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Deep Jive Interests

Thoughts on Web 2.0, Social Media, Marketing and So On.

On The So-Called “Gold Rush” For Facebook Vanity URLsJune 14

According to Bloomberg, about 3 million vanity URLs have been snagged over the weekend:

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said more than 3 million members registered user names by yesterday morning after it offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.

Facebook began accepting registrations at midnight New York time on June 13 on a first-come, first-served basis. Within the first 15 minutes, more than 500,000 user names were assigned and about 1 million in the first hour, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook.

While that sounds like a huge number, I wonder if it really is.  Later in the article, they add a denominator on to that fact — there are about 200 million people registered on Facebook.  So, a little more than 1% of people “rushed” to nab their own vanity URL this weekend.

Its in alignment with some of the friends / family on Facebook, actually, where most people had no idea that it was Friday, but most, really having no idea, and a substanti

How Many Geeks Are Even Trying Bing?June 14

I think one of the great advantages that Google has isn’t just the strength of its search technology, or the bottom-line deliciousness of adwords / adsense.  Its really the thought leadership of what “Search” — and even, probably “The Internet” — means to so many ordinary people.

So much so, (and moreso than say, “Internet Explorer” ever meant to browsers, or Windows ever meant to PCs) that I wonder how many folks are actually going to give Bing a try.  Notwithstanding the opinions of reputable technology publications like the New York Daily Post, how much of an uphill climb is Bing’s marketing approach going to be when you’re trying to penetrate some fairly hardened assumptions?  And what about Geeks?

Personally some part of it for me is the simple disdain that Microsoft != “cool” (Xbox and its intellectual properties excluded, naturally), and that Microsoft could never really touch the sainted toe lint of Google.  And if that isn’t a touch of Google fanboy-ism I dont’ know what is.

Maybe that’s true.  It probably isn’t.  To that end, I’m going to try and make Bing my default search tool for a couple weeks to try it out.  Who knows?  The last time I tried making anything my default [whatever] I ended up switching out of Firefox

Security Updates-a-PlentyJune 14

So … DJI is back.  Sort of.

After browsing teh interwebs about securing Wordpress installations I found a good tutorial over here:

http://www.guvnr.com/web/blogging/10-tips-to-make-wordpress-hack-proof/

I would encourage everyone to have a look.  Beyond the usual “install the latest version” and “use stronger passwords” , there’s some other great hints, like changing the default “admin” user’s name to something else; changing the “wp_” prefix on your datatables, and using the power of .htaccess to block unauthorized usage of your wp-admin folder (and plugins folder for that matter).

For the lazy or less-inclined (your truly included), you can also try this plugin:

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/custom-applications/wp-security-scan/

Which is super awesome, and automates most, but not all of those changes.

A relatively recent review of other blog security plugins can be found over here — fair warning: haven’t tried any of them, but some of them do sound nifty.

How These Six Words Could Energize Friendfeed on the Mainstream MediaJune 14

Well, who knows if it really would — but I think one of the biggest inflections in Twitter’s popularity over the past 6-12 months has been the mainstream media’s push, and obvious love affair with socia media.  Of course, CNN is one of the biggest culprits / lovers so far, with almost every one of their hosts plugging their myspace / facebook / twitter accounts (Chief faller-in-love: CNN’s Rick Sanchez, naturally).

Anyway, I think Friendfeed would benefit tremendously by getting someone over there (and, really anywhere where people are pushing out their social media profiles to millions of laypeople all the time), to sell their idea of what Friendfeed is — and how it can help by inserting five words to the end of any social media pimping phrase.

Those words?

“… and follow it all on Friendfeed.”

While its not uncommon for Twitter celebrities to get subscribers in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, I daresay that amongst the lay public (and even amongst the Twitterati), that while Twitter has its obvious benefits (its pretty much the only way to get up to date news from what’s going on in Iran at the moment, for example), it continues to suffer from a few significant drawbacks, not the least of which are unified areas to both have and witness conversations,  unify social media streams, and in a meaningful way, increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

Hacked Again.June 13

So, I was jazzed to write something new yesterday — the topic of which, I can’t even recall now — when I realize that the blog had been hacked again.  Yes, I am guilty of not upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress (was running 2.5), and probably a host of other security laziness.  Anywhoo, the nature of the hack was pretty insidious.  I would try and login through the /wp-admin area, and it would automatically redirect me to a spam site.  The actual site would rotate, however, as I’d get a different one each time.

Ugh, what a nightmare.

In fact, even “searching” on the site triggered this particular behaviour, which was annoying and embarassing at the same time.  I spent the greater part of two hours yesterday combing through WP code to try and find the culprit file / code / hex / curse, but to no avail.

You may, therefore, notice that DJI is looking a little different, as I have went DEFCON 1, and simply obliterated my old compromised Wordpress install, keeping my database.  I re-installed Wordpress using a clean install, and am going with a simpler theme for now.  I’ll be sticking with it while I try and implement a few more things to lock down the security on this blog (as, of course, there a great many things that you can do in addition to running the latest version), which I will be implementing, and blogging about, shortly.

Cheerio