Archive for December, 2009

As anyone with an internet connection, or who has been around someone under thirty recently, knows, facebook’s success over the past few years has been unparalleled. This year alone it has jumped from 50 million users to 350 million. However, facebook may now be in danger of becoming a victim of its own success as it struggles to deal with the sheer weight of personal data at its disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The conventional logic in the browser world is that Chrome is the fastest gun in the west. Whilst it may lack the myriad add-ons that firefox offers, its signature benefit has been that it boots quicker and loads pages quicker, and that has convinced a steady stream of people to switch over, since its inception earlier in the year.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re well used to the year end search query lists, published by the major search engines, being used as handy barometers of what’s been going on that year, but this is the first time I can remember facebook doing the same thing with status updates. The social network has today published a list of the top themes in the more than 45 million status updates a day (from 30 million unique visitors) that facebook enjoys.

Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at Facebook will have to hope that the old adage about all publicity being good publicity is true today, as news breaks that the social network is cited in as many as 20 percent of divorce petitions. These statistics come courtesy of divorce online, a firm of lawyers who specialise in divorce cases and who say that a staggering number of marriages are now ending as a result of the extra-marital liaisons arranged through the site.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a move that will delight webmasters and developers, Royal Mail has promised to give away postcode data for free. The move is part of the organisations commitment to make more use of technology and the internet to help transform their services. This is particularly important for ecommerce sites, who often use post codes to predict the full addresses of users, taking a valuable step out of the payment process, which as anyone who’s worked in ecommerce knows, is the best way to lower your number of abandoned carts.

Read the rest of this entry »

The iTunes store has ejected one of the site’s major developers for posting thousands of reviews on their own products. Chinese Developer Molinker had more than a thousand applications listed on the iTunes store, their removal has reportedly reduced the size of the store by 1 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Parents and youth advocates have long worried about the potentially harmful influence social networking sites like facebook could have on the young. In response to these worries, facebook has decided to install what is being referred to as a ‘panic button’ on their site so that children can quickly alert site administrators whenever they see material that is offensive or obscene. The button will work in a similar fashion to the one that features on the social networking site Bebo, whose demographic skews much younger than facebook.

Read the rest of this entry »