being that you can upload [...]

Venturebeat reports that Microsoft might be close to acquiring the San Francisco based semantic search engine Powerset for about $100 Million. No announcement has been made yet by either party. We have contacted Microsoft and Powerset for confirmation and will update this post once we receive more information.

Rumor"s about Microsoft"s interest in Powerset had been swirling around the Valley since last month, when Dan Farber first brought up the possibility in a post on CNet.

The consumer-facing side of Powerset currently only searches Wikipedia articles, but Microsoft is most likely more interested in using the underlying technology for its own search products like Live Search. Powerset"s specialty is providing answers through natural language queries like "When was Henry VIII born?" Powerset licensed this technology from Xerox PARC).

Having backing from Microsoft could help the small company to expand beyond Wikipedia and start indexing more of the Internet.

Mircosoft"s search products have struggled to gain any ground back from Google"s search. Currently, Google has more than a 60% share in the search market, while MSN/Live Search has about 9.5$.

Powersets capabilities have generally received very positive reviews and in his original piece on this, Dan Farber already argued that Powerset"s ability to create connections between concepts, relationships, and meanings could give it a heads-up over Google"s keyword and PageRank driven search.

Powerset was funded in a $12.5 Million Series A round by Foundation Capital, Founders Fund and various angel investors.

Recently, we"ve seen a couple of our favorite web apps go open source. The code for FF To Go, the popular mobile client for FriendFeed developed by RSSMeme creator Benjamin Golub, is now available under the MIT license and Snackr, the RSS AIR app we adore has posted their source code on Google Code. Is this the start of a new trend for niche web apps? And what does this mean for the future of their development?

Why Go Open Source?

Of course, we can"t talk about the trend in open sourcing web apps without mentioning the big news about Reddit. Recently, the social news site decided to open up so that you can now build your own version of Reddit. The difference here is that Reddit is large enough to not be considered "niche" - it has 4.5 million unique visitors per month and has grown 1000% since the acquisition by Conde Nast"s Wired Digital division.

However, when compared to competitors like Digg and Yahoo Buzz, it"s clear that Reddit is the underdog here. If anything, the decision to go open source was a move to compete in a way that Digg and Yahoo cannot. When speaking as to what they hope to accomplish by the move to open source, co-founder Steve Huffman said that they"re hoping users will tweak what they want changed and add new features. The beauty in this is that even if users develop new features, they can"t necessarily be used to go and build a competitor to Reddit - because the code is open source, Reddit could just implement those features themselves.

Small Apps Open Up

While open source might be a good thing for a community the size of Reddit, there"s still concern that when smaller web apps go this way, it means the development cycle is going to slow down.

Take for example, Enso, an app which provides an alternative way to interact with your computer, similar to what Launchy offers. In March of this year, this niche app also went the open source route via the revised BSD license. In this case, the move was most likely due to the fact that the Mozilla Foundation hired away three of the principals from Humanized, the company behind both Enso and Songza. But immediately upon the announcement of the move, there was concern echoing in the comments of the blog post:

Will the Humanized folks still be leading the charge on Enso? or are leaving it adrift?

and another pleaded...

Humanized, please don"t leave Enso adrift.

As to whether Enso has indeed been set adrift...well, no one from the Humanized team ever responded in the comments section and the Humanized blog is now promoting Mozilla. A May 6th entry even let everyone know Mozilla was hiring and provided an email address to apply. In addition, four other of the May blog posts were about Firefox.

When it comes to FFtoGo, though, creator Golub assured me on Twitter that he"s still developing the app, but he hopes others will start sending him patches soon. (We hope so, too!) Snackr also is currently going strong, but they only went open source on June 5th. Still, they"ve already posted a couple of test builds on Google Code, which implement new features like the ability to star new items, change ticker transparency, customize how old the items displayed can be, and more.

Even Bigger Apps Can Lose Momentum

However, the concern for the lack of development isn"t entirely unfounded. Take for example, another open sourced app, this one from Socialtext, maker business social software. In July of 2006, they released Socialtext Open, an open source version of their wiki software. But it"s a good thing they didn"t stop development of their own because, by the looks of it, Socialtext Open has only had one patch in 2 years:

Excited or Worried?

Those are just a handful of examples of apps going open source, but there are many more. Of course, this isn"t to ignore the fact that Sourceforge does quite well, it"s just to raise the question - does open sourcing a niche web app really encourage more development? When the community is so small, if the creator doesn"t continue to work on the app, how does the app really fare? And has a favorite app of yours ever been abandoned?

