Twitter’s Retweet (beta) feature: note the “ReTweet” link next to the reply link.

The “New Feature”

So, what happens if the little link in the above screenshot snippet is clicked? Well, if you are “lucky” enough to be testing this feature, you will see the following within your timeline:

(note the image instead of the letters “RT”. That’s the innovation here, apparently.)

Everyone else sees the usual “RT @[user]: [Tweet]” format, without the fancy shmancy image to go in place of the “RT” part.

Management Screen

One more official part of the new feature, however, is the “ReTweet management screen”:

See who re-stated what

Here, you can see who has ReTweeted what, who has retweeted you, and so on. This tool only supports the usage of the “official” RT link; old-style manual “RT”s are not tracked here in bit.ly-like fashion.

My Verdict

I’m being a dick about this new feature, I realize this, and here’s why:

Bet your Twitter web client doesn’t do THIS, huh? More screenshots: The Coffee Desk Twitpic

Twitter user @troynt pretty much ruined Twitter for me: his Firefox Greasemonkey script added “group” support before the Lists feature was added for all to use, it hides the stupid Twi-ter pronunciation ad box thing, it nests timeline replies (seen in the screenshot), it allows you to add “notes” about a user to this profile page, it allows you to automatically see new Tweets upon reaching the bottom of the timeline screen in the web client, it can embed images (e.g. Twitpic) and YouTube videos directly into the timeline under the corresponding tweet, it has auto-complete for @ notation, and it allows you to turn off pretty much any aspect of the site via a nice checkbox-system within it’s in-Twitter management console.

The biggest thing Twitter should adopt here, while remaining optional and customizable of course, are the nested replies, image/video embedding, and auto-completion. Until then, this script makes Twitter’s web client 100% more usable for me.

One thing the script doesn’t do that I would like to see in Twitter is auto-updating times: Facebook does this in their newsfeed: when a minute has passed, the “posted at …” is updated to reflect how much time has actually passed, not how much time has passed since the status/post was last loaded. Nothing grinds my gears like trying to figure out when a tweet occurred upon returning to my computer after 5 minutes of being away (simple math shouldn’t be necessary with Web 2.0)

So while this article started as a critical review of the new ReTweet feature within Twitter’s web client, it’s quickly turned into praise for the @troynt Greasemonkey script instead, since it pretty much makes Twitter 100% better and adds more features to make it actually worthwhile. Use Firefox, get the Greasemonkey add-on, and get the @troynt Greasemonkey script from userscripts.org – it will change your perspective about Twitter’s web client moreso than their useless ReTweet Feature.

Twitter’s (Beta) ReTweet Feature Review originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 17, 2009.

This unique AJAX technique, employed by some of the top current Web 2.0 apps, has many benefits besides usability: it actually saves the bandwidth of the site by an astounding amount, and defers the latency of the new page’s loading to the responsibility of the client-side web browser’s script compilation instead of downloading a new, full page each change in navigation.

The Basis of the Technique

If you want to see this in action, simply click on your replies within Twitter’s web client, do anything in Gmail/Google Wave, or click a profile/photo in Facebook – watch the URL, particularly the last part (everything past the ‘#’ character, called the “hash” by many.)

Basically, it works like this: whenever you perform an action that requires a change in navigation, e.g. clicking a link to go to a profile or to view an email, a JavaScript “onclick” event handler for that link calls a shared “AJAX load this page” function that begins to load the data required to change the page.

Also, it updates the URL’s post-hash characters to make the “new page” bookmark-friendly in case a user wants to go directly to that page as if it were static HTML instead of a dynamic client-side scripting-dependent page instance.

Likewise, each time a page within Gmail (or whatever app) is loaded, it checks for hash characters and will load the data into the page, transparently to the user. Because of this, most of the time the characters after the hash is simply the latter part of a URL to be inserted into the AJAX function to load the page, e.g. the characters necessary to download a page called “http://www.gmail.com/”+hashtag etc.

Benefits of this System: bandwidth

Most professionals use this simple AJAX technique to simplify the navigation of their site and to track user activity, but there is an often-overlooked advantage to using this model: bandwidth conservation and faster loading speed via deferred processing.

