Monday, November 3, 2008

Who hacked the network on Google Developers Day 2008 in Israel?

Though the event seemed to be organized quite well, there were network problems occurring which were the reason for me leaving the gathering earlier. At some stage I've got a warning on my browser about invalid certificates for Google.com and naturally didn't decide to accept the invalid certificates. I've told others around me that someone has probably been hacking the network but seemed most people were reluctant to believe it.

Turns out I was right, here's the email sent form "The Google Developer Day Team":


Developer Day
3 de noviembre de 2008 11:02
PLEASE READ: Unauthorized network activity at Google Developer Day

Dear attendee,

First of all thanks for attending Google Developer Day yesterday, we hope you found it useful. Unfortunately, we need to let you know about an incident which took place during the conference which you may need to take precautionary action on.

We identified unauthorised activity on the public wired Ethernet network which was provided by the convention centre for conference attendees to access the Internet. This may have affected a limited number of attendees accessing websites and online applications through the wired Ethernet connection. We have no evidence so far to suggest that the wireless network also provided at the event, and which was used by most attendees, was affected.

Due to the unauthorised activity, there is a chance that if you used the wired network, any user name and password entered to access a website may have been put at risk. When trying to access a secure website (a website using https), you may have received an alert indicating that the page had an invalid security certificate. In any case, we advise users as a precaution to change the passwords for any websites or services they accessed through the wired connection during the conference.

We're really sorry that this has happened but we believe that the vast majority of attendees won't have been affected by this incident. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing you at future events very soon.

The Google Developer Day Team

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Google Developers Day 2008 in Israel

Google's Developers Day 2008 tour has landed in Israel today. Google is looking for developer love and is doing their best to attract it. The main message coming from Google is "Let's work together to make the Internet a better place. The better it is, the better we're all off". Not forgetting that we're talking about a commercial company, not a charity foundation, their approach is, at least on the surface, quite amiable.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the day, in regard to Colnect, were related to OpenSocial. From their website: "OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network's friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users."

What does it really mean? As I see it, FaceBook has taken too big a share of the social networks world than Google (and others) think they deserve. One of the main reasons for the success of FaceBook is the FaceBook applications written by developers and extending FaceBook's functionality in many different directions. The problem is that developers are mostly unable to devote many efforts to writing their social applications to all social networks out there and would thus focus on the biggest ones. Orkut (Google's social network) is surely not the biggest and so the way to convince developers that they should write Orkut-complaint applications, we now have OpenSocial.

OpenSocial supports other networks as well which altogether (according to their figures) serve nearly 500 million users worldwide. Though I'm skeptical of how someone knows my Linked In and Orkut accounts are of the same person (they probably don't share email addresses around), it's still quite a big figure which should be a motivation enough for a developer to focus on it instead (or in addition to) FaceBook.

Colnect is about to release some social applications to the social networks world to assist collectors integrate their collectibles hobby with their other activities and help spread the word about Colnect to fellow collectors. OpenSearch seems an appealing choice since it involves many networks which cater to different crowds which altogether might coincide better with Colnect's target crowd than FaceBook.

Last but not least, there's the issue of Chrome, Google's new browser. While promoting it as simply a means to make your surfing better, it would still have been a bit more amiable and transparent to say "we've made our own browser so that we can make Google search the default search engine and not allow you to block AdWords ads with some addon". If Google really would have cared just for the web users community, it would have simply put more efforts into the existing open source browsers. In my experience, Chrome is still much inferior to FireFox.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

50% increase in Colnect's growth rate - welcoming stamps and coins collectors

Less than 2 weeks following the initial release of Colnect V2 and without any commercial advertising of Colnect, there are already ~90 active coins collectors from 35 countries and ~50 active stamps collectors from 25 countries on Colnect. Active refers to a collector who has updated his/her personal collection on Colnect.

The overall amount of newly registered members during the last week shows ~50% increase over the weeks before it. This achievement, enhanced by the facts that the new site experienced some downtime and that registration now requires email address confirmation, should probably be attributed to the collectors who already know Colnect. Some collectors collect more than a single collectible and so many phonecard+coin collectors would know other coin collectors and let them know about how useful Colnect would be for them.

To help motivating collectors the following news item has recently been published on Colnect:

Help Colnect and Win Free Phonecards!

Colnect now has a huge stamps and coins catalog. However, since it's so new, many collectors of stamps and coins have not yet heard about us. Now is your chance to help Colnect and win free phonecards.
How?

Simply tell your collector friends to join Colnect. Once they join and update their collection, they should Contact Us and tell us you told them about Colnect. Every friend that joined Colnect with your help entitles you to 10 points. Each friend your friend bring, gives you 3 more points.
Who will win?

The 3 collectors who has accumulated most points until the 30th of November.
What will you win?

First place: 50 Phonecards
Second place: 40 Phonecards
Third place: 30 Phonecards
BONUS: A Colnect T-Shirt.
Questions?

Visit the forum for answers.


What about commercial advertising


Though so far Colnect did not rely on any commercial advertising but rather 'word of mouth' and friendly reviews and backlinks, it may be a good idea to advertise it some more with AdSense or a similar program. For the time being, I prefer to see a steady growth while I'm fine tuning the system and perfecting it rather than a flood which will make Colnect buzzing and later endangered.

Link and Search

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