Microsoft today announced that they would be including a pretty tight integration of Facebook connect into the XBox live system. There are two parts to this story, one is that all future XBox games will allow users to post back information to their Facebook Streams and walls based off achievements in games, high scores etc. Facebook connect will also be used to pull in friends and marry them up to your Xbox live account.
The second part is that there is going to effectively be a Facebook application on the XBox which will allow you to see friends photos, comments, videos etc.
All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.
Edit: At the Nintendo conference in the afternoon, they announced that the DSI would integrate with Facebook to allow users to upload photos straight from the device.
There are some suspected 20 million + XBox live owners, and since Facebook connect now integrates with 3rd party websites, iPhone applications, the XBox, and now DSI we should surely see it grow and grow into a monster application.
So i have just finished speaking on my panel at SMX London, on what is new with social media. I think it went really well, and hopefully put the message across that social media is a powerful medium which is growing and growing.
The other panellist’s were excellent also, and we all complimented each other very well.
I have put my presentation from this panel right below, just click the image to download.
As a bonus i have put up my presentation from SES London on Successful site architecture.
A while ago i wrote a post about Facebook stalking and how Facebook had created a news feed preference page so that you could adjust what sort of stories you see in your news feed. One of the most interesting things about this was that you could specify friends who you would ‘like to see more of’ and of course friends who you would ‘like to see less of’, however i am convinced that after the recent roll out of the new news feed that none of these preferences even work.
Hi, we no longer work
Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…
You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available
Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ’see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.
To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.
Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ’see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!
Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.
I recently got accepted to speak on the Whats new with Social Media panel which is being held at SMX London on the 19th May 2009. I am really looking forward to this panel because i will be speaking with some real good guys (and gals) including Ciaran Norris, Massimo Burgio, and Lucy Langdon.
Im hotlinking this image because my uploader won't work
I am planning on speaking about utilising Facebook and Twitter, much of the presentation will be spent on Facebook Connect and also using the twitter API. All this will be wrapped in some case studies which should push people to really consider the power of using such technologies.
Come along and say hi if you are there, i really do think it will be a good panel
Back in December 2008 Microsoft Live Search announced that it would be releasing its new spider/crawler into the wild to crawl all those lovely websites out there, now 4 months on it seems that the MSNbot is being very naughty and and completely disregarding robots.txt and no index meta tags, and even worse, could be crawling your site based on the robots.txt of a completely different domain!
So what’s exactly going on? It seems that the problem first started in February 2009 when some users on webmaster world noticed that the new MSNbot had been hitting on their robots.txt files but not obeying the rules and grabbing pages which had been excluded. Discussion ensued with people wondering if this was just some crawler spoofing as MSNbot, but it turns out that it was the real MSNbot so why would it be completely disregarding the robots.txt?
Well another discussion over at Webmaster talk confirmed that MSNbot was definitely disregarding the robots.txt instructions, in fact one member posted the following information…
Now for the non technical out there, the above is basically three lines from a log file which shows that MSNbot came to the site from the ip of 65.55.106.115 and read the robots.txt file, the bot then requested the about.php page and left. However, shortly after, the MSNbot came back from a different ip address (this time 65.55.106.172) and tried to crawl the /forbidden directory. Whats weird here is that apparently the /forbidden directory is not linked to from anywhere so the only way the bot would know it existed is by reading and disregarding the robots.txt file. It might cross your mind to think that this is all a coincidence and that someone masquerading as MSNbot came along shortly after and tried to access /forbidden, however both ip address belong to Microsoft.
As i said earlier, it seems a bit strange that Microsoft would start to ignore robots.txt files, so after digging deeper it seems like there is a bug in the new MSNbot which means that it is actually reading the robots.txt on a complete different domain and then trying spider your site. Here is an example request from the spider…
In this instance, the spider thinks that it is crawling www.lumigan.com but is in fact crawling a completely different website thus disregarding it’s robots.txt and indexing pages that shouldn’t be indexed. It’s at this point that Microsoft seemed to get wind of it and stated that they are looking into the problem.
The final piece of the puzzle comes from a post on one of Microsoft’s own social boards, where a user basically confirms what everyone else has been speculating…
For some reason, msnbot/2.0b is visiting the wrong IP addresses to retrieve robots.txt. In other words, it THINKS it is getting robots.txt for www.yoursite.com, but it is really reading the robots.txt file that is served for the default host at the IP address for www.mysite.com (not necessarily www.mysite.com’s robots.txt). Clearly, msnbot/2.0b is using the wrong DNS lookup for its requests.
So, we get confirmation that MSNbot is using the wrong DNS lookup for its requests and as such is definitely crawling sites based on the wrong robots.txt information. This is very concerning since areas on your website that you specifically do not want to be crawled, are being crawled and could end up being placed in to the Live SERPS.
