It’s no surprise that users are seriously not happy with the new Digg homepage. Just run a search on Twitter and you’ll get a nice dose of “Digg Displeasure”. Which is why it’s utterly humorous to find that a majority of links on Digg’s homepage link to rival site Reddit (which I personally love, love, love).

It’s fair to say that the message is hardly subtle. Reddit, for better or for worse is a Digg competitor, or at least it was for the old Digg, even if the two sites weren’t exactly the same.

People are also enraged over the new publisher accounts that basically let media organizations take over the Digg homepage – traditionally the home to power diggers, the folks who discover and share interesting stories and links.

Seeing those issues persist and the Reddit attack on its homepage, Digg temporarily prevented both end-users and publishers from submitting new content, except for the auto-submit via RSS feeds feature. But as writing this articles, as many as 8 out of the top 16 stories on the Digg Top News section are from Reddit and one of the others is a sponsored entry. It’s also an apparent statement that the new Digg quite blatantly sucks (at least according to a majority of comments I’ve read on the internet).

Remember the times when a Digg hit could bring your site down? Those days are gone now, at least temporarily, because Digg dropped the ball. The first big mistake was the removal of shouts, later replaced with Facebook sharing. Prior to that, Digg was basically a popularity contest. The more original content you discovered, the more power went to you. Shouting cool sites to followers was key to growing your popularity and it gave popular diggers the power to catapult an unknown site or a buried site to stardom.

The question remains though, will this actually accomplish anything. Digg has been known to listen to its users, or at least the really loud ones, in the past. But it has already promised to bring back some of the features and change others and a complete roll-back is certainly out of the question.

The latest redesign won’t change the fact that sites like Mixx, Reddit and StumbleUpon have taken a lot of steam from Digg, which seems to have lost its direction.

Apparently Digg is yet to make a statement addressing the community’s hate of the new version, though we’re just assuming they’re hoping you’ll like it over time.

UPDATE: Reddit is currently sporting a new logo, the Reddit robot holding a shovel. Get it?

Hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security has created the torrent file (2.8GB), which contains the Facebook account details of roughly 100 million users. That’s about 1 in 5 of the half billion accounts the social networking site has! The 2.8GB torrent was compiled via a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook’s open access directory, which lists all users who haven’t bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines.

Bowes’ directory contains 171 million entries, relating to more than 100 million individual users – more than one in five of Facebook’s recently trumpeted half billion user base.The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, from which details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers can be accessed.

Accessing a user’s page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends’ profiles – even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable. There’s absolutely nothing illegal about what Bowes has done – the information is, after all, publicly available – but perhaps the existence of a stalker’s online black book might finally persuade less security-minded Facebook users to get their act together.

Feel free to go download the torrent, but if you’re looking for juice on a particular person, you could just as easily get it by searching Facebook for them. You’ll get the same info.

1. Watch what you say: The public nature of the social networking sites is also the most dangerous thing about them. You say (tweet, set a status message, leave a scrap, comment) something and it STAYS there till eternity, for the rest of the world to watch and judge. Being funny might be a good thing to be considered “sociable”, but what if your potential boss fails to see the humor? Extreme case in point: There were at least couple of occasions where guys had to land in jail, because the police didn’t find their tweets funny!

2. Don’t be the Sales Guy: Okay, we know. That most of us join social networking to gain something in return. So, it makes perfect sense to spam others with your affiliate links, right? WRONG! No other feeling is more irritating than the feeling of being at the cross-hair of a spam-attack. Avoid forcing your business to other people. It is considered as spamming if you try to overly promote your business. It’s just like going to a conference and handing out your business card to EVEYONE even before you are introduced. When you don’t do this in real life, then why in the social networking sites?

3. Politics and Religion: Okay, we know – it’s a free Nation (world) and everyone has right to freedom of speech blah blah blah… But the fact remains that people join social networking sites to connect with others and while doing so they prefer to leave their political view and religious beliefs behind. Obviously, they expect the same from you, as well. So stay away from strong political or religious views. Since people can have different views in these areas, it is in your best interest if you remain neutral and professional all the time.

