Some of you might have heard, but if you haven’t then brace yourself– I won the #DigiWWWOW awards!! WOO HOO!!
I’m still trying to come to grips on how I manage to beat out competitors like Amanz, MrPiratz.Com, Droid.my and of course Technology, Design,Inspiration. All of whom garner more hits than me, and are far more popular. Mr.Piratz was the first person to congratulate me in the backstage room.
[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210356987576324096”]
Security Analyst today reported that as many as 6 million LinkedIn passwords have been leaked, the 161 million strong Social network focused on creating professional relationships have since confirmed the leak and have taken steps to mitigate the issues.
All compromised accounts will no longer have their old passwords working, and so the first thing you want to do is logon to your linkedin account and check if your password is still working.
The big FB goes public today, making a lot of people very happy and few people very very rich, including one Eduardo Saverin – who will probably be barred from ever entering the US –EVER AGAIN!
However, that’s a story for another day, today Facebook is the hottest bit of tech news you can get your hands on, the last time an IPO this exciting occurred it was for a search engine named Google. Google IPO-ed at around $80, today it shares hover between $550 - $650. Just saying.
So it’s really awe inspiring to look at the numbers, 845 million active users (just slightly smaller than India) 2.7 Billion likes/comments everday, 250 million photos every single day and 100 Billion friendship. You my dear readers could own a small –make that VERY small- part of the company for the $38 share price tag people are talking about.
So how does the $38 price tag for Facebook Shares compare to Malaysian companies?A quick calculation puts Facebooks market cap at USD100 Billion, or roughly RM300 Billion. Malaysia doesn’t have a RM300 Billion dollar company (or at least one that is public listed), so in order to give you an idea of the magnitude of Facebook, I had to combine a few Malaysian companies to reach Rm300 Billion. With the Rm300 Billion Facebook is worth, you could buy outright:
Pinterest is an awesome social site that let’s you ‘pin’ up interesting articles on boards that other users can view and then continue sharing. It’s absolutely amazing, and I’m in love with it. If you’re still curious about what Pinterest is or want to snag an invite (it’s still invite only btw), then just leave a comment at the bottom of this page and I’ll send you an invite as soon as I can. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, just head over a board I created from random quotes I saw from other users over here http://pinterest.com/keithrozario/quotes/.
A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.
Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]
A couple of weeks back, Dreamhost reported a security breach on it’s servers, so I thought for security sake I should change my passwords as well. I’d been using the same password for the past couple of years and it was time for a change anyway.
However, as most of you will notice, whenever you’ve just changed your password you instinctively try to re-enter the old one on your next login. This obviously prompts and invalid password prompt which should point you in the right direction. If you’re like me though, you end up thinking you typed it wrongly and try again, this can go on for a while and if you’re not careful you could lock yourself out of your account because you entered the ‘old’ password 3 times in a row.
A good piece of design I noticed from Google is that if you’ve changed your password recently, they actually remind you that you changed it and when you changed it. Thereby stoping your automatic response in it’s track and getting you to type the new one. Just a small piece of code and small feature but a rather good piece of design.
I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.
Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.
According to a New York Times article today, the world has apparently shrunk beyond our imagination. The latest study uses facebook as the base for their study, and used it to study the separation of people. Previously I blogged about the amazing study conducting by (even more amazing) Stanley Milgram and how he came up with the concept of 6 degrees of separation. The latest study not only re-inforces the original study, but goes further to explain that the number is now only 4.74.
It really is a great opportunity we have now with facebook being the Hyper-Social network, with little competition. What this means is, at least for now, everybody online has a facebook account. That would certainly change in the nest 2-5 years, but what’s really interesting is that with facebooks great popularity, we have now have a wonderful chance to perform these kinds of research, and kudos to facebook for actually initiating it. The data from the research can be found on facebooks data page. Now onto the research:
On day 4 of my 30-day challenge to blog everyday, and I’m already running out of stuff to say. However, as with most things, inspiration seems to spring out when it is most required. I’m sitting in front of TV, watching BBC Dateline and one of the panel members is Henry Chu, the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in London.
The topic of the discussion was something along the lines of “Are newspapers going out of date, and what is the future of newspapers?”. Henry answered in a rather poignant way, circulation of newspapers throughout the world including the Los Angeles Times is decreasing, but the irony is that while circulation is decreasing, readership has increased. So think about it, less people are buying the newspapers but more people are reading it, and the newspapers have actually become a lot more interactive. For instance content of the LA Times is now not only being read by people outside of Los Angeles (or even the US) but actually being commented on by people from Australia and Malaysia.
The reality is that while newspaper circulations have been reducing over the years, the appetite for news has not decreased, and neither has the demand for it. What has happened is the nature of the demand has changed, and consumers now demand that their news sources fulfil these new demands or they’ll take their business elsewhere.
wpCandy reports that Facebook recently sued an Indonesian blogger who created a wordpress theme that could turn your wordpress site to look like Facebook, and the similarities were really striking. For one your post look exactly like status updates on your Facebook profile and comments on those post look exactly like your friends commenting on your status updates in Facebook.
Similarly, TechCrunch reports that Google has gone after a couple of rather confusing typo domains that look remarkably similar to Youtube. Although not so similarly, Google is making a request for control of the domain rather than suing the pants of those cybersquatters (which it probably should), and not so similarly Google has a much stronger case.