COPY PASTE ™

twentynot2000.com : a website on how we are going to say "2010"

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:38:00 +0000

Today is the last day of 2009 . That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s .

Say “2009″ outloud. Chances are that you’re saying “two thousand and nine.” But if you think about it, that’s weird. Say “1909″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “nineteen-oh-nine.” It makes some sense, since we weren’t going to pronounce “2000″ as “twenty hundred,” but for whatever reason, going forward, we never moved to something like “twenty-oh-one” for “2001″ and so forth.

TwentyNot2000.com, a website came up in nick of time with the sole purpose of breaking the peoples habit of saying "Two thousand and ten " rather than just Twenty ten . But why do we just care? The answer is simple it takes more time to say "Two thousand and ten " rather than just "Twenty Ten"
The site also has a facebook group and Fanpage , just to drive the point home. The fan page actually has over 17,000 fans.

For more details just check out their website.

And a very happy new year to all readers :).

Bing beats google for "Times Square" Bomb threat news

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing . A search for “Times Square” on Google turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”).

Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page.Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page. Incidents such as this one show why those realtime results should be on the homepage as well, for both Google and Bing. If this was a real incident, hiding the realtime search results doesn’t do anyone much good.

Google to get caffeinated.

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web.Google has been testing the technology codenamed “Caffeine,” since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google.
Well most people wont be able to notice its effect. The look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine is an upgrade to Google’s search index algorithms. But it will significantly speed up how fast Google can present results, especially across different media types such as photos and videos.

An independent study conducted in September by SEO firm Summit Media suggests that for generic search terms, Caffeine gives more weight to news and social media results, while more specific keywords are more likely to turn up websites about that topic.The finding includes.
* Rankings are unlikely to fluctuate. Taken across all of the keywords for a client there should be a tiny percentage change in ranking.
* Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that’s not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important.
* There have been no changes to give one sector any new advantage over another.
* Generic terms against long tail terms in Caffeine show a greater priority for News, Information and Social Media – which fits with generic terms being less clear in terms of the searcher’s intent.
* Only 5% of urls contain exact matches for the searched keyword, 6% of the total point score is made up by exact match urls.

When Caffeine does go live, not only should Google feel zippier, but many of the results will feel more newsy and realtime, particularly for generic searches.

370 passwords that you can't use on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Twitter passwords are no longer easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked. It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do is to take a look at the source code of that page to get the list of banned passwords. Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and you are done.

This isnt a security issue ,in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. Here are a couple of them.

- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters

Click Hereto download the full txt file.

zynga starts testing sms notifications

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones.

It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.

One obvious concern with the new feature is spam — Zynga has made a habit of exploiting any way they can find to grow its userbase and increase revenue.And if you ever get sick of the messages, you can just reply to Zynga’s messages with ‘STOP’, and the feature will be disabled.

SMS alerts aren’t the first step Zynga has taken to wean itself off of Facebook Platform. Last month, it launched Farmville.com, a standalone site dedicated to the company’s massively succesful game. Farmville.com is still reliant on Facebook Connect, but it gives Zynga more control over the user experience.

We spend more and more time online

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week.

To put things in perspective: Harris surveyed 2,029 adults by telephone for an entire week in July and October 2009, and has been doing these types of polls since 1995.

Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that.

There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002.

Read More..

The age groups that spend the most time online are those aged 30-39 (18 hours) and those aged 25-29 (17 hours) and 40-49 (17 hours).

You Tube gets its own short URLs

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:51:00 +0000

Looks like Google is really going full steam ahead with its shortened URLs. Only a week after the search giant launched its own Goo.gl short URLs, its subsidiary YouTube is launching its own short URL service: youtu.be.
In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which means it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.

Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically. You can also create the link yourself in this format:

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you’ll see it redirects to that video.

Facebook memology - Top status trends of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.

For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot.