4. Consistency is the Key: Irrespective of whether you are an average Joe, a social networking guru or a huge multi-national trying to leverage social networking to connect with its consumers, being consistent is the key to your social networking success. Social networking can take up a lot of time – agreed! But, if you get bored with it and stop updating your profile (status updates, community updates, pics, tweets, videos etc), it is just a matter of time that your friends/followers/consumers will also get bored of you and will stop following you. Make sure you make a schedule and more importantly — stick to it. Although you don’t want to spend all of your time on social networking sites, you DO want to consistently update every day and there are automated tools to help you do so.

5. Incomplete Profile: Even if you don’t feel like completing your profile page and even if you don’t think that it is important, on the contrary, it is the most important thing for your success in social networking sites. Just because of the fact that I have included this point as the last mistake, don’t assume that it is the least important of all. Your profile is where people will go to find more information about you and your business. This is the place where you should be genuinely talking about your business, and maybe even provide a link to it. If you go around adding value to forums, it is most likely that people will be interested to visit your profile, so make sure it looks impressive. Compare your social networking profile page to the home page of your blog or company website and suddenly you will start seeing more value in it.

Which of these mistakes have you committed in your social networking life? Feel free to add your own mistakes to the list via commenting.

But irrespective of your feelings, here are 12 least known Facebook facts that are interesting to some, unknown by most, and will enhance your knowledge of the largest social network in the world.

- Facebook was originally funded by a co-founder of Paypal for $500,000.
- There is evidence that founder Mark Zuckerberg stole many of the ideas and much of the code from ConnectU. They sued Facebook and settled for an undisclosed amount.
- 400,000,000 people log into their Facebook profile at least once a month.
- Half of those people log in every day.
- 70% of Facebook users live outside of the US.
- The Facebook users make it the — Third Most Populated Country in The World – The United States of FaceBook!
- 44.1% of Denmark has an active Facebook profile.
- Only Google gets more traffic. Check their respective Alexa traffic ranking and you would know.
- Yahoo! tried to buy Facebook in 2006 for a whooping $1,000,000,000. Obviously, they didn’t succeed.
- 8,300,000,000 hours are spent on Facebook monthly. And we talk about being productive at work!
- The fastest growing demographic in America on Facebook: Women 55+. So don’t fall from your seat if I tell you that my mom-in-law and granny are on Facebook too.
- FAD is a mental disorder – Facebook Addiction Disorder — FAD. Ironic, isn’t it?
- Court notices and summons sent through Facebook are legal and binding in Australia.

Source: Online PhD Programs

Their goal is to eliminate the mystery of shortened links and prevent harmful spam, malware, and phishing attacks by rolling out an official URL shortening tool on Twitter called t.co, and in doing so, they may have just put an end to bit.ly and other major URL shorteners with millions of users.

Twitter apparently feels that forcing using to leave twitter.com to shorten a link is absurd and therefore it sees a link shortener as an integrated part of the service the best option. So expect this to be an official end of URL shortening service like bit.ly, tinyURL.com and others. This is one big reason why Twitter is set to launch its link shortening service t.co to wrap all links shared on twitter. Three benefits of twitters coming up with its own link shortner :

1) Will help Twitter to crack down on spam, when ever a suspicious link is found it gives a warning to the user.

2) Helps Twitter with analytics.

3) It allows the users to know where the link leads to. Example : If I post an article from TechChunks, the shortened URL will still say http:techchunks.com.. even though it is shortened by t.co.

So the confusing part about t.co is that many users won’t really be aware of it. That’s because Twitter is including metadata with each tweet that allows clients to display the link’s original URL, even when the link is being routed through t.co first.

Another thing to note is that — while users will now be seeing expanded links show up in their tweets (which could be quite lengthy), each link will only count as twenty characters against the 140 character maximum. That’s because all t.co links will be exactly twenty characters long. According to Twitter, “goal is not to build a brand around t.co”. Instead, it’s to increase the transparency of links that are being shared on Twitter.

So where does that leave is.gd, tinyURL, bit.ly  and the literally hundreds of URL shorteners out there? Realistically…dead! t.co eliminates the need for 3rd party URL shorteners. Right now, they (Twitter) are testing and tweaking this service on a few employees accounts, but plan to roll the changes out application-wide this summer.