Here’s a rudimentary example: when your web app doesn’t use AJAX-loading and instead relies on unique page loads each and every time the user navigates to a new page, here is what is sent to the client’s web browser each time, following server-side processing:

Even if the browser caches these files and page snippets, the inclusion statement still represents an unnecessary amount of bandwidth when multiplied by the number of concurrent users.

However, if a page uses AJAX-loading to load new content into the existing page, all of the above example code would only be loaded once, including site-wide elements such as navigation menus and general formatting sections.

Instead, the AJAX would only request “page-specific” content such as a particular email’s content (in the case of Gmail) and insert it within the existing page, which only had to load once.

This way, once the common site elements are loaded into the browser, only the changing content needs to… well… change. This can lead to tremendous savings on bandwidth, which is important when many users are hitting the site at once.

(props for still reading this longer-than-normal article – hang in there!)

Another benefit: Processing speed

When most browsers process a script, they first download the plaintext .js file from the server upon seeing it’s inclusion statement within the HTML. Then, they compile it directly to native code (or some similar action) and store the compiled JavaScript into the browser’s cache for future execution.

So, when the initial page is loaded, the included AJAX script for loading future content is compiled and cached, making it’s future execution very fast. This lowers the latency involved on the client-side when downloading future content to be loaded into the running page, and since bandwidth consumption is kept to that of the content’s usage only, the process is extremely fast compared to loading a full page each time.

Further Enhancements

If the server and web browser are configured properly, then the Apache mod_gzip/mod_deflate could further boost the speed of this process. This puts more of the loading process in the realm of processing and conserves bandwidth more, and qualifies as an enhancement since bandwidth is more of a scarce resource than processing power.

In other words, you’re more likely to see a quad-core on a DSL or shared cable connection than a Pentium III hooked into a T3 line, so lower bandwidth in favor of processing time in most situations while employing sniffing practices to ensure mobile accessibility.

Speaking of accessibility, notice that on most AJAX-employing Web apps that although there is a JavaScript event handler associated with a link, they don’t forget to keep the link intact: there is no ‘href=”#”‘ in Gmail or Facebook – a quick look at the status bar while hovering over a link will reveal basic accessibility fundamentals in practice.

This, combined with appropriate JavaScript feature degradation (without resorting to NOSCRIPT tags) will ensure accessibility while using this advanced technique: if the client doesn’t support AJAX loading or JavaScript at all, then fall back on regular site loading using full page requests.

Since only a negligible amount of users fall into that category anyway (including Googlebot and other crawlers), the loss of performance due to a few client requiring full page loads is relatively small.

Final Notes

So, as seen in the examples above, the use of AJAX content loading within web apps, as employed by Gmail and Facebook, has numerous advantages to the site and its usability while remaining transparent to the users.

Best of all, if done correctly, it can be unobtrusive and therefore non-impacting to a site’s SEO or accessibility.

Almost everything discussed here neglects the role and possible optimization in the server-side scripting involved in all this, but each web app is unique and therefore can be optimized to best suit the situation as far as server-side optimizations go: just keep the main page’s inclusion rate low so the initial page loads fast, and keep the “dirty work” required by the server-side AJAX handler to a minimum.

Also look into distributing the load between several scripts to handle different types of AJAX requests, reducing query-string parameters and the conditionals involved in their processing, and even look into distributed computing (mod_proxy and it’s family) for self-hosted web apps with large scalability requirements.

In addition, the AJAX-handlers can be easily made into a rudimentary API for a web app you may want to make available for an iPhone/Blackberry app, or if you wish to open it up for any client as Twitter and FMyLife.com have done.

One thing is certain, however: whatever the aim of your web app may be, with very few exceptions, you will almost certainly benefit from this JavaScript AJAX programming technique upon its deployment within your site or app.

I hope this will convince more app authors to move to this system of page loading. Until next time…

Use of AJAX To Conserve Bandwidth and Processing originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 8, 2009.

And it was fucking nasty.

I look at Google Wave as Google’s technological way of repeating the same experiment: take Docs, Orkut, Gmail, Wikipedia, and IM, stick them in a “blender”, and you get Google Wave. What follows are what conclusions I have drawn as a user/developer using Google Wave for the first time.

Article index:
First impressions
Wave Terminology
Issues
My verdict
Screenshots
Screencast

First impressions: What is a Wave?

When Anthony said he scored an invite from Twitter, I couldn’t wait to see what the buzz was about – Google Wave was still relatively unknown and unexplored territory to me at the time.

