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Social Media Fad or Revolution?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Do you think that social media is a fad or a revolution? Social media has been taking the internet and the world for that matter by storm. Facebook reached over 100 million accounts within the first 9 months. That was just signing up people with high school or college email addresses. Facebook got the attention of 100 million people in less time that it took radio or TV or the Internet to get one million listeners, subscribers. So is it a fad or a revolution?

Look how fast and how far we have come since the internet has taken the world by storm.

John Botch

laserburnmedia.com

john@laserburnmedia.com

Posted in Facebook, Online Marketing, Social Marketing Strategy, Social Media in Society, Twitter, YouTube | No Comments »

Short url’s

Friday, August 14th, 2009

tinyurl

What is behind these short url’s that social media site Twitter is using? There is a new company out there now that specializes in URL mapping. They will redirect the short url to website that you post.

With a vested interest in making sure that people can use short URLs confidently, many of the leading short URL providers have signed up for 301works, an independent URL mapping directory service (you can think of it like archive.org but for URL mapping). The venture will be managed by GNIP, Inc. The announcement reads:

Leading Internet software companies have joined together to launch an independent URL mapping directory service. The new service will allow all participating short URL providers the ability to make their mappings available as regular updates or as a historical archive through the directory. The service is planned to launch in the next few weeks after participating companies individually inform their respective user communities of their planned participation. Once launched the service will be available at 301works.org and will be managed and run by Gnip, Inc. while the participating companies work to identify an appropriate non-profit organization to manage the directory long-term.

It is with these shared goals for improved permanence and transparency that Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, bit.ly, Cligs, Gnip, URLizer, and urlShort have joined to launch this new organization.

In plain English: the URL shorteners want to establish some sense of permanence to the mappings they provide, making users more confident that their links won’t just break at some point in the future. It’s a good first step towards addressing concerns about the dangers of short URLs.

So if this non-profit that they want to come up with might give users more certainty that their short link will be redirected or even stolen. Twitter uses these short urls for their users. More companies are on board to use short url’s. It looks like short url’s will start becoming a thing of the future. The one thing that I really want to know is why Twitter uses these short url’s? Is it because they didn’t want people to keep on tweeting about their business? Is it because they want people to see as many tweets as they can fit on a page?

John Botch

Laserburnmedia.com

john@laserburnmedia.com

Posted in Facebook, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Social Marketing Strategy, Social Media in Society, Twitter | No Comments »

So what was wrong with Twitter on Thursday?

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

twitter_logo

If you did not already know they had a denial of service problem. They are saying that it is not a hacker as far as they know. They say that the attacks are related to the political conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Twitter said it suffered a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers toward a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

The attacks may have been related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.

They started with hackers using a botnet to send a flurry of spam e-mail messages that contained links to pages on Twitter, Facebook and other sites written by a single pro-Abkhazia activist, according to Bill Woodcock, research director of the San Francisco-based Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that tracks Internet traffic.

Russia recognized as independent the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after a brief war with Georgia a year ago.

When people clicked on the links, they were taken to the activist’s legitimate Web pages, but the process of loading the pages at such volumes overwhelmed some servers and disrupted service, Woodcock said.

He said it’s hard to immediately tell whether it was a case of hackers trying to punish the sites for publishing views they disagree with, or if they were directing traffic to the sites out of sympathy for the activist’s message.

It was a hacker or it might have been an activist trying to get a large group of people to see his or her current page.

-John Botch

laserburnmedia.com

john@laserburnmedia.com

Posted in Facebook, Social Media in Society, Twitter | No Comments »

Facebook and Twitter Go Down

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Denial of Service Attack Cartoon

Anyone trying to use either Facebook or Twitter today probably noticed that both sites were, at times, unresponsive.  And while Facebook has yet to offer up an explanation for the sluggish and unstable service, the people over at Twitter announced that their problems were due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack, one that they are still fighting though.  And while Facebook hasn’t announced if they were under a similar attack, it wouldn’t be all that surprising.  Because if you are going to try and bring down one social networking goliath, you might as well try and bring down two social networking goliaths.

A Denial of Service attack, for those that don’t know, is where someone bombards the servers of a website (in this case Twitter) with millions of “pings” or information requests.  Not being able to deal with the massive ammount of traffic and server requests, the entire site becomes sluggish or even unresponsive.  And when dealing with social networking sites, this type of thing tends to snowball.  Why?  Well, because people tend to send out Twitter messages talking about Twitter being hit with a DoS attack, which increases traffic across the Twitter servers, adding to the problem.  Same with Facebook (although it has yet to be confirmed that their problems are, in fact, a result of a DoS attack).

From the official Twitter Blog…

Ongoing denial-of-service attack 2 hours ago

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

So who is responsible for the attack?  No one knows yet.  This could be the work of one hacker or even another country.  The way the attack typically works is that a virus is sent out to thousands (or more) computers.  The infected computers, who’s owners probably don’t even know it, begin, all at once, bombarding the target website with information requests.  It’s the equivilant of having everyone in a city flush all of their toilets at the exact same time.  It tends to break things.

As more information is released, we’ll be sure to keep you all updated.  All for now, gang.

-Dan Cheek
www.LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com

PS
For additional coverage of the Twitter and Facebook “crisis”, be sure to also check out Mashable.

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Posted in Facebook, Twitter | No Comments »

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