What are your thoughts on Twitter’s new link policy?  If you use your own personalized URL shortener how is this going to change how you use it?

The tool simply asks you for the URL of a tweet, once you copy that in and hit “Bake it,” you get back a preview of how it’ll look on the web, and a box with the code you need in it. So basically, this new feature of Twitter is designed to make it easier to embed a tweet within a web document.

“The origin of the script is both self- and user-centered. Mostly, we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets. But of course we also think it’s a much better user experience to have @-mentions, hashtags and the account itself all linked and clickable,” writes Twitter. You can try it for yourself here — just copy and paste the URL for a static tweet and then “bake it.”

Anyone who runs a website, whether it be a blog with a few readers or a major publication that caters to millions, knows that reproducing the wisdom of a tweet on an HTML page can be a tricky affair.

With the new ‘Blackbird Pie‘ feature, Twitter aims to solve the tweet quoting problem by providing web authors with a special snippet of code that can be used to embed a tweet in all its HTML glory, including the author’s avatar, links, and a snapshot of the author’s actual tweet.

At any rate it is kind of great, because all the links/names in these tweets are clickable so readers could trace information back to its source. A great example is, if a tweet is actually a reply to someone, you could click on a “in reply to” link just as you can on Twitter.com to get some context.

Interestingly the generated text is so static that even the ‘less than a minute ago via web’ shall stay static without dynamically changing the tweet time. The feature is a step in the right direction, but in the present form, it is something that clearly needs refinement.

In fact, “Blackbird Pie” is a prototype and doesn’t work on Tumblr. And “Note that this is not guaranteed to work on your platform; it works for us here on a very plain WordPress install. If it does work, when you paste the tweet into your post, it will pick up some of your styling, e.g. the font-family you use on your <p> tags. That’s intentional!”, adds Twitter.

Embedded tweets are likely to become a welcome addition to the arsenal of functionality provided by the social media giant. If you’re tired of making screenshots of tweets, and had been looking for an alternative that includes the ability to learn more about (or follow) the people who are quoted, then the ‘Blackbird Pie’ is a twitter feature that will be welcomed by you with open arms.

Initial customers of the platform include Virgin America, Bravo, and Starbucks. Advertisers will bid on keywords based on a CPM basis initially, but later on Twitter intends to launch a “resonance score” metric that will judge how much reach and impact individual sponsored tweets have, based on favorites, retweets, and views.

Key Points:

- Twitter will hopefully now be able able to add another revenue stream to monetize its model
- Brands will be able to insert themselves into the conversation, but will have to ensure their message is valuable and well-targeted in order to meet relevance hurdles
- The media and ad industry may see progress in establishing more useful and comprehensive performance metrics for targeted buys via social media – how users respond to the message, if they retweet it, reply to it, post it, blog about it, etc.
- Twitter users will either find the message valuable – or intrusive and not relevant to what they were searching for.

In a lot of ways, it’s like Digg Ads, the social media company’s successful advertising model. Both use user interaction with ads in order to determine the price and longevity of specific ads.

Twitter refers to this as a “non-traditional” and “easy” strategy that “makes a ton of sense for Twitter.” Promoted Tweets are described as ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a  wider group of users.

It’s an idea observers of the company have suggested for quite a long time, although it’s still unclear whether those types of queries will monetize nearly as well as conventional search. Sensitive to keeping the user experience free of annoying marketing messages, Twitter will boot sponsored tweets if they’re aren’t receiving lots of replies, clicks or retweets. If this happens, advertisers won’t have to pay for the tweets. … Search ads and in-stream advertising should come as no surprise. After Twitter bought search engine Summize in 2008, search advertising was a fairly obvious approach to monetization. That said, the company has a bit of an unusual take on it. The search ads will appear at the top of results, not on the side like with Google results and Twitter is using a system they call ‘resonance’ to pull out ineffective advertising.

According to a report by the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo consulting firm, sponsored tweets may shock Twitter users at first, but they will find they still have the power to select and reject, which also means advertisers still must pay close attention to the tweet-o-sphere. “This isn’t traditional spray and pray,” the report said.

