FoxyWeb Tech Journal

There has been a lot of talk about the “Web 2.0″ bubble and if it’s going to “pop” soon. As we saw with the dot-com bust back in the day, we know it’s happened before. Something that has been on my mind about this topic is this: how involved on the Internet was the world back when the first bubble popped?

It’s pretty simple. The world wasn’t that involved back then. Today, roughly 70% of all teens have high-speed Internet access. Marketing has shifted, sales have shifted, the world has changed. Google’s recent purchase of YouTube.com for $1.63 billion is one of the landmarks that the web is here and here to stay. The web may change, and become better (Internet2), but it will always be here. The digital sector has grown beyond our imaginations and we can only expect great things for the future.

(via Slashdot)

As part of Google’s latest big push for advertising, Google gobbled up YouTube.com for a nice cool $1.63billion in stock. Some small time investors came out nicely in that deal, walking away with some $400 odd million. Founders walked away with $100-200 million each. Not bad for some PayPal alumni.

With AOL slowly losing market share to Yahoo!, Google, and MSN, it really needed to pick up its feed and get on the move to do something big. That “big” they are attemping to make is starting with the debut of OpenRide. OpenRide is a new broadband portal designed to attract visitors that have since moved over to Google and like companies that have been doing a better job.

Visit the beta of OpenRide to see what it’s like.

AdAge.com

As I was browsing around today, I noticed there was a new partnership between Chase and Facebook.com, so I decided to look further into it and sign up. So I signed up *yay* and everything is going fine when suddenly I look down and I see some invalid code.

Warning: require(../btmLinksLeft.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/ron/html/content.php on line 256

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘../btmLinksLeft.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/share/pear’) in /home/ron/html/content.php on line 256

While yes, this is simply just a path problem, I would expect that Facebook.com would never run into these kinds of issues, always testing before releasing code.

Just as Google and MySpace teamed up with an advertising deal, Facebook.com and Microsoft have followed suit to have Facebook.com serve ads from the new Microsoft adCenter, reports ClickZ.com. MS will be the exclusive ad manager for Facebook.

According to site traffic measurement outfit Hitwise, MySpace grabbed nearly 80 percent of the traffic to social networking sites in June, while second-place Facebook trailed at about 7.6 percent. To be fair, the Facebook universe is far more exclusive than that of MySpace, which allows anyone and everyone (including TV and movie characters) to set up free profiles. Facebook limits profiles to high school and college students and faculty, as well as staffers from a handful of large companies including Apple, Accenture, Gap, Microsoft and Pepsi.

I’ve been a Facebook user for almost 2 years now and I really love it, I think it’s a great idea and I give a round of applause to Mark Zuckerberg (the founder) for creating it.

I just got an invite to DomainFest 2006 being held by DomainSponsor.com here in Los Angeles. I’m really excited for it. It’s going to happen late September, but I’m really stoked about it. Anyone else going?

Although AOL had substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers’ user names, the search queries themselves contained
Social Security numbers, medical conditions and other data that could be traced to an individual. In fact, The New York Times was able to trace user 4417749 to Thelma Arnold, 62, of Lilburn, Ga. Yahoo! News

This is a nasty one. AOL “accidentally” released dozens of records of search data with social security numbers. Only some people saw this data — as I did not, I woke up too late to see it — but it was taken offline very fast from when it was released. Since that time, 3 AOL employees have left the company.

The data release is among a series of breaches involving sensitive information in recent months. Unlike those resulting from computer hacking or missing laptops, however, the AOL data had been intentionally released as part of a program to assist academic researchers.

This is just yet another reason why I will never trust AOL with my personal information.

RoundCube is the latest and greatest from Open Source. RoundCube provides an AJAXified platform for accessing your webmail. Similar to how GMail functions with AJAX, it should automatically let you know when new mail has arrived. As I have not tested this product yet myself, I am looking forward to trying it out because SquirrelMail just isn’t cutting it anymore.

So my boss was walking along and points out this site to me: Zimbra.com; so naturally I go to take a look at it. Wow, this is a complete office suite almost, all online. The e-mail integration is amazing and it it has an interactive calendar, Zimlets (as they call them), and so much more. The email comes with pre-built search queries which would save a ton of time for someone that uses the same queries over and over.

Tags. How could ANY application go without tags these days. Tags are the latest ‘Beta’ I guess, but either way, I love tags. (I use tags on this site, not gonna lie.) Well, this Collaboration Suite comes in both Enterprise and Open Source edition. Good move for them. Help spread the word by giving it away for free and offer commercial licenses for it as well with added support.

Myspace Legal has been very busy lately with some cease and desist letters being sent out to few websites. The legal department wasn’t targeting sites that have Myspace resources such as pictures or profile generators, but they were targeting automated script websites which were benefiting purely from the Myspace community. Sites such as SingleStat.us, which was a status report site for users of Myspace. This automated process type website is against the AUP of Myspace for really one reason: it puts a higher amount of stress on the Myspace servers, therefor providing a lower quality service to the actual community.

Myspace saw this as an opportunity to increase server performance and actually follow through with upholding their AUP. This is a good move for Myspace and we should hopefully see even a slightly higher increase in usability on the website. (via)