It still is, but it was before I used it, too.

As stated above, it is basically the retarded child of Gmail, Docs and Orkut with an editing interface that can only be described as somewhere between Wiki-style editing and instant messaging. It’s really hard to explain.

Fuck it, here’s a screenshot:

So do you see where it draws from Gmail and docs in its user interface? Even more Gmail-ish is the assignment of email(?) addresses to @googlewave.com, although I think those are reserved for waves/blips.

I also said it was like Orkut, Wikipedia and IM: everybody can edit any wave (unless there’s some “read-only” checkbox I haven’t seen yet), and like IM, the waves/blips are directed towards one or more people in a social-networking manner, instantaneously.

Here’s the creepy factor: you can see what people are typing before it is officially published. I found that to be a little weird. Goodbye, moments of typing “fuck you I’m not coming to work today and I’m hungover” before hitting backspace a few times and typing “I’m feeling under the weather” in a conversation to my boss. In a wave, this would get me fired.

Here’s where I freely edited the top blip in someone else’s wave:

Wave terminology

From what I’ve seen, nobody really knows what the hell is going on in Google Wave, much less what they call everything. But here are the basics: a wave is a thread of blips. A blip is a multimedia message, that is, a rich textual message containing multimedia (duh).

And, for the creation of these extravagant new evolutions in online collaboration, Google has designed the ultimate clickable GUI component to begin one of these innovative new “Waves”:

(sarcasm fully intended)

Oh, and all the cool wavers/surfers/hipsters/testers use “Google \/\/ave”(backslash-forward slash-backslash-forward slash-a-v-e) to refer to the product. You can see why I don’t.

Issues With Wave

Spam spam spam! I waltzed right up to someone else’s wave/blip and added my own line to it. I could have easily added a link or files as well, and with the handy-dandy Wave API freely available to use, spammers and hacked accounts could tune Wave into the biggest spamfest since Twitter.

And I know we’ve ripped on Google for vague privacy policies before here, but Google Wave’s privacy policy keeps mentioning “offline storage” as a permanent storage of all my retarded waves, including smiling bob up above.

Since could waves also contain emails, files (read: warez) and even untyped/unpublished “nah, I’d better not say that” content, the “stored for life” offline storage clauses within the privacy policy is a little disconcerting to say the least. I don’t like my drunken waves being stored in a nuke-proof underground safe somewhere.

For a Google product in “beta”/preview, it’s very stable. All the JavaScript seems to be bug-free, even in the obscure browsers I rigorously tested Wave in in an effort to find flaws. The keyboard shortcuts are the best I’ve ever seen in a web app: Google’s devs have clearly done their homework for the programming of this app.

My verdict

I almost don’t see the need for any of this besides as a toy that simplifies bouncing between other tools.

On the other hand, everyone thought Twitter was the biggest piece of crap on the web when it first came out, but now everyone uses it. Maybe the same will true for Wave: it could possibly revolutionalize how we collaborate online, and combined with Google’s Chrome OS could be the next generation of computing, placing Google in control of the entire process from the hardware up.

Or, it could become a (to the majority of users) unused tool like Google Docs. Only time will tell, but the invite system seems to indicate popularity like that of Gmail, so it could go big once released.

Random features and screenshots

The editing history timeline is pretty cool

A yes/no/maybe widget. Elementary school love letter deja vu.

Thread blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip etc.

Well that’s all for now, no more ripping on Google Wave until they add more features. I hope I cleared things up for users trying to figure out what it is after reading so many vague and screenshot-less reviews on other sites. I would just like to know how this idea was conceived in the first place, personally.

Oh, and if you want an invite, hit us up on Twitter – we still have 20 as of this writing

Update: Screencast added

Thoughts On Google Wave: A Google Wave Review originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 3, 2009.

Below are some screenshots of this temporary feature (for historic purposes) and a little information about it.

Article Sections:
#treat
#trick
Technical Details
Final Notes
Update: Screencast Added

#treat

Although not nearly as interesting as it’s Halloween-themed counterpart, the #treat update displayed this design over the timeline:

But the #treat easter-egg isn’t nearly as fun as the #trick easter-egg:

#trick

First, right after the update solely containing ‘#trick’ is “published”, this drop-down message is displayed after the new background is loaded:

Then, after a progressive timeline/tweet modification, the next change appeared:

By far, this was my favorite modification of the two. Also, it earns more of an ‘easter-egg’ status than the former because I don’t recall ever seeing #trick trending throughout the day as I did #treat.

