- Image by Carlo Nicora via Flickr
By Doug Caverly
Even with its 500 million users and omnipresence in society, Facebook is not discounting the threat posed by Google‘s supposed plans to launch a social network, according to a new report. Instead, the company’s gone into a sort of “lockdown” in response.
Do you think the lockdown’s a sign that Facebook thinks it’s in trouble? Or just a way of accomplishing some extra work?
Anthony Ha reported, “We’ve heard from a source close to Facebook’s plans that the social network is working hard to fend off Google. Specifically, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has declared that the company is on ‘lockdown’ for the next 60 days, with the office open on weekends as the company tries to revamp Photos, Groups, and Events in advance of the Google launch.”
Then Ha added, “We hear Zuckerberg even has a neon sign saying ‘Lockdown’ on his office door.”
That last detail makes it sound like Zuckerberg isn’t exactly sweating bullets; most people wouldn’t order neon signs under those circumstances.
Still, if what Ha heard is true, it could be a signal that Zuckerberg at least feels a reworking of his site is in order if Facebook is to stay dominant. And if an earlier report that Facebook has Google’s social product plans in its possession is accurate, that may mean Google has something very interesting on the way.
Of course, Google still hasn’t shared any details with the public about what it’s planning.
Filed under Breaking News, SEO News by on Aug 17th, 2010. 
- Image via CrunchBase
According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.
Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:
- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution — turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.
- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!
- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.
- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.
- In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.
- Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.
- Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.
- One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.
- Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.
- The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.
“Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. “Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users.”
NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.
Filed under Breaking News by on Aug 3rd, 2010.
