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 substantial proportion of them asking “but why does it matter?”

I think it begs the larger question of the importance and awareness of reputation management on the Internet — specifically realizing how important it is to own your own Google Search results (particularly if you have a reputation and profession you care about), how Facebook ranks in all of that (can rank quite high), and how a Facebook vanity URL containing keywords might in turn rank (again, theoretically high).  But that’s really a post for another time.

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 right into Chrome.

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.

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.

There’s no question that Twitter is the media’s favourite darling at the moment, but I wonder if and when the shoe will ever really drop on Friendfeed as the real means of “joining the conversation” (another phrase I hear all the time on CNN) in a way that’s just not possible on Twitter.

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

In fact, if it weren’t for data to actually support Twitter’s meteoric rise a real “internet” utility if there ever were one, one might be inclined to believe that Twitter’s popularity is more a function of media loving Twitter than anything else (although, let’s be honest — it still has a ways to go)

Which brings us to Time’s story about how ZOMG Twitter will change our very lives as we now it (the title being parsed loosely by me)

The funny thing, I find, however, is the assumption that Twitter’s awesomeness will inevitably translate to Twitter’s ubiquitous future.  Take for instance the article from Caroline McCarthy last week on the relatively slow pickup by adolescents and young adults to Twitter.

I found this article to be telling for two reasons:

1. It is completely in line with my own totally non-scientific observations – namely, that every single young person that I’ve met (as in, in person, and not online) who has a vague interest in technology between the ages of 10-20, and / or people who do come into contact with young folks on a regular basis, all tell me they are “not on Twitter”, or that kids “just don’t do Twitter”, or “they don’t ‘get’ Twitter”.

2. The implications it has for the “ZOMG its a Twitter Future y’all!” messages – including the one that I didn’t know would yet be written by Time.

Long story short: I don’t think we can yet assume that Twitter’s future is guaranteed.  As much as Twitter is trumpted on mainstream outlets like CNN (which loves Twitter), I think its still very much in the early adopter phase.  There are still far too many variables for it to cross that chasm, not the least of which is the demographic factor that was mentioned above.

True, adolescents and young adults may yet get hooked onto Twitter.  There’s still time for that.  On the other hand … they may yet not.  Or, not enough of them will for it to make a generational difference before something “else” comes along to occupy that particular microblogging / social networking space.