Social networking site MySpace is releasing a set of APIs later today that will allow developers to implement protocols for exchanging and synchronizing user profiles between their own applications and MySpace profiles. Users can share their basic profile information, as well as their MySpace photos, videos, and friend list.

As we reported earlier, MySpace has signed up a number of high profile partners for this launch: Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and Photobucket.

This is, of course, a direct competitor to Google"s Friend Connect and Facebook"s Facebook Connect, though, as Steve O"Hear notes on ZDNet, there are important differences between these projects. While Friend Connect relies on an iframe to exchange data between sites, the Data Availability APIs makes third-party services request the data from MySpace "on the fly" and only allows a user"s login name to be cached.

As Steve notes, if MySpace"s Data Availability API is adopted by a large enough number of sites, it could make MySpace the de facto host for social network profiles.

The details around Facebook Connect are still a bit unclear, but Facebook will probably update its developer community about its plans at next month"s F8 conference.

For users, being able to have their profiles linked between different services is a major step forward in terms of usability. It would be very convenient to have a Twitter profile automatically synch with a MySpace (or any other service"s) friend list, or only having to update photos on Photobucket and then see them directly on MySpace.

Microsoft announced this morning that it plans to acquire Portugese mobile application company Mobicomp, makers of some very cool mobile tools that we"re excited to get our hands on. Microsoft watchdogs Liveside saw the news first and have a good description of the Mobicomp offerings, which we"ll discuss below.

One thing"s for sure, though - the iPhone is not the only mobile game in town. We continue to see things that Windows Mobile phones can do that iPhones cannot and we expect that to continue after the launch of the iPhone app store. Check out what Mobicomp offers, presumably a feature set that will be included in all Windows Mobile phones in the future.

The Features

• Automatic backup and recovery

MobiComp"s MobileKeeper™ Backup & Restore is an "over the air" mobile backup and restore service that can store any kind of content held on a mobile device, including contacts, calendars, text messages, photos, videos, music, bookmarks,
ring tones and applications to business files like Microsoft Word and Excel. Backup to the web happens automatically and the web interface also allows for management of the contents of the mobile device. This reminds us of SugarSync, among other things.

• Social web integration

The MobileKeeper™ Sharing & Communities features include both read and write capabilities for blogging and participation in various social networking sites. Here at RWW we"re big fans of Facebook Mobile, Netvibes Mobile and FriendFeed to Go - and we believe that mobile social networking in general is going to be very big.

• News ticker

The company"s Active mTicker™ is an RSS-based news ticker that delivers a wide variety of content types while the phone is in idle mode. Sounds like a great idea, if a battery suck. We love the Adobe AIR desktop news ticker Snackr and we like the idea of a high quality, customizable mobile news ticker. Right now the news ticker doesn"t appear to be personalizable - it"s almost like an ad platform for customers. We would love to see users able to access this functionality directly.

In other words, this is an exciting acquisition for Microsoft to make. We hope that Mobicomp"s features can be integrated quickly.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.

One interesting aspect of the new rule, according to the WSJ, is that general terms such as .news or .sports would also become available for registration.

The new rule proposes a $50.000 to $100.000 fee for the registration of one of these new domain names, effectively restricting their availability to larger organizations.

This new plan would have a number of ramifications, but maybe most importantly, the domain name speculation business is going to be changed forever. Most interesting and generic .com names have long been taken. The new system, however, will bring an abundance of new domains, which might drive down prices for .com domains. This is surely going to upset a lot of speculators, as Chris Morrison also points out on VentureBeat. Right now, speculators can hoard interesting domain names and auction them off for millions of dollars (business.com sold for around $350 million).

Will Consumers Care?

In the past, ICANN slowly added a number of new top-level domains such as .info, .mobi, .travel, .coop, or .asia. None of these gained a lot of mind-share among consumers and can often be bought at a discount because demand for them is so low. For the average Internet user, .com is the only domain on the Internet, with only .edu, .gov, .org, and .net having some traction as well. Not coincidentally, these (together with .mil) were also the first TLDs available on the net.

The question is if these generic TLDs will be more successful. If consumers didn"t adapt to .info, will they adapt to .coke? The .com domain has become so ingrained in our Internet culture that it has practically become synonymous with domain names and the Internet as a whole.

While some web services like del.icio.us were able to attract a considerable amount of users with their idiosyncratic domains, even del.icio.us finally bought delicious.com when it started attracting more mainstream users.

It looks like these questions might get answered pretty soon. Judging from ICANN"s timeline for the introduction of generic TLDs, we could start seeing them as early as Q2 of 2009.

