Basically, what will happen is when you login after the above mentioned time, you will get a message asking you to register a URL There are a number of different suggested options and also the chance to pick your own name. Now i imagine that a lot of the big company names are not allowed, however if Facebook aren’t too strict then i wonder how many people will register competitors names. giving us a new form of cyber squating? Will Facebook take steps to stop people registering trademarked names? What happens if you do, will they take that name away from you? These are all questions that are left unanswered that this time.

The above image from the Facebook blog shows how you will be able to select your name, i feel sorry for all the people with common names who are probably going to end up with bobsmith1982 or something alike. Still, i am sure that many people probably wont be that fussed.

So get your alarms set for 05:01 if you want the choice of the so coined ‘vanity url’ that you have always wanted.

Yep, even though my website has the most backlinks for the term “dean chew”, has content saying my name is Dean Chew, and has some authority, then why the hell does it rank 9th? I know i don’t have “dean chew” in the title, but jeeze. Besides, what the hell is Dean Forge doing in there, is that what i searched for? No! What’s even worse is that if you search just in the UK then i don’t rank on the first page at all.

Lets see what the big G has to say about this?

Thanks Google, all is right with the world again. My guess is that MS engineers are rectifying this as i type, what with all those millions of searches for my name going unclicked

That is all.

The second part is that there is going to effectively be a Facebook application on the XBox which will allow you to see friends photos, comments, videos etc.

All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.

Edit: At the Nintendo conference in the afternoon, they announced that the DSI would integrate with Facebook to allow users to upload photos straight from the device.

There are some suspected 20 million + XBox live owners, and since Facebook connect now integrates with 3rd party websites, iPhone applications, the XBox, and now DSI we should surely see it grow and grow into a monster application.

The other panellist’s were excellent also, and we all complimented each other very well.

I have put my presentation from this panel right below, just click the image to download.

As a bonus i have put up my presentation from SES London on Successful site architecture.

Please enjoy and let me know what you thought.

Hi, we no longer work

Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…

You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available

Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ’see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.

To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.

Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ’see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!

Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.

Im hotlinking this image because my uploader won't work

I am planning on speaking about utilising Facebook and Twitter, much of the presentation will be spent on Facebook Connect and also using the twitter API. All this will be wrapped in some case studies which should push people to really consider the power of using such technologies.

Come along and say hi if you are there, i really do think it will be a good panel

So what’s exactly going on? It seems that the problem first started in February 2009 when some users on webmaster world noticed that the new MSNbot had been hitting on their robots.txt files but not obeying the rules and grabbing pages which had been excluded. Discussion ensued with people wondering if this was just some crawler spoofing as MSNbot, but it turns out that it was the real MSNbot so why would it be completely disregarding the robots.txt?

Well another discussion over at Webmaster talk confirmed that MSNbot was definitely disregarding the robots.txt instructions, in fact one member posted the following information…

65.55.106.115 - [01.11] "GET /robots.txt "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.106.115 - [01.11] "GET /about.php "msnbot/2.0b"
65.55.106.172 - [01.16] "GET /forbidden/ "msnbot/2.0b"

Now for the non technical out there, the above is basically three lines from a log file which shows that MSNbot came to the site from the ip of 65.55.106.115 and read the robots.txt file, the bot then requested the about.php page and left. However, shortly after, the MSNbot came back from a different ip address (this time 65.55.106.172) and tried to crawl the /forbidden directory. Whats weird here is that apparently the /forbidden directory is not linked to from anywhere so the only way the bot would know it existed is by reading and disregarding the robots.txt file. It might cross your mind to think that this is all a coincidence and that someone masquerading as MSNbot came along shortly after and tried to access /forbidden, however both ip address belong to Microsoft.

As i said earlier, it seems a bit strange that Microsoft would start to ignore robots.txt files, so after digging deeper it seems like there is a bug in the new MSNbot which means that it is actually reading the robots.txt on a complete different domain and then trying spider your site. Here is an example request from the spider…

GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Host: www.lumigan.com
User-Agent: msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache

In this instance, the spider thinks that it is crawling www.lumigan.com but is in fact crawling a completely different website thus disregarding it’s robots.txt and indexing pages that shouldn’t be indexed. It’s at this point that Microsoft seemed to get wind of it and stated that they are looking into the problem.

The final piece of the puzzle comes from a post on one of Microsoft’s own social boards, where a user basically confirms what everyone else has been speculating…

For some reason, msnbot/2.0b is visiting the wrong IP addresses to retrieve robots.txt. In other words, it THINKS it is getting robots.txt for www.yoursite.com, but it is really reading the robots.txt file that is served for the default host at the IP address for www.mysite.com (not necessarily www.mysite.com’s robots.txt). Clearly, msnbot/2.0b is using the wrong DNS lookup for its requests.

So, we get confirmation that MSNbot is using the wrong DNS lookup for its requests and as such is definitely crawling sites based on the wrong robots.txt information. This is very concerning since areas on your website that you specifically do not want to be crawled, are being crawled and could end up being placed in to the Live SERPS.

Thankfully Brett from MSN yet again confirms that they are aware of the problem and they are trying to fix it. The problem is, no one seems to know when the fix will be complete or if the data that they have gathered in the past 4 months has already been used in the SERPS.

If you want to check to see if your site has been effected then i offer you the following advice from the above forum post…

Search your web log for requests from msnbot/2.0b. Do you see requests for links that don’t exist on your site? That’s because they exist on a different site, the one msnbot/2.0b THINKS it’s crawling . If you log the requested server name, do you see unfamilar hosts? Those are the ones msnbot/2.0b THINKS it’s visiting .

You could also just out right ban the MSNbot using an .htaccess line with something similar to the following…

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^msnbot/2\.0b [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

//Returns a 403-Forbidden response and no content.

Hopefully Microsoft can get this issue resolved soon.

I have been at Ayima for just over a year now, i came from sunny Lincoln to the Big Smoke to work with some of the best people in the industry. A lot has happened in that past year, i have been fortunate to travel to conferences and learn a lot of new things, and Ayima has been steadily growing all the time.

Tony Spencer has long been friends with Mike N and as such we have started on a new venture by opening an Ayima office in America with Tony heading it up. It is an exciting chapter in the Ayima book and hopefully it will mean that we all get to visit America a lot more

I am sure that Tony will do a great job, and we are all looking forward to pulling in some big clients.

Lets get straight into it…

5) Facebook Song

The Facebook Song, umm song sounds like something from a country and western convention, that being said it’s not without its charm and good for a laugh in a couple of places.

4) Facebook Anthem

This is actually quite well put together and would be higher up my list if it wasn’t for the girl reminding me of Hannah Montana, who i literally can not stand.

3) The Facebook Skit

This video involves some Indian guy (i think he is Indian) singing along to a parody of Enrique Iglesias’ song Hero, need i say more?

2) Facebook Off

The guys from College Humour create a brilliant parody of the Nick Cage film, Face Off. Really well done and full of laughs, would of been 1st if it wasn’t for…

1) Facebook Gangsta

By far the best Facebook Parody, these guy encapsulate pretty much all the white guys who sit behind their computers thinking they are Gangsters, and yes, that includes me.

Super Bonus completely unrelated parady video

Totally unrelated but a great example of how to parody something from the guys a Cracked.com, if you actually watch Star Trek this is 100 times better.