How it works

This is a little techy, but basically Twitter added a hook into their JavaScript’s AJAX tweet-publishing code that did some simply string matching to detect the single strings “#trick” or #”treat”, in order to perform a special action in response.

The background of the page, at least in the case of the #trick’s biohazard image, is a transparent PNG laid over the page’s background. I know this without even looking at the code because the coffee-colored background was visible under the biohazard image before it was changed to black to further complete the process of setting the new design.

The usual now-famous Twitter drop-down box was recycled for the “Happy Halloween” message, only using a black background with a yellow Arial(?) font in the case of the #trick design. I assume absolute-positioned transparent PNGs are what allowed the spider webs/witches to lie over the drop-down messages.

And note that the tweet is never published – some hard-wired control flow code prevents it from reaching Twitter’s servers in favor of redesigning the client’s appearance.

Enjoy!

I saved the screenshots in case someone missed it, and for historic purposes.

I actually discovered this by simply seeing people tweet about #trick/#treat (with other words in their tweet) and by seeing #treat within the Trending Topics.

Twitter actually provided a description for the egg within the trending topic for #treat. Without their explicitly stating it, I (and presumably other users) would have never thought to tweet JUST #trick or #tweet. Besides, unless I’d already seen it I’d look like a spammer or idiot with a published tweet containing only #trick or #tweet.

But, that said, I really enjoyed this new added feature today, along with Google’s “This space intentionally left blank” thing on their front page.

I hope everyone out there enjoyed this as much as I did!

Update: YouTube Screencast Now Available

A Twitter “Happy Halloween” – Trick Or Treat? originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on October 30, 2009.

Well, this article explains everything behind www.hell.com that there is to know.

At a glimpse

Just in case you’ve never visited hell.com ever before, go ahead and do it now: here’s a link.

Unless the site’s ADHD creator has gone and revamped the design for the millionth time following the publishing of this tell-all article, you should see a JavaScript-based mouseover animation, a down-arrow GIF logo, and a phrase saying something along the lines of “hell.com is a private parallel web, there is no public access”. Blah blah blah, trust me – it’s all a facade.

The Pages

Beyond the current(?) homepage, there should be a Google search gateway. This can also be found on the 404 error page, should a URL under hell.com not exist.

But, as the Wikipedia article suggests, here are some more pages (mirrored here) that have existed within hell.com and related sites in the past:

• http://hell.com/ – the homepage
• http://hell.com/soul.html – hell.com’s “soul buyback program” (they just wanted money)
• http://hell.com/? – hell.com’s once-only public art unveiling event, which took place shortly before the year 2000.
• http://hell.com/X/faqF.html – a Flash animation depicting a bunch of questions flying at the viewer in an attempt to create “art”.
• http://hell.com/xit.html – one of many Google search gateways found on the site.
• http://final.org/HELL.html – a final.org (owned by the same guy) page spreading false propaganda about hell.com in order to make it appear larger than it is.

Hell.com and Final.org, both (previously) owned by Kenneth Aronson, are hosted on the same web server. Just type in ‘https://hell.com/’ and bypass the security warning to reach final.org’s homepage – a dead giveway that they are hosted on the same server since web server software cannot provide virtual hosts for two separate secure TLS sites on the same server.

Here are some other pages providing information about the site and its owners:

• WHOIS information for hell.com – reveals the sale of the hell.com domain name to a cybersquatter
• WHOIS information for final.org – reflects the original owner of hell.com
• HTTP headers for hell.com – reveals server software versioning, module information, and more server information. Matches that of final.org. (updated to hide server signature as of this article’s publishing – no joke)
• Kenneth Aronson’s website – meet the founder of hell.com. Artsy “likes to fuck with your head” type.

The Basic Idea

If you had a look at the founder’s website above, you’ll see that he’s the far-out artsy fartsy type. He also runs a website called “Nothing In The Box” where he sells boxes full of nothing at all for various prices, in case you don’t believe me.