YouTube"s huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that"s up 26% from it"s May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.)

In April we reported that YouTube"s dominance in online video was bigger than Google"s dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

Questions

Hitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That"s strange. We"ve asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we"d love to hear them.

YouTube"s huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We"d love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.

Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Xobni, an inbox add-on for Microsoft Outlook. This application is designed to tap into the hidden social network everyone uses: their inbox. More recently, another inbox addon called Xoopit came onto the scene. This one is for your Gmail inbox and provides a way to find files, photos, videos...and people, although that feature is not as obvious. Both of these applications are extending the possibilities of the inbox while turning them into hubs for for our real-life social connections.

Xobni

Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use.

With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact"s current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app"s sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles.

Download Xobni

Xoopit

Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you"ve seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard.

The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry.

On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what"s really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you"ve been identified!)

At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren"t too security conscious.

Download Xoopit

For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:

Upgrading the Inbox

Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it"s nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory.

Because so many people use Gmail, we"ve seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani"s Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google"s Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful).

Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we"ll soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend.

Watching Yahoo"s decline is rather sad. If you take any pleasure watching it, you must"ve enjoyed a weak kid getting beat up by a couple of bullies in the schoolyard. Yahoo"s decline is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can"t Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What"s so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.

The companies that faded from view in earlier transitions are far too numerous to mention. Most of them suffered from the boiling frog problem. They never hit a crisis that forced fundamental change. They were profitable and had plenty of cash reserves. Customers (not all but enough) loved them.

The problem was always "too little, too late". Faced with creative destruction, a radical strategy is usually needed, something that looks almost crazy and high risk. It also has to be really simple to understand, so that employees, investors, partners and clients can understand.

FWIW, here is my unsolicited advice to the Yahoo Board:

* Jerry Yang has to go. He is too associated with the past. Radical turnarounds need a new leader. His 1.0 act was brilliant and he can enjoy the financial fruits of that. His post Semel 2.0 act was dismal.

* Nix both the Google and the Microsoft deals in a way that it is clear they mean it. Signal an independent path. So what if investors dump your shares? Another investor will buy. This happens all the time, it is just "noise on the line".

* Understand what happened, without any rose-tinted glasses. Basically Yahoo is not a player in the two major shifts - search and social. It is still very good at Web 1.0 and that still makes a lot of money, but Yahoo missed both of the big transitions.

* Come up with a simple strategy that everybody can rally around.

Here is my attempt at a simple strategy for Yahoo:

1. Re-energise the current core money-makers.

2. Disrupt the current leaders with a new proposition for developers.

The first is not really a new strategy, it is just better execution. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM he got a lot of flack for saying something like "the last thing IBM needs right now is a new vision". What he realized was that the company simply needed better execution and that was not simple to do, it required a massive cultural shift internally. The same is true for Yahoo today.

Re-energizing the current core money-makers is possible if Yahoo accepts that there is really very little synergy at the end user level. People use different services because they work for them at the time, there is no lock-in at all. Recognizing this would mean managing these lines of business more like a Private Equity Fund manages a portfolio of companies:

* Lots of autonomy for managers
* Ways for managers to make a ton of money if they perform (more than the CEO)
* No mandate to use any other part of Yahoo - can use external resources if that is better. Synergy is loosely coupled and voluntary
* Very low corporate overhead

This model will work well for current lines of business as well as new acquisitions. There are plenty of start-ups looking for an exit that has public stock, but will give them autonomy to perform.

The second part (disrupting current leaders with a new proposition for developers) should not be unveiled until there is something substantive. Yahoo has an opportunity to take a leaf out of Amazon"s AWS book, but go a lot further. Yahoo can open up all their search, content, communication and community services to developers via well-defined interfaces. If they do this really radically, Yahoo could lead the next wave of the "programmable web" or the "web operating system". This has to be radical. More "too little, too late" won"t work. Radical means:

1 Simple pricing. This is where Amazon did well. A start-up can understand how to build their costs into a plan.
2 Cost plus pricing. This is again where Amazon did it right. They look at it like a retail "I buy infrastructure at $x and sell it at $x plus y%". Nothing wrong with that model at scale.
3 Loosely coupled. You can use just the services you want. But you end up using lots of services as it is simply easier to integrate than something else and the price is right.

Yahoo has lots more to offer than Amazon. Nor do Yahoo need to worry about cannibalizing their core e-commerce business (which does constrain what Amazon is willing to offer).

This developer offering has some risks. Theoretically, any start-up can compete with Yahoo"s existing cash cows, using Yahoo"s own assets. In practice a) start-ups will tend to focus on new markets and b) start-ups can compete with Yahoo anyway, with or without their help.

