World Of Tricks

Twitter suffered a hack attack overnight, with its Web pages redirecting to a site for the “Iranian Cyber Army.” Twitter later Friday posted an update that said its domain name records “were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed” and promised another update “once we’ve investigated more fully.”

Iranian reformist Web site Mowjcamp also appeared to be hacked by the same group.

TechCrunch has a number of screenshots and videos of the hacks, which also affected Google’s listing for the sites.

It wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for the attacks.

As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Iran has been conducting a campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-wide — not just prominent dissidents — who criticize the regime, according to former Iranian lawmakers and former members of Iran’s elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard, with knowledge of the program. Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad, these people say.

The Twitterati have spoken!

Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about.

1. Google Wave

The most-talked-about app of the year - on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter's general trending topics on multiple occasions.

If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign.

2. Snow Leopard

Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year.

3. Tweetdeck

This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more.

4. Windows 7

The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues - and the top of trends - for several months running.

5. CES

The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek's version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely.

6. Palm Pre

Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn't yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans.

7. Google Latitude

In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master.

8. #E3

Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven.

9. #amazonfail

Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren't "adult" in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie!

10. Macworld

And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free.

And that's it for Twitter's top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Yahoo has quietly announced Yahoo Meme micro-blogging service in English after its soft launch in Spanish and Portuguese. Meme is currently in an invite-only mode. Once the account is created after receiving invitation, users get a blank blog for micro-sharing text, images, music, videos or mash up of all these things.

Registration is simple and gives a Meme URL based on Username like http://meme.yahoo.com/Username. That s just like Twitter and Facebook offers Username URLs.

Meme's setting panel has minimal options like Meme title, 100 character Description, avatar/photo and notifications. Along with that, Meme also offers page layout customization with Themes. On the Meme page, users can post text, photos, videos and all together for sharing with other users. Just like Twitter and Tumblr users do, Meme users can search for other users using the Find option on the top of the page and Follow them to receive their Meme updates.


Meme users can have threaded conversations in the Comment option under every meme post. Also, users can repost the Memes of other users just like Tumblr offers Reblog . At this stage, the Meme service looks very basic and lacks bunch of other features that other competing services into micro-sharing offer. Just like Twitter Trends, Meme has a Popular option that shows Memes posted by users recently.

This is a shocking but interesting news. Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. FriendFeed is mostly used for combining our all online accounts (Twitter, Facebook, SU etc) and staying updated to others. It is not good as Twitter and has a small user base compared to Facebook and Twitter. But FriendFeed has many great features that gives more controls to users. Facebook was trying to acquire it from a long time and finally FriendFeed has accepted their request.
Future of FrienFeed

FriendFeed mentions that it will continue its services. FriendFeed employees and Founders get positions in the Facebook team. You can long to your FriendFeed accounts using the same info. you used till now. Facebook can now bring more features from FriendFeed and improve present features.
Will it affect Twitter?

Most of the FriendFeed content is delivered by Twitter users, there are very less users who update their status from FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a platform for combining all social media activity and Twitter has a major role in it. So as of now it will not affect Twitter.

So what do you think about this? Will it affect Facebook or Twitter?

Twitter is set to adopt the reTweets. You will be soon able to reTweet by just clicking a button and that too in a new way. reTweeting is a great way to share someone’s thoughts/useful links with your followers. As Twitter announced on its official blog, the new RTs will show the original Tweet of the user you reTweeted in your streamline. Means your followers will be see the original Tweet along with your name in it.

The new way of reTweeting looks good and useful. But it may also lead users to confusions. By reTweeting the first Tweeter would be getting exposer to more audience and that is good too. It can also help you to connect with more interesting people and discover new things. But it may also work opposite. When you are following a lot of people on Twitter but you take care of only a few user Tweets, then you may ignore some good reTweets of your friends because they will show the person you don’t know or don’t care of. Well, this is the first phase of ‘Project Retweet’, wait for more news from Twitter. This is how Twitter plans.