Thankfully Brett from MSN yet again confirms that they are aware of the problem and they are trying to fix it. The problem is, no one seems to know when the fix will be complete or if the data that they have gathered in the past 4 months has already been used in the SERPS.
If you want to check to see if your site has been effected then i offer you the following advice from the above forum post…
Search your web log for requests from msnbot/2.0b. Do you see requests for links that don’t exist on your site? That’s because they exist on a different site, the one msnbot/2.0b THINKS it’s crawling . If you log the requested server name, do you see unfamilar hosts? Those are the ones msnbot/2.0b THINKS it’s visiting .
You could also just out right ban the MSNbot using an .htaccess line with something similar to the following…
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^msnbot/2\.0b [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
//Returns a 403-Forbidden response and no content.
Hopefully Microsoft can get this issue resolved soon.
I’m a little late to the party regarding this as both Mike Nott and Robert Kerry have already covered it. However since my blog is read by a ton more people than both of theirs combined, i thought i should write a quick post about it too
I have been at Ayima for just over a year now, i came from sunny Lincoln to the Big Smoke to work with some of the best people in the industry. A lot has happened in that past year, i have been fortunate to travel to conferences and learn a lot of new things, and Ayima has been steadily growing all the time.
Tony Spencer has long been friends with Mike N and as such we have started on a new venture by opening an Ayima office in America with Tony heading it up. It is an exciting chapter in the Ayima book and hopefully it will mean that we all get to visit America a lot more
I am sure that Tony will do a great job, and we are all looking forward to pulling in some big clients.
We all love Facebook, well most people did before the new layout change. If you read my blog you know that i spend a lot of time writing about new Facebook features etc. I thought i would lighten up the mood and create my first blog list, and what better place to start than with Facebook and the parody videos that people have made.
Lets get straight into it…
5) Facebook Song
The Facebook Song, umm song sounds like something from a country and western convention, that being said it’s not without its charm and good for a laugh in a couple of places.
4) Facebook Anthem
This is actually quite well put together and would be higher up my list if it wasn’t for the girl reminding me of Hannah Montana, who i literally can not stand.
3) The Facebook Skit
This video involves some Indian guy (i think he is Indian) singing along to a parody of Enrique Iglesias’ song Hero, need i say more?
2) Facebook Off
The guys from College Humour create a brilliant parody of the Nick Cage film, Face Off. Really well done and full of laughs, would of been 1st if it wasn’t for…
1) Facebook Gangsta
By far the best Facebook Parody, these guy encapsulate pretty much all the white guys who sit behind their computers thinking they are Gangsters, and yes, that includes me.
Super Bonus completely unrelated parady video
Totally unrelated but a great example of how to parody something from the guys a Cracked.com, if you actually watch Star Trek this is 100 times better.
I was checking out the hitwise blog, and came across an interesting post centered around the traffic growth of *shudders* Perezhilton.com… and no, i am not linking to it!
Anyway, the interesting thing about the post is that it states that according to hitwise numbers, Perezhilton.com now generates more traffic from Facebook than it does from Google searches.
Apparently…
Last week, 8.70% of visits to PerezHilton.com came from Facebook compared to 7.62% from Google. The switch happened the week ending December 27th, 2008.
then in the comments, someone else confirms that…
It’s a similar situation in the UK: 2.5x as many searches for Perez than Paris last week. 19.1% of Perez Hilton’s traffic from Facebook, just 12.0% from Google UK and 2.3% from Google.com
Now what else is interesting is that Facebook now accounts for about 3.3% of all traffic driven to video sites, Hitwise have provided the following handy dandy trend graph.
So to sum up the point of this post, whilst it may still be difficult to attract Facebook users to buy products from your site, it should certainly not be overlooked as a means to generate traffic to information based sites or blogs. I imagine that this trend will continue to rise, especially as Facebook look to launch its new real time homepage later today
I was just talking with Jane Copland about the beloved Sphinn blog and how it is always up to date ) So i decided to type in http://sphinn.com/blog and found it rather amusing when it 301 redirected to http://blog.sphinn.com/blog and then returned me a 404 error.
It made me smile that Sphinn, an SEO blog, haven’t got there redirects sorted correctly, although I do sympathise with them since they are using the rather useless Pligg platform.
Evil Green Donkey was unavailble for comment, when i leaned over the desk to ask him he put his fingers in his ears and started singing YMCA )
The Facebook Connect world just keeps on getting better and better, not only do we have the wonderus Facebook connect core, we now have widgets for nearly every blogging platform and on top of that FB have released a new comments widget that can plug directly into your site with little effort and code.
With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via their APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.
The Comments Box comes with additional social features:
Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.
) So i decided to type in 