Yahoo can score four ways with a really open suite of services for developers:

1. They make money immediately from fees for the services.

2. They empower start-ups to compete with Google and Facebook.

3. They become exciting again, getting talent back on board.

4. They get a steady flow of acquisitions with zero integration cost.

Yahoo has occasionally done things that excite developers, such as Delicious, Pipes and SearchMonkey. They need to take that to a much higher level and offer everything they have via interfaces and promote that like crazy. That is how Microsoft won the PC era. With the right leader, Yahoo could still do this in the Web era.

This afternoon at Structure 08 an interesting discussion was had about the birth, growth, trials and tribulations of Salesforce.com. Om Malik from GigaOm was joined by Michael Copeland from Fortune Magazine and Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. While the "fireside chat" was titled The Endgame for Boxed Software?, the focus was on what lessons can be learned from the venerable CRM vendor.

According to Harris, in the consumer world, everyone must think not only on one level, but on several. Salesforce.com thought about software, scale and the Internet; questioning what it would take to build this "thing" they were thinking about.

"When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon," Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.

In early 1999, they built a prototype. Stealing tabs from Amazon and buttons from Yahoo!, they built a site.

Om: What has the transition been from then and now and why?

Harris: As a technology, we wanted to build a platform first. One that is beautiful from a technology perspective. But you risk losing touch with why you"re doing it. Originally it was going to be for sales people and there were various abstract layers; we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn"t consciously do that.

When we started, a lot of people said they didn"t want to trust their information to anyone; data, privacy, these were all big things, and people were concerned with trusting their customer records and leads with another company. We made the huge step, and now people trust the information services.

It"s still very early days in platforms--are you going to use someone else"s platform (app engine from Google, Amazon) or use your own?

It"s all about the database. Databases have evolved. Today you don"t really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.

We sell to business. We do a lot of work on compliance and security issues to meet the needs of enterprise. For business we are very appropriate; for websites, go to Google. Amazon gives you CPU time or storage. We too have a lot of technology that is pre-built that you can leverage if you want; analytics, search, 24.7 web services, API, it"s all there.

Michael: What about compliance and security and is anything Salesforce.com can do to get apps to go viral.

Harris: We want to have a directory where people can go find pages quickly. Free pricing models are one way to drive a viral model. We are looking at ways how to work with Facebook. We are looking to involve developers more.

Om: Infrastructure; what are the challenges

Harris: About two years ago we did go through some serious issues and part of it was due to eBay. They could give us more power but no space, or space and no power - so we moved everything to new data centers.

We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.

There is no blueprint on building a scalable service; you never replace it with V2 so you are forever changing it. There are best practices that have evolved, and people should follow them if they want to do this.

Early on we thought of tech innovation as software and infrastructure, and that innovation can occur on one or the other. To truly innovate you need to think of it as one thing and change all areas.

Cooliris" PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it "nifty" and "gorgeous." Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

A Wall of Pictures

At its most basic level, PicLens, which is now at version 1.7, allows you to quickly browse through images from photo and video sharing sites on a full-screen 3D wall. This wall looks a lot like Apple"s Cover Flow and the screen-shots here really don"t do it justice.

One thing that might come as a disappointment to users is that PicLens doesn"t work with every site. However, PicLens does support a wide range of photo sharing sites, social networks, and image search services, including Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images. In its newest version, PicLens now also supports searching for videos in YouTube. PicLens should also work on any other site that has a Media RSS feed enabled.

Cooliris has also made a plugin available that allows owners of self-hosted WordPress sites to enable PicLens" functionality for their blogs.

As for browsers, PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Window Shopping in 3D

One interesting function PicLens has added, is the ability to do a visual search through Amazon"s online store. Scrolling through the covers of books, CDs, and videos, or even browsing the apparel section is surprisingly fast and actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Clicking on an item enlarges it and brings up the price and a short description. One limitation of this search is that you can"t specify anything else but keywords. Items can"t be organized by price or any other filter normally available on Amazon such as brand or seller. This is even more limiting because you can"t do a search on Amazon and then have PicLens display the results of your search, making the feature quite a bit less useful.

It"s Pretty, But Is it Useful?

Whenever a piece of software looks as good as PicLens does, the question that comes up pretty quickly is how useful it can actually be.

The Amazon integration is most useful when you are searching for a specific look or just browsing through books for the sake of it, but otherwise, it feels more like a gimmick than a useful feature.

