Facebook hacked? Some application’s can post on users walls

I was hanging around on Facebook over the weekend when i noticed a couple of strange wall posts from two of my friends. Both of them included url’s to “ringers” which in English means ring tones. I was quite fascinated by this because i have been playing with FB apps for a while and have been looking to see if something like this could be done.

I know that about 6 months ago there was a way to post to users walls by injecting some code on the canvas page but FB plugged the hole, i am now looking into how people have managed to do it this time.

fb-hack1.gif

I’ll update this blog post when i have more info…

Very clever porn link building and social media explotation

The porn industry has always been pretty clever when it comes to creating links and marketing their sites. Obviously it is such a competitive vertical that they are always trying to get one up on each other (No pun intended). Unlike the rest of the SEO world that can game sites like digg.com and reddit.com it is very hard for the porn industry to infiltrate the masses so when they do it is in a very clever way.John Bukkake

Let me introduce to you Professor John Bukkake, what a strange name you ask. Well for anyone who knows what joys Bukkake is all about you will find it even stranger that he is a facial dermatologist at the University of Calcutta. Finding this a little hard to believe i decided to click through the links of the site to eventually find myself transported to an actual Bukkake movie download site.

You see, what those clever porn seo’s have done is to create a page which is so unbelievable that it is funny, the masses over at digg and reddit can’t beleive that something so funny would exist so they digg/vote it up without looking over any of the external links on the site. This generates a great buzz, and some seriously good links in to the John Bukkake page which then links out to the porn sites.

I wouldn’t be suprised if they 301 the domain to the porn site after a couple of days either.

So in closing this is a by the book method of gaming social network sites, you need to be extremely creative but it will pay off.

Edited to add:
I have seen this kind of idea before on a lawyer site. Basically they had the lawyer in question pull a stupid face for his profile picture on his site. After the crowds started linking at such a silly picture being shown on a very professional site they switched it back to his normal profile pic. They generated a ton of back links from authority sites such as digg’s front page.

Edit 2:
Looks like they are cloaking the J Bukkake page so that if your not a human then you 301 straight through to the actual err proper content.

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 Beta

I am rather suprised at how quickly MS have managed to get IE8 beta out the door, but i received news today that it is available to download now. I am currently on my MacBook so can’t test the beta just yet, but intend to get home this evening and give it a whirl.

You may or may not know this but to get IE8 to actually render pages correctly developers will have to do a whole hosts of user-agent sniffing or style sheet selectors, you can find example code of this below…

function getInternetExplorerVersion()
// Returns the version of Internet Explorer or a -1
// (indicating the use of another browser)
{
var rv = -1; // Return value assumes failure
if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer')
{
var ua = navigator.userAgent;
var re  = new RegExp("MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[\.0-9]{0,})");
if (re.exec(ua) != null)
rv = parseFloat( RegExp.$1 );
}
return rv;
}

function checkVersion()
{
var msg = "You're not using Internet Explorer.";
var ver = getInternetExplorerVersion();
if ( ver > -1 )
{
if ( ver >= 7.0 )
msg = "You're using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8.
I should send a quirks or strict mode document."
else
msg = "You should upgrade your copy of Internet Explorer.";
}
alert( msg );
}

It seems to me that every time MS do something good they end up shooting themselves in the foot by insisting that every page on the net needs to be supported to IE6 standards. I see it like this, make users upgrade so us developers don’t have to code for ie6, 7, 8 and then proper standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari.

IE8 Beta

You can get the beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Google wants you to share your Analytics data

So I logged into Google Analytics this morning to check on some of my sites and i was greeted by a little message asking me if i wanted to share my Analytics data between Adsense, Ad Words and Analytics. I thought great, this will allow me to gain much more information when doing other campaigns.

Google Analytics data sharing

The next tick box down asked if i would allow Google to use my analytics data for anonymous bench marking. I’m a bit weary when a big company like Google asks for users data, but would very much like to see what information (if any) they make available to Joe Public. Will this mean that we can start getting a lot more information about certain verticals when researching Adwords? Or will Google make the information available in Google Trends.

I also wonder how many webmasters are weary about allowing Google to view their site data, and if Google will do the old switcheroo at a later time and start to use Analytics data to factor in SERPS results. I know they do don’t this at the moment as i specifically remember Matt Cutts stating that the spam team does not have any access to the Analytics data.

Anyway, something’s to think about before you click yes, or no.