Saturday, February 23, 2008

Facebook Fatigue? Visitors Level Off In the U.S.

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/239540820/

facebook-chart-jan-08-us.png

The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. According to the latest stats from comScore, Facebook attracted 33.9 million unique visitors in January, 2008, down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December, 2007. Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?

Worldwide, Facebook is still doing fine. It grew 3 percent in January over December, attracting 100.7 million unique visitors. (MySpace had 109.3 million visitors worldwide, up 2 percent month-over-month. And in the U.S., it was slightly down as well from 68.9 million visitors in December, 2007 to 68.6 million in January, 2008. Despite its larger size, though, MySpace lost fewer visitors in the U.S. than Facebook did).

facebook-chart-jan-08-world.png

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Yahoo Buzz Launching Soon

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/239726881/

Half of the country’s tech bloggers and journalists, it seems, are under embargo around next week’s launch of Yahoo Buzz. Word has still leaked, likely from recently layed off Yahoo employees. We’re under embargo, too, so I can’t say much. But the posters up all over Yahoo give a taste of what is.

“We’re re-launching Yahoo! Buzz as a destination site where users determine the best stories & videos” - sounds a lot like Digg to me. The URL given in the poster - alpha.buzz.yahoo.com - can only be accessed by Yahoo employees. The launch URL will be buzz.yahoo.com. If you happen to be online, check out TechCrunch at 9 pm on Monday.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Microsoft SkyDrive Offers 5 GB of Online Storage Space, Out of Beta

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/microsoft-windows-live-skydrive-5-gb-storage-space/2348/

Windows Live SkyDrive, a free online storage service from Microsoft, just got better and bigger. They now provide 5 GB of storage space which is the same as offered by AOL XDrive.

microsoft-storage-drive

SkyDrive was earlier available only for users in US, UK and India but now they have expanded the service to included many new countries including Australia, France, Switzerland and Canada among others.

Windows SkyDrive provides RSS feeds for their folders so your subscribers will know the moment you upload new files. You can also embed files / folders in web pages for your readers to download files directly from your website.

skydrive.live.com | SkyDrive Team Blog


Microsoft SkyDrive Offers 5 GB of Online Storage Space, Out of Beta - Digital Inspiration

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Embed Images from Google Maps In Emails & Blogs Without Using Screen Capture Software

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/embed-google-maps-still-images-email-blogs/2349/

It is now possible to embed live images of Google Maps in emails and other websites (like MySpace, Facebook or WordPress.com) that do not allow JavaScript.

Earlier you had to take a screenshot of the Google Maps and save that as an image file but that’s no longer necessary as this Static Maps Wizard will let you create a still but dynamic image of any location on Google Maps.

For instance, the map of Hyderabad above is not a screenshot but a live image served from Google Maps using this URL.

You can place the Google Maps image in any web page using the standard <img> tag. For embedding maps in web emails (like Gmail), simply compose a new message and drag the Google Map on to the email body. Thanks Tom Manshreck.


Embed Images from Google Maps In Emails & Blogs Without Using Screen Capture Software - Digital Inspiration

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Flickr Follows Wikipedia - No Google Juice for External Websites

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/pictures/flickr-wikipedia-google-juice-pagerank-seo/2352/

flickr nofollow seo

Like Wikipedia and del.icio.us, Flickr too joins a growing list of websites that are ranked very high in search engines but do not pass any link juice to external websites.

Flickr has recently enabled the nofollow tag for all HTML links placed in photo descriptions and comments - that means Flickr will not pass any PageRank benefits to external sites. See example.

And though Flickr has nofollowed all external links, they still want external websites (who post Flickr photos) to link to the original photo page without using the nofollow tag (check the HTML code generated by Flickr when you want to link to some photo).

flickr-nofollow-links

Surprisingly, the nofollow tag is not applied if the URL in the photo description points to another page on Flickr. And external links in descriptions of Flickr Sets and Photo Pools continue to pass PageRank as noted by Jeff Muendel but am sure that will change very soon.


Flickr Follows Wikipedia - No Google Juice for External Websites - Digital Inspiration

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