PicLens is at its best when displaying objects from photo and video sites. Having the ability to visually browse through a large number of items gives it a clear heads-up over the functionality of these web services themselves, and, at the end of the day, it"s also plain fun to use.

Lidija Davis is reporting for ReadWriteWeb from the Structure 08 conference in San Francisco

In a recent report, Gartner predicted that early adopters will forgo capital expenditures, and instead purchase 40% of IT infrastructure as a service by 2011. Alistair Croll, senior analyst at Bitcurrent, and MC for the first Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, sees things differently. According to Croll it will be a lot sooner: "Right now, almost every company has someone in their IT department using the cloud to some degree." Croll predicts that by 2009 it will no longer be almost every company; it will be 100% of companies.

Led by Alistair Croll, panelists included: Geva Perry, GigaSpaces, Jason Hoffman, Joyent, Tony Lucas, XCalibre, Lew Moorman, Rackspace, Christphoe Bisciglia, Google and Joe Weinman, AT&T.

Here are my real-time notes from the panel, followed by a primer on cloud computing.

Grid vs. Cloud

Jason talks about how grid computing is more about running multiple batch jobs. He predicts that there will be a proprietary stack and an open business model based on the cloud. Simply put, if the cloud is not billable it"s a grid; the difference is the notion of pay-per-use.

Geva insists there is room for both models. The major goal is to build applications that are platform agnostic.

Are we selling our souls - or should we not worry about lock in?

Of the panel, five deal with general purpose clouds; only one, Christophe, deals with specialized clouds.

Jason explains that in this emerging market, standards haven"t been set. This produces lock in issues, but hopefully as time goes on, we"ll have standards. Specifications are a major issue to what an open "loving" cloud should do and we need to be able to reach open protocol standard and give people assurances the cloud is a good place to be.

Because we are trying to convince people that buying hardware and software is a bad idea, we need be open source and trustworthy.

Tony says that Google"s Big Table is basically a lock in and Christophe responds by pointing out that it is still just a developer preview; the theory is that it will be a very open platform.

Alistair asks what the setup is for Google; put everything in the cloud or put more out at the edge.

According to Christophe, Google has geographically distributed clusters with a lot of their services being replicated to keep customers safer. They want to ensure that if you trust them with your e-mail, the most current may be in a datacenter close to you.

What has to change for enterprise to buy into cloud computing?

Christophe says we need to allow people to do what they do best and gives the example that originally even banks were not considered safe. People kept money under mattresses. As time went on, they realized their home could also be broken into, so storing it at a bank is a smarter solution. He expects that over the next couple of years we"ll see companies keeping data more safe, and enterprise more willing to buy in.

Joe thinks benefits will come from a commitment to the enterprise space and ensuring the infrastructure is secure.

Geva is concerned that companies don"t want quick credit card access as afforded with most cloud computing solutions. They want contracts and support; they want help. It needs to be given. Lew thinks the definition the concept is very confusing for enterprises. The word cloud is starting to mean less and less, yet at the same time it is cheap easy and it"s getting into enterprise through the back door (IT departments are beginning to investigate).

The session went well and was held before a standing room only audience.

Cloud Computing: A Primer

The "cloud" is a well known metaphor for the Internet. IT folk have been drawing puffy blobs to represent it for decades. The latest buzzword "cloud computing" however, is not as well defined, and not as familiar.

However, the general consensus is that cloud computing has become an umbrella term covering various solutions. Here"s a basic rundown:

SaaS

Software as a Service is a subscription based application that is hosted on a remote server, and accessed through the Internet. Subscription based because you don"t pay a licensing fee--as long as you"re subscribed (whether the service is paid or not) you have access to it. Accessed through the Internet because the software is not downloaded onto your computer; the program and the data is accessed via the Web. Think Gmail as the basic SaaS, salesforce.com as the larger model.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service offers computing services on the Internet designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost effective. You no longer need to buy servers, network equipment, memory, CPU, disk space or data center facilities; they are provided as a monthly service, generally based on capacity used.

Given there is no up front capital to purchase hardware, software, or facilities, corporations and developers are quickly moving to this a smarter option. Amazon"s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is a prime example of IaaS.

PaaS

The idea behind Platform as a Service is to deliver development environments as a service; offering programmers everything they need to create applications via the Web - including building, testing, deploying and hosting services - without the need to ever install anything on their own computers.

Examples of PaaS: Google App Engine, Yahoo Pipes, and Force.com from SalesForce.com

This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like Starting up … Loading, please wait… kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b) = sda5(8,5) kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b kinit: No [...]

