The internet is an incredibly powerful tool for sharing information, communicating, and learning, but it’s also an excellent resource that identity thieves use to obtain your personal information. Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States and nowadays most people don’t give a second thought to posting their full name, address, and phone number on popular social networks like Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. Read more »

Last month I pointed out that Twitter’s growth rate had slowed from 76% in March to 39% in April according to Compete. Compete statistics that were recently released show that Twitter’s unique visitor traffic growth for May was stagnant at a mere 1%. To make matters worse, Quantcast has Twitter actually losing traffic in May. This should be of serious concern for Twitter and its investors as the life of Twitter’s recent popularity is still in its infancy despite arguably receiving more media hype than any web service to date. Read more »

Kevin Rose has been eluding to some really big changes over at Digg lately. In his interview with Michael Arrington, Kevin went as far to say that the new directions for Digg are “a ballsy move”. During Digg’s Townhall Meeting that aired last night, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced lots of upcoming changes that include removal of the shout feature, better sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and a redesign of the homepage. Read more »

It seems like nearly everyone in the tech world is sick of hearing about Twitter so I thought it would be nice to checkup on some of the other microblogging and micromessaging services that are available. When Twitter launched in 2006 and began receiving some decent attention, copycats came out of the woodwork. Fortunately for Twitter, no direct competitors really had the staying power to launch any kind of real threat to the little birdie. Compete’s latest stats show that Twitter’s monthly unique visitors is up by 39% yet many of its direct competitors are dead or barely breathing. Read more »

Twitter traffic has been growing at incredible rates the past few months due to mass adoption and coverage by the media as well as celebrity endorsements. According to comScore data, traffic in terms of unique visitors at Twitter.com alone (not including traffic from Twitter apps/clients) increased by ~95% for the month of March. Compete’s traffic growth value for unique visitors in March (~76%) was similar. This morning however, Compete released its latest data for the month of April which suggests that the booming traffic growth rate that Twitter was experiencing is slowing. Read more »

The more I think about FriendFeed as a Twitter application the more sense it makes. FriendFeed has the potential to become the go-to communication service for 140+ characters. Currently when you need to continue a Twitter discussion elsewhere (because of 140 character limit), you only have two options: chat or email. Both of those choices are really inconvenient however because they require that you move the discussion to another location. Read more »

The explosion of new social networks and web applications that occurred several years ago created a need for people to keep track of one’s web content/activity over many different online services. The lifestreaming/social aggregation solution seemed to address that problem quite well and soon there were almost too many to choose from. Read more »

It’s incredibly shocking how short some people’s memories are. In the late 1990’s the Web became inundated by frames such that content was practically inaccessible. Fast forward approximately 10 years later and we’re facing the same problem once again. In response to the surging popularity of Twitter and the need to tweet shortened URLs, Digg and others (HootSuite, Krumlr) have resurrected the sleazy technique in an attempt to take advantage of this ever growing trend. By repackaging its frame based toolbar as a social media sharing service Digg hopes to artificially inflate their own visitor statistics and steal traffic from other publishers. Read more »

Digg released their iframe based software toolbar (DiggBar) this week and I’ve been trying to educate both users and publishers as to why frames are a very bad idea. From a publisher’s standpoint, the framing of one’s website by another is considered both unethical and illegal. It effectively steals content, traffic, and potential revenue from the original content owner. From a user’s point of view, the initial attraction to these new framing toolbars (i.e. HootSuite, Krumlr, DiggBar, Facebook) is their ease of use and ability to shorten URLs for use on Twitter. Read more »

While it appears that most publishers understand the serious negative implications that the technique of framing incurs (and hopefully they all add frame breaking script to their websites), most Digg and Facebook users do not. What is of the utmost importance to users is the usability of a product/service. Thus, in an attempt to explain the effect that frames have on browser/website usability, I submit this single image to the Digg and Facebook community as well as all Web users to ask one simple question: Read more »