Without coming right out and just saying it, he’s alluded to it in various interviews: he founded hell.com one day after he purchased the surprisingly-available domain name, and decided to use the popular type-in-traffic name to establish a “net.art” website where he simply messed with the visitors’ heads, provoking infinite questions in an attempt to create an obscene form of “art”.

Throughout the site’s life, in an attempt to garner even more attention, he has sold email addresses for @hell.com, he once released a public art display (mirrored above), and other various immature pranks to further stir up curiosity about the waste of bandwidth known as hell.com.

And now, although the site/domain is rumored to be up for sale on November 1, 2009, it is currently owned by a cybersquatter by the name of Rick Latona. If you read my other article on cybersquatters, you’ll know that I have a very low opinion of them, but at least this one had the decency to keep the current hell.com content up (presumably by request of Aronson).

(side note – their email service provider and the other popular subdomain bat.hell.com are both now defunctional)

Nothing To See Here

That’s all hell.com is/was: a retarded side project of a bored artist seeking money and attention. Nothing more, nothing less – there is no “parallel web” or anything, just a hoax existing for the single purpose of provoking questions within the heads of type-in traffic visitors.

While Yahoo! Geocities died on October 26, 2009, it seems that on November 1, 2009 another artifact of Internet history will also die. The only difference is, while Geocities had at least some useful content buried within it, hell.com had absolutely nothing.

Maybe that was the beauty of it, but as they say: beauty lies within the eye of the beholder. I see none.

What Is / Was Hell.com – The Real Answer originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on October 27, 2009.

Oh, and we provide a tribute and archive of our own, too!

Skip to a particular section:
Tributes
Archives
Personal Notes

The Tributes

First, the tributes: these have been seen and collected from all around the Internet, paying homage to the loss of many poorly-made, if not historic, Geocities pages sure to be lost with the service’s closing:

• xkcd.com’s Geocities redesign – we are mirroring it here, just in case the “redesign” is lost in the future.
• WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!!! – also mirrored in case of a future unavailability, this person almost perfectly represents every other Geocities page in existence.
• Another Perfect Geocities Tribute – a great read for any person reminiscent of Geocities, as well.
• The GIF Guy’s Website (image map-less mirror here) – this site, hosted on a bare IP, is the archive of the Geocities page of the guy who created the first famous “under construction” GIF. Source is here.
• Geocities “Under Construction” Animated GIFs Collection – a memory-intensive archive of almost every “under construction” animated GIF known to mankind!

Those are classic, I really enjoyed how they satirize the “poor” usage of HTML/frames/GIFs as the old Geocities sites used to. Of course, if you want to experience this same feeling on a modern website, just jump on over to MySpace where most profiles continue to do so only with some CSS thrown in the mix.

(or, read my complaint against MySpace – the same applies to Geocities, as well

The Archives

The main archivers of Geocities are The Archive Team and Archive.org, both of whom realize that the shutdown of Geocities could potentially be a loss of valuable information.

In addition to these (but certainly not outshining them), there are a few Geocities pages a few editors here have saved during private web browsing, mainly saved due to the fact that Geocities has been rumored to have been closing for some time. There are pretty off-the-wall, just to warn you:

• RKFS Linux Filesystem Tutorial – archive of a Geocities-hosted Linux filesystem driver tutorial.
• Cold Water Extraction Tutorial – a chemical procedure detailing how to extract a liver-harming chemical from certain medicines.

The 404 error in the right frame of the page is due to the missing ad page that Geocities began to stick into pages – disregard it.

Final Notes

While Geocities is regarded by most early Internet-goers as a collection of poorly constructed (yet always “under construction”), personal, random, and terrible excuses for websites, there are a few Geocities sites that actually contain useful information, as the various archiving teams set out to preserve in history.

If you were a heavy Internet user from 1994 – 2000 or beyond, then you may have just had a Geocities page as your first website, so don’t be so fast to ridicule those who did. As for the rest of us, a simple MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/$SOCIAL_MEDIA website will suffice in the absence of Geocities.

R.I.P. Geocities 1995 – 2009

Geocities Closes: Tributes, Parodies and Archives Spring Up originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on October 26, 2009.

Facebook's Updated Relationship Statuses, Including the Newly-added 'Widowed' Option

You wouldn’t really guess that many widows would be using Facebook, but the group behind the petition is a sign that Facebook is increasing their reach throughout the population – even to widows.