　　我去年曾经安装了深圳电信的“我的E家”包年的2M ADSL宽带，价格为1800元，而现在，同样的价格可以使用的带宽已经为3M了，我早先曾经申请免费将我的2M ADSL“提速”，今天发现我的ADSL被电信升级为3M的速度了。

　　使用测速软件测试，速度的确已经达到了3M带宽，下载文件速度也挺快的。

　　3M带宽理论上最高的下载速度为每秒384KB，我从月光博客上下载文件可以达到每秒320KB，峰值为370KB左右。看来以后下载文件可就方便多啦，在线看电影也舒服了。

　　目前深圳电信3M包年的ADSL套餐价格为1800元，包含固话月租、七彩铃音、来电显示、20元固话通话费、赠送网络杀毒及防火墙应用（金山毒霸安全组合），提供2个宽带帐号。送宽带无线“猫”一台。

• 中国网通也不怎么样  (2008-2-21 21:59:44)
• 中国电信的傲慢和粗暴  (2008-2-15 20:33:51)
• 中国电信解除屏蔽Google的服务  (2008-1-11 19:29:37)
• 中国电信屏蔽Google背后的秘密  (2008-1-9 0:10:17)
• 中国电信屏蔽Google的若干服务  (2008-1-5 22:14:01)
• 中国电信又开始耍流氓啦  (2007-10-30 21:04:31)

A couple of minutes ago an interesting attempt to phish for Google account credentials made it to my inbox. It had me blink my eyes because while I suspected phishing there were some things with this one that had me check twice to see how it"s done, as things looked quite official on the surface. As you may know, phishing emails are sent out by abusers to make the recipient in some way reply with their password or click through to enter their password, but the more official looking they are, the more easily they"re believed. This particular mail, shown in the screenshot, had the following attributes: It was sent by "customer care". OK, could be a lie. It got my name right... might be just luck, as my name is included in my mail address. I ...

Google used to pride themselves about how word-of-mouth spread popularity of their search engine, and to this day they"re doing remarkably little traditional advertising. However, after their ad campaign in Russia now another ad campaign in China has been spotted. Xujie in the forum posted photos from a DWGoogle.cn article, with one pic shown above which includes Google"s super-short "g.cn" domain. From an automated translation: "Google China in Guangzhou Subway advertising is to promote Google"s mobile search services." At the moment, purely relying on word-of-mouth in China would be a tough challenge, too, as the business environment isn"t completely fair. For ins ...

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

• Want to learn how to do 100 pushups? This site gives you a nice training program that"s bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time.
  
• This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves "What can science learn from Google?" Oh geez...
• Google announces the launch of Ad Planner, which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. And next week Google will announce ShowrStalkr, in which they spy on you while you"re showering and inform you of any areas you"ve neglected to soap up.
• Hey, check out how trendy SEOmoz is! Suck it, Cutts!
• Andy  Beal is offering an online reputation management workshop August 7 (the day after my birthday!) at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This should be an extremely valuable clinic and there are only 17 seats left, so scoop one up if you want to learn more about how to manage your brand and reputation online.
• MindValleyLabs provides some tips on how to get and leverage attention from the mass media. Racist remarks seem to be working for Don Imus...
• Eric Enge interviews Vanessa Fox about holistic online marketing, her new Jane and Robot site, and other tidbits.
• Apparently Thursday at noon PST is the best time to post a blog entry. I think I linked to another study that came to the same conclusion in a previous Roundup Thursday post.
  
• The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers is opening up domain names to endless variations. Expect to see .wtf and .lol TLDs soon.
• Plurkable tells us how you can become a power plurker. You pretty much have to stay up 24/7 so your karma points don"t dip. Bastards.
• This is insane. Apparently a bunch of idiotic teenage girls at Gloucester High in Massachusetts made a "pregnancy pact" and all got pregnant at the same time because they thought it would be cute to raise babies together. They even went so far as to get knocked up by a 24 year old homeless man (Arrested Development reference in 3, 2, 1..."I just want my kids back!"). Good lord. Whatever happened to slap bracelets being the big trendy thing to have at school? Why is it babies now?!
• According to RSS Applied, Facebook finally beat MySpace in monthly visits. MySpace was too busy trying to take a pouty photo of itself standing in front of a bathroom mirror to comment.
  
• The New Yorker has a video interview of Eric Schmidt, the CEO and chairman of Google.
  
• Can Google define what"s "obscene"? This NY Times article highlights how the Internet could be changing obscenity standards in court cases. Sarah should weigh in for an upcoming Legal Monday post!
• Richard Baxter reviews Blip, the "musical Twitter."  Apparently they don"t nofollow the links in the status bar, so SEOs, start yer spammin"!
  