But below that, things start to get interesting. For example, “FML” is the number two term. As you likely know, this stands for “fuck my life” (or as Facebook puts it, “We’ll leave the “F” open to your interpretation”) and is a popular Internet meme in general for talking about why your life sucks. As you can see in the graph they included, FML usage rose out of nowhere to peak in May, then dipped, then came back in September. Facebook also notes that usage of the term was strong during Mondays and Tuesdays.

“Swine Flu” and “Celebrity Deaths” came in third and fourth place respectively, which isn’t surprising given how much news both created this year. Then things get pretty boring until number 10: “Twitter.”

Read More...

New facebook clickjack attack http://fb.59.to

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:44:00 +0000

There's a malicious website set up at http://fb.59.to that tries to trick users into a clickjacking attack that shares the link on victims' Facebook accounts.

Some Facebook users today saw a comment looking like this (new pix!):

Clicking on the comment that redirects user to http://fb.59.to

On this page they are given a fake Turing test that tricks them into clicking a "blue button" which is their clickjacked Facebook page positioned at adding a new comment ("Share" button). The whole web page looks like this (clickjacked area is marked green):

Clicking on the button shares the malicious link on Facebook.

The page has a meta-redirect set up to a Youtube movie launching in 12 seconds so a users might get the impression that the movie launched because they successfully passed the During test.

World map of social networking sites.

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:19:00 +0000

Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.
It clearly shows the dominance of facebook over other networking sites .

Read more

Orkut New Feature - View photos in orkut album as a slideshow

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Orkut has integrated a fantastic new feature to orkut albums. Now you can view all the pictures in a particular orkut album in a slideshow. Starting a picture slideshow in orkut album is pretty simple.

Nerrot –World’s Most Minimal Torrent Client

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:17:00 +0000

As BitTorrent sites have developed over the years, many have added a plethora of features to enhance the user experience. A brand new torrent site called Nerrot, which officially launches its beta today, takes completely the opposite approach.

http://nerrot.com

Just hit what ever you want to download
and feel the diference.

World’s Largest Spherical Photo (18-Gigapixel Awesomeness)

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:49:00 +0000

Jeffrey Martin has spent over a month stitching together what he believes is now the world’s largest 360-degree panorama shot.
The photo was taken from a TV tower in Czech’s capital, Prague, and gives you a great digital glimpse of what the beautiful city looks like.
For maximum effect, head on over here and hit the fullscreen button.
Pan around the (18-gigapixel) image, and then zoom in on any part of the picture to be amazed how deep you can dive in. Heck, you can read the license plates off cars situated miles and miles away from the TV tower. The startup set up a treasure hunt that will kick off next week: find 30 things in the shot based on clues given on Twitter and Facebook and you get a chance to win $1000.

The record-setting photograph was created from 600 individual exposures stitched together into a single image measuring 192,000 pixels in width by 96,000 pixels in height, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

When printed, it will be sixteen meters (54 ft.) long at standard photographic quality. Not only is the subject matter of this new panorama arguably more picturesque than the previous record-holder, the road to its creation is one that has spanned continents.

The previous record holder is supposedly a 13-gigapixel photo of Harlem, NY, that became the world’s largest known panoramic image when it was shot back in 2007.

Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:40:00 +0000

Google has made a change to Chrome OS to move the user login from the machine to the browser.
The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits.
Explore these tradeoffs and decide what to do about the login manager.” The code was checked in on December 14: “An early version of this change is finally in. It’s not ready for daily use yet, and we haven’t gotten the network picker on there or anything yet, but at least we’ve got a baseline in there. I’m filing issues for the follow-on work.”

There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience.

But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps.

Google Internet Bus Community

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:20:00 +0000

Google Internet Bus Project is a very interesting project. The Google India team rode a bus and he's equipped with computers with Internet access, and it will travel 28 cities in India in an attempt to educate people about what is the Internet, showing what the great benefits that Internet can bring.

India is the second country with more users on orkut, and the site is, as in Brazil, the leader in social networks. For this reason the community was created Google Internet Community Bus inviting people who knew the bus (or not) to join the community, which will be shown pictures and videos about the project. The community itself has a theme and some normatives , as can be seen in the image above.

