your link to better business solutions

OpenSocial Now Reaches 350 Million Users, And Growing

by on Aug 20, 2008 (0) Comments

Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with OpenSocial, it reaches a total of 350 million users. And it will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September.

Google’s Joe Kraus gave me an update today on OpenSocial’s progress. He wouldn’t say which partners would launch next, but by the size of that pink bar in the graph above, one of them is relatively large—about the same size as Orkut. (My guess is that it will be either Bebo or Six Apart). He also mentioned some partners, such as imeem, launched without ever contacting Google (thanks to Apache Shindig) and that at this point only 10 percent of the engineers hashing out the OpenSocial specifications are from Google.

So how many OpenSocial apps are actually being used? There are about 4,500 different apps so far, which have been installed more than 150 million times. I couldn’t get daily active user numbers across all OpenSocial partners, but for Hi5 about 50 percent of members use an OpenSocial app at least once a day. There are 1,800 OpenSocial apps on hi5 alone, which have been installed 66 million times, so that may be representative of OpenSocial usage in general.

Virtualization Reality Spurs Microsoft to Change Licensing Rules

by on Aug 20, 2008 (0) Comments


Microsoft announced Tuesday it is easing licensing restrictions for server applications. Companies will no longer be required to pay additional fees to move software within a server farm, the company said. The move is an attempt to remove barriers in order for its enterprise customers to develop more dynamic data centers and enterprise IT systems using virtualization software, according to the software maker. The revamped licensing is Microsoft’s response to the growth of virtualization in enterprises, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

The move is an attempt to remove barriers in order for its enterprise customers to develop more dynamic data centers and enterprise IT systems using virtualization software, according to the software maker.

The revamped licensing is Microsoft’s response to the growth of virtualization in enterprises, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

“Microsoft had to do something about its licensing to acknowledge the reality of virtualization,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

Don’t Forget to Link Out

by on Aug 20, 2008 (0) Comments

Search engine optimization is more than just a series of techniques. It is a concept of continuity, which is why linking out (to other sites) matters equally if not more than who links to your website.

For the sake of relevance and to create the right continuity, you’ll need to create the appropriate signals to search engines that convey (a) your site is an authority and (b) that is it a resource to expedite trust (which equates to pure search engine dominion).

The Premise of Outbound Links

For example, if I wanted to rank for the word SEO, then by me linking to a site that already ranks highly for the term augments the continuity of the content on my site. Although they may not link back (unless you appeal to them in some way shape of form) the transaction still has a favorable impact on your link profile.

Transparency and Hub Status

By linking out to quality sources, this establishes your site as a resource known as a hub site, meaning just in case you didn’t find what you were looking for here, we have included some great links you can follow to complete your search on the topic. By doing this properly, this tactful and selfless action can spring-board your pages past your competition and virtually leave them in your shadow as far as rankings are concerned.

This strategy involves achieving a state of balance through observance of the quality and quantity of links in to links out (per page and for the entire domain) creates a distinct profile that eventually is used to identify the caliber of your content. Obviously, this is yet another layer of the process of SEO, but a very important one for consideration when your aim is to create a series of strong pages about a topic to garner a high ranking position.

Using the Link From Domain Search Command to See Your Outbound Link Profile

Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz (note the tactful outbound link) discussed a great search command in the “Give it Up Session” from SMX Advanced, that works using MSN Live search that provides a snapshot of who your site links to by using a simple search command, linkfromdomain. In order to use the “link from domain command” just open MSN Live Search and type linkfromdomain:website.com and hit return to see the outbound link profile of the site in question. Obviously, you will need to replace the generic website.com with the site you are inquiring about.

Umbraco replacing DotNetNuke?

by on Aug 20, 2008 (3) Comments

Well in my Case Yes – Umbraco is going to replace our current user of DotNetNuke on www.WebDatamation.com

I am currently working on creating the templates in Umbraco for the newly designed website. Similar to Sitecore planning, I am having to build the structure of templates based on the homepage and inner page designs. I hope I can keep track of all the issues, so that I can share it with you. Will keep you posted.