• This is interesting--50 resources for how to make Flickr work for your library. It"s neat to see libraries and other institutions adopting web 2.0ey goodness. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
  
• Here"s Eric Ward"s site translated by Gizoogle. I particularly like the quote by "D-A-Double-Nizzy Sullivan."

Four star links:

• One of my favorite bloggers, Gord Hotchkiss, authors an intelligent post stating that we shouldn"t crown Google as the search engine king just yet because Google"s biggest competitor could still be out there--a scrappy young startup like, well, how Google was back in the day.
  
• nTrendsMaster is a really good tool for traffic keyword analysis (beware the slow download, though). It claims to "give you as accurate as possible information about the popularity and level of competition for any keyword you like."
  
• Danny Sullivan writes a great post about how Yahoo! is mistakenly being painted as a "loser company." Rand"s thoughts on the matter: "I"m pretty tired of people saying Yahoo!"s beat, when in fact they"re one of the most amazing companies in the world. They"re just competing against possibly the most amazing company in the world, so all the comparisons are ridiculously unfair."
• Psychology Today has the last interview George Carlin gave before he died. I actually saw George Carlin perform in Detroit when I was 16, and he was incredible. We"ll miss you, George! Thanks for bringing us some great fucking comedy. :)

Five star links:

• Matt McGee has a fantastic post about how he thinks XML sitemaps are the most overrated SEO tactic ever. It"s an honest, refreshing perspective and a great read.
  
• SEOmoz worked with Geosign at the height of their fame and fortune, but nonetheless it"s fascinating to see their rapid rise and fall due to PPC arbitrage.
  
• I already have my next bike picked out for upcoming triathlons...

5-Star Achievement:

Okay, I don"t have a fancy badge to display, nor do I have a link to share, but I"m going to shamelessly plug the fact that I completed a half Ironman on Sunday.

Check out those guns

After enduring confusing registration forms, coping with flat tires, carbo loading, and training for 5 months, I was able to successfully swim 1.2 miles, bike 56 miles, and run 12.4 miles (a traditional half Ironman is 13.1 miles, but the race was in Victoria, BC, Canada, and they did it as a 20 km run). My finish time was pretty mediocre, but I don"t mind--now I know what to improve upon for the next race! I have to say thank you to my coworkers for putting up with me running out of the office clad in spandex on far too many occasions, Manstery Guest for training with me and for putting up with my Jessie Spano freakout moments when I was unsure as to whether or not I could do the race, everyone in the SEO community and all of the SEOmoz members for encouraging me and for sending me well wishes, and Christine, our director of operations, for persuading me to sign up for the race, for lending me tons of gear (including her old bike and wetsuit), and for being extremely supportive.

Oh, and since I was in Canada, yes, I did get to indulge in a cheese and bacon baked potato from Wendy"s:

Victory has never tasted so calorically delicous.

YOUmoz entries:

• Get Your Banana Out and Start Monkeying Around with Yahoo Search. Stephen T gives us an intro to Yahoo SearchMonkey and shows us how to create an application.
  
• The Logical Path to Keyword Research. Scotie shares with us his keyword research process, which involves finding a workable solution via a logical path.
  
• Keyword Research for Emerging Markets...Or Not. Mitch Turk asks how to do keyword research for emerging markets.
• Great Expotations: My SES Top 11. LinkDev shares a list of lessons learned while attending SES Toronto.
• Does the Google SandBox for Domains Still Exist? Or How Quick Can I Get Around It? Paisleyseo sets up an experiment with a new domain to see if it will get sandboxed or whether it"ll get indexed fairly quickly.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Google"s Top 100 SEOmoz Member Profiles. Darren Slatten identifies the top 100 SEOmoz member profiles as seen by Google.
  
• At What Stage Do You Say "Bugger the Users, I *Need* to Do This!"? ChristianB runs into the dilemma of putting ads on his site at the risk of alienating his existing userbase. It"s a conundrum many of us have faced in the past: can you make money AND keep your users happy?

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added.

Upcoming events:

• Mobile Social Networks & UGC July 2-4 at the Moevenpic Hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Social Networking Conference July 10-11 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEM specialist for Impact Media in Southampton,  UK
• Contracted SEO advice as well as ongoing SEO work for toycollector.com in London, UK
• Web marketing associate and SEO/SEM expert for imageMEDIA in Tarpon Springs, FL
• On-page optimization specialist for seOverflow in Denver, CO
• Senior research scientist for a vertical ad network in New York, NY
• Contracted SEO for UGT Servers in Florida
• Search marketing specialist for Sesame Communications in Renton, WA
• E-commerce marketing manager in North Atlanta, GA

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• Talent Gurus in Houston, TX
• Deographics in San Francisco, CA
• SEER Interactive in Philadelphia, PA
• SEMinhouse.com in San Francisco, CA (uh, nice URL, especially when you read "SEM" as "seem"...)