Google Khoj

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:08:00 +0000

A website where you can create your own search engine with google style logo in it. You can use it as google logo maker

Google Khoj hidden text or hidden logo.

www.googlekhoj.com

Google URL shortener

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:54:00 +0000

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

* Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
* Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
* Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

http://goo.gl/

Google Talk Tricks

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:33:00 +0000

Have Fun With Google Talk..

Are you Still using your Google Talk only to chat with friends?

You can add various bots as buddies and double up IM as a notepad,Cricket info,Jokes,News,translator,twitter application and a lot more.Here is a long IM Bot list to have some fun with Google talk...

Add these email id’s to your gtalk and type help for more info or check the Bot’s status message.

googlesms@bot.im – the ultimate bot for all your basic needs like cricket scores, railway info, find businesses around you, stock quotes, horoscope and more, Click here to know more about this bot.

cleartrip.trains@jabber.org - Train Search, Availability and Booking For eg. ‘Mumbai New Delhi May 29 3A’

sbot@bot.im – All in one google, yahoo and twitter search

astro@askme.im - For daily horoscope

calc@askme.im – basic calculator

url@askme.im – URL Shortening using bit.ly
fx@askme.im – Currency Conversion

stocks@askme.im – Live Stock Quotes

instacricket@askme.im – Detailed IPL Cricket Scores

jokes@askme.im – Jokes

movies@askme.im – Bollywood Movie Reviews

quotes@askme.im – For nice quotes

en2fr@bot.talk.google.com, en2im@bot.talk.google.com – Translation BOTS by Google

bots@gtalkbots.com – personal manager to store notes and share messages

cricket@ibnalerts.com – Instant cricket n sport alerts from IBN Live

games@gtalkbots.com – play anagram in your gtalk

searchguy@bot.im – Search in different sites in varied formats in Gtalk

imified@imified.com – Personal Manager to store notes, and also synchronize and post to different websites like twitter, blogger etc
.
inezhabot@gmail.com – Delivers RSS Feeds to your Gtalk

webaroosms@gmail.com – Send SMS to your smsgupshup.com group members from Gtalk..

Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:22:00 +0000

Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations . And while the deal isn’t done, it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million.
Yelp was founded in 2004 as a way to let users leave reviews on local businesses. Comscore puts worldwide traffic at nearly 9 million monthly unique visitors, and it has been growing fast – the company says it’s real numbers are more like 25 million monthly uniques. Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million and are expecting $50 million or so in 2010.

Yelp last raised venture capital in early 2008 from DAG at a $200 million pre-money valuation, we’ve heard. They’ve raised a total of $31 million over four venture rounds.
For their part, Google is clearly on a shopping spree. They recently acquired AdMob for $750 million, and were in the running on the LaLa acquisition. Expect lots of deals to be announced by them over the next three months.

Get Ready For The Google Branded Chrome OS Netbook

noreply@blogger.com (fun.dll) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:14:00 +0000

Google has said from the beginning that they plan on working with select manufacturers to ensure a good Chrome OS experience for users when devices first hit the market next year. From an early FAQ: “The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience.
Most people assume that “working with” around Chrome OS means the same thing as “working with” around Android – lots of meetings to make sure the devices and software work together as well as possible. But sometimes those pesky hardware guys just don’t do things quite right. And when you’re competing against Apple, everything most definitely needs to be quite right.

That may explain why Google has, according to multiple sources, been talking to at least one hardware manufacturer about building a netbook for Google directly. As in Google gave the company a RFP with quite detailed technical specifications and has begun discussions on building it.

They’re not in any particular hurry and seem to be aiming for the 2010 holiday season, a full year from now. Our understanding is that Google intends to have the devices built, branded with Google, and then sell them directly to consumers. The only firm tech spec we’ve heard is that they’ll be mobile enabled, and likely tied to one or more carriers with a subsidy.
Google may be considering an ARM CPU or even targeting Nvidia's Tegra line which can display HD Flash video with no problems at a fraction of the power usage.