To start out, Promoted tweets are appearing in Twitter search results. Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone says the company wants to make sure they’re useful to users so they’ll attempt to measure whether they “resonate” with users. Indications of resonation include engagement activities like replying, retweeting, and favoriting. If a promoted tweet doesn’t resonate, they’ll stop showing it, which also begs the question whether this paid business model is going to work for Twitter or it will go into oblivion dues to this ad poisoning.

I think promoted tweets are okay if it goes along with the interests and info you share on a regular basis. But at the same time, I would be worried that twitter advertisements become irritating and spam-like in quality. And there certainly needs to be clearly defined verbiage stating it as an advertisement. More details about Promoted Tweets are expected to be shared by the company this week at an AdAge conference, and at Twitter’s own developer conference, Chirp.

Whether or not Promoted Tweets will be thought of as spam (ultimately causing the death of Twitter) or relevant messages depends largely on how users respond to the ads, and whether the ads are seen as intrusive once Twitter starts injecting promotional messaging into users’ regular streams. But the fact remains that Twitter must figure out a way to bring in revenue beyond the search deals it has signed with major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Stone’s blog post did not say whether Twitter would offer a fee-based, ad-free version of Twitter for those who prefer not to see any advertising.

The text of the email is as follows:

“Dear user of facebook,

Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed. You can find your new password in the attached document.

Thanks,
Your Facebook.”

The message is spoofed and shows up as coming from “Facebook Support” at help@facebook.com, although that’s really not the source.

If you use a web based email client, you shouldn’t be too concerned with the viral part of this but if you download your email, it’s worth virus checking your computer to be safe. The attachment contains a password stealer that can potentially access any username and password combination used on the computer, not just the login credentials for Facebook. If you have downloaded the application you should install a virus scanner and also change your Facebook password immediately.

I have a facebook account but received this same email on my work email, which is essentially a totally different one and not even close to my facebook account. So that would lead me to think that they are just mass-emailing to see who will bite. It is always a best practice to always be wary of any email attachments, irrespective of the domain from which it appears to have been sent! I don’t care who it is from. If you are not expecting one. then alway scan it.

At any rate, isn’t that uber-annoying? I would hope that these wannabe hackers go find something better and more productive to do with their time. At the same time, I find it absolutely hilarious that people actually fall for these phishing attacks (LOL)!

The Android Widget lets you post text and photos with a single tap. Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait.

The widget is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. You can search for ‘Google Buzz’ in the Android Market to download it now. Once it’s downloaded, it can be added to your home screen the same way you add any other widget — click on your home screen menu, click on “add” select “widgets” and then select the option for Google Buzz. However, this new widget looks very slick — easily one of the best widgets for Android yet. But here is some bad news for iPhone users — this simple functionality wouldn’t be possible on the iPhone, as it doesn’t allow for widgets.

With a Buzz widget sitting on your phone’s home screen, it sure seems a lot easier to post to buzz, and perhaps even give Buzz a fighting chance against Twitter. Check it out, and let us know what you think about it via the comments section.

Yesterday, Twitter introduced its own anti-phishing service that allows Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. The new security measures will focus on Twitter direct messages (DMs) — private tweets addressed to a specific user — and corresponding e-mail notifications. Twitter believes DMs are the primary source of Twitter-based phishing attacks, and has not yet announced any plans to extend the new service to regular Twitter messages. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter’s link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.

In a blog post, Twitter’s director of trust and safety, Del Harvey, said that the company is deploying the service as a way to keep users safe from the increasing levels of phishing and other malicious activity on the site.

” Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe. Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.” Harvey wrote in the blog post.

Of particular note is that, regardless of what URL shortener Twitter users use, they might end up seeing links shortened to a twt.tl domain. Does that mean that Twitter is putting the other URL shorteners out of business by creating their own? Maybe. That would be bad news for URL shorteners like bit.ly, who’ve made a business out of offering advanced analytics to uses who submit links through their website.

We’ll be watching our timelines for twt.tl links in the coming days and weeks, and more importantly, we’ll be keeping our eyes out for hackers who manage to get around the new system – because nothing is flawless when it comes to internet security.