UK/Europe:

• Impact Media in the UK

Asia:

• Info Cubic Japan in Tokyo, Japan

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Heather Braswell McMahon is an experienced copywriter and is looking for an opportunity in Atlanta, GA, developing copy, search marketing and social networking strategies, and content strategies for clients in an agency or web dev firm setting.
• Lewise Hiltz is an Internet marketing manager who has experience in both online/e-business and traditional sales and marketing.

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Posted by randfish

The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström, getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of PageRank, dropping out of Google"s index:

You can see from the image that the single URL was dropped, but a site:birdstep.com/database query reveals that in fact, all of those pages are out of the index. Time for some detective work.

Jane & I spent a few minutes trying to puzzle out if bad links were pointing in or if the pages were somehow cloaking or violating TOS. As we were digging through the backlink profile, we saw that, naturally, the birdstep.com domain was linking to the subdirectory on most every page. When we viewed the source code of those pages (for example, the homepage - www.birdstep.com), we saw something strange. Below is the tail end of the source code for their top nav bar:

<li class="menuObject"><a href="http://www.birdstep.com/Corporate/"><img src="/images/menu/Corporate.gif" border="0" alt="Corporate" /></a></li>
<li class="menuObject"><a href="http://www.birdstep.com/Contact-us/"><img src="/images/menu/Contact_us_active.gif" border="0" alt="Contact us" /></a></li>
<li class="menuObject"><a href="http://www.birdstep.com/database/"><img src="/images/menu/Database.gif" border="0" alt="Database" /></a></li>

Looks fine, right? Just a regular menu serving up images as the clickable link. Only problem is...

Notice the navbar? See the missing link? That"s where the "database" section should be linked-to, only the image is missing. Apparently, it was just a design mistake and so they used a 1x1 pixel gif until they could get it fixed. There are plenty of other visible links in the content body of many pages over to the database section, but that top link in the navbar is invisible - technically violating Google"s rules. Despite the fact that plenty of other sites and pages link to the database section legitimately, and Birdstep certainly has no reason or intention to hide that link (other than a miscalculation on pixel width), the whole subdirectory was removed from the index.

Luckily, we caught it, Birdstep has removed the link and they"ll hopefully have the subdirectory re-included in the near future. They also generously gave us permission to discuss the Q+A issue on the blog, which we very much appreciate. I think this serves as a wise warning to developers and designers everywhere - unintentional, white-hat spirited mistakes can be just as dangerous and have just as dire consequences as black hat manipulation. Watch your code!

One more point of interest - in searching around on this issue, I noticed that a Google search for http://www.birdstep.com/database/. (with the added period at the end) brought up this result:

I ran another query on a page I know was removed from the index, and it also yielded a result like the one above (unfortunately, I can"t share that page publicly). It"s possible that this might help diagnose future pages that are removed for bad behavior and exhibit similar symptoms - definitely not a bad query to have in your arsenal if it really does work consistently.

UPDATE: Looks like although this hidden nav element could be a problem, it wasn"t actually this issue coming into play here. The answer was... capital letters cloaking 404 pages to Google (an excellent find from John Mueller). Basically, Birdstep was using some user-agent and port detection to redirect Googlebot to a 404 error page (obviously, not an intentional, we"re cloaking because we want to trick Google, but the oops, that was dumb kind). The odd part is, it looks like Yahoo! and MSN/Live got it right (and there are plenty of links), but Googlebot was being treated differently.

We didn"t notice this initially due to multiple problems - first, just switching your user agent to Googlebot in Firefox won"t expose the issue. Neither will using search spider emulators like SEO-Browser. You need to actually telnet to Port 80 (as Matt Cutts notes in the comments). Second, you will see the page in Yahoo! and MSN (making it feel more like a penalty than a crawl issue). I seriously doubt they"ll be banned for this - the intent to spam or deceive isn"t there - but once again a fascinating detective story about the problems a site can have. Big thanks to Matt and to John for their help.

p.s. Removed the bottom part of the original post due to overwhelming feelings of sheepishness.

p.p.s. Dave Naylor has a tool that can help detect this sort of thing (though it wasn"t originally intended for that use).

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