Goofy Web 2.0 sites that don’t really make sense

by on Aug 20, 2008 (0) Comments

It’s not all wine and roses around here at Web 2.0 Watcher. Some of the sites I come across are just plain goofy. Maybe it’s just me – I’m not getting the point, or I don’t see the potential. Maybe the idea is sound but the implementation needs work. Maybe these sites are just not meant to exist.

Parkingspots.com
I get the idea of mash-ups, and that there is likely an end-user for every mash-up idea (hey, people need to find bus routes on Google Maps, right?). I wrote about MizPee.com not long ago, and that it’s definitely a felt need (ahem). (By the way, judging from some e-mails, no one seemed to think the site – which takes itself seriously I think — or my comments were very funny, so keep those cards and letters coming.)

Parkingspots.com seems like a site that helps you find a
parking spot, right? Well, it’s actually for finding a parking spot
you can rent – as in, it’s for people to post their rentals. I’m not
sure how many people want to rent a parking spot instead of using a parking garage, using a corporate lot, or just finding a, well, parking spot somewhere, but maybe it is a hugely massive number.

Yodio
Yo! Yodio! I don’t really get it. I’m sorry – the site has a pretty
good design, although it’s a little old tech Intel/Microsoft for me. It seems to work okay. The problem is that – people can call in and annotate photos. So, in other words: you use a telephone, to annotate your photos – that’s it. Every time I visited the site, someone said “Hey…” and went on to explain what the site does. There is a Yodio page for a gal who is graduating from college, and I think the dad is explaining why that’s cool. Okay, so the gist of this is that: you can use a telephone to annotate photos. I am just not getting excited
about this.

Google Refuses to Penalize Me for Keyword Stuffing

by on Aug 20, 2008 (0) Comments

What’s up, YOUmoz! Ok, enough small talk. I’ll get right to the point.

I have a 2-page website that I created for the sole purpose of having something to link to from my SEOmoz profile page. My site doesn’t really do anything or provide any useful information, but I use it to experiment on sometimes. Over the past 3 months, I’ve written several YOUmoz posts that include links to my site with the anchor text World’s Greatest SEO. I chose this phrase because it amuses me… plus it has virtually zero search traffic, and therefore, zero competition. In other words, simply using that phrase in my home page’s title tag was enough to get into Google’s top 10. After a couple of my YOUmoz posts linked to it, I easily grabbed the #1 spot in Google.

As you might have guessed, my incoming traffic immediately exploded off the charts and set a new record for bandwidth consumption.

Times were good. But then I got greedy. I added the phrase [worlds greatest seo] to my SEOmoz profile page in an attempt to also conquer the #2 spot in Google.

Unfortunately, my plan backfired as my SEOmoz profile took over the #1 spot and bumped my site to #2. I tried to undo the damage by removing the phrase from my profile page, but it didn’t work. Google still ranked it as #1, claiming that some keywords only appeared in links pointing to the page. So basically, my profile page has enough PageRank to outrank my own site, despite the fact that it didn’t even contain that phrase in the content anymore. In other words, this is what I was looking at:

My Site

  • PR 0
  • Exact phrase used in Title, Description, H1, and paragraph content.
  • Exact match anchor text in links from several YOUmoz posts.
  • Ranked #2

SEOmoz Profile

  • PR 4
  • Exact phrase not used anywhere on page. Only the words “SEO” and “greatest” appeared on page. “World’s” didn’t appear at all.
  • Also had at least one exact match anchor text link from YOUmoz.
  • Ranked #1

Gartner Tech Forecast: Cloudy and Getting Cloudier

by on Aug 19, 2008 (0) Comments

The data analysts at Gartner came out with a hefty report Monday that ponders the outlook for information technology spending worldwide for the rest of this year and the next few.

It is a number-laden tome whose overall findings aren’t particularly surprising. Spending on information technology worldwide, Gartner projects, will grow at a rate a bit higher than global economic growth — up 10 percent (4.5 percent adjusted for a weak dollar), to $3.4 trillion this year. The weakness in the United States will be offset by the strength in emerging economies, and not just the well-known BRIC bloc (Brazil, Russia, India and China). In the Middle East and Africa, Gartner expects technology spending to rise by 15 percent this year.

But the information technology sector has become so large and so central to the world’s economy that the spending total is not the place to look. The top-line numbers, almost inevitably, mask the ferment beneath.