For many of us, the relationship status doesn’t change very often, but the new option should allow a very specific set of users the ability to make their relationship status more accurate than before.

Nothing real exciting, but still a major change for Facebook.

Facebook Adds New ‘Widowed’ Relationship Option originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on September 1, 2009.

This post is more of a “Dos and Don’ts” post as far as SEO is concerned. There is a point where optimization tactics become spam for all practical purposes, and here I aim to define the difference more clearly.

Editing Wikis

One thing Wikis have brought to the Internet is something I tried once when I first had a web browser as a teenager, and that is the ability to edit web pages while they remain live on the Internet.

But adding links to your website for the Pagerank and user link-clicking benefits is an act that has a right way and wrong way to do it. Overall, you should never add links to your own website: if it is notable enough, someone else will do it.

Otherwise, you could be outed by other members of that wiki’s community for blatantly link-spamming to your website, potentially even banned from the site along with links directed at your website.

Wikipedia seems to be the largest target for this, and they have a very large set of editors dedicated solely at removing spam links from the site. It’s just best not to personally edit these sites yourself, for all practical purposes.

Directories

With DMOZ being the best example, directories are a white-hat method of gaining link love for your site, without resorting to unethical means.

However, even directories can be abused. Submitting your site for four or five different categories and subcategories is a bit much, and luckily the DMOZ folks are pretty good at stopping this sort of nonsense.

But a single link to your site in the proper category will benefit both your site’s ranking as well as the users of the directory.

Blog Comments

Most blogging software has support for comments with a “website” form field. This is perfectly acceptable and a common practice for a sort of “pingback” to the commentator’s blog simply for leaving a comment.

It is unacceptable, however, to leave an additional URL to the root of your website/blog at the bottom of an overly-generic or non-contributing comment. There is already a growing problem of spam crawlers going through the Web looking for Wordpress/Blogger comment forms for the purpose of leaving a comment with a URL and keywords.

So while filling out the Website field of a comment form is acceptable, leaving another root URL at the bottom of a comment is not. While links to a related article on your website may be okay, in most cases its just best not to push the envelope.

Twitter Spamming

This is a pet peeve we’ve covered many times on this site.

Using Twitter to propagate (tracked) links to your website or blog is both annoying and pointless. If anything else, it will get your blog/website listed within spam databases for life and royally piss off any otherwise potential readers.

That’s not to say that using a Twitter account isn’t an ethical way to gain traffic: actually tweeting news and tips from a Twitter account, without following everyone in the public timeline and/or posting a link to your site in every tweet, is a good practice.

It allows you to connect with your readers/visitors in real-time, and might actually attract a few more readers via valid RT’s and mentions from other followers. This is only possible, of course, if you don’t scare everyone away as a potential spammer.

Emailing Links

This is a big one, and should be fairly obvious. Email spam remains the largest spam medium in existence, and if you don’t know the rights and wrongs of Emailing links to people, then here’s a few examples:

Hey, person I know and are on good speaking terms with. Remember that completely-relevant talk we had the other day? I found an article on this website (or alternatively “posted an article on my website/blog”) that you may find interesting:
(link)
Tell me what you think.

-(your name)

Hey check out my blog: (link)

Never just give links to anyone you are not on good speaking terms with. Doing so will get both your site and your email address listed in spam DBs.

Over-advertising

I already acquire a low opinion about websites and URLs I see advertised all over the Internet on seemingly every page I visit.

Examples include the game Evony (“come begin your journey, my lord”), the “Single mom’s teeth-whitening secret” ads, and the “Go back to school” ads that always feature distracting dancers.

Putting a discreet textual advertisement to be deployed on a few relevant pages here and there is okay, but large, distracting Flash ads to be deployed on hundreds of sites is a no-no, and will draw negative attention to your site.

Final Words

In a nutshell, SEO ethics should be fairly common-sensical to most. Understanding the fine line between genuine SEO and blatant spamming is important for your site, as swaying too far in the wrong direction will do more harm than good.

SEO has no direct relationship with spamming, although both of them aim to promote and increase the rank of a given website. Everything covered here in this article is related to SEO that escapes the boundaries of the website’s code, which we have also discussed on this website (check the “Top Articles” section.)

Even placing keywords with no direct relation to the page can be more of a spammy practice, so SEO ethics do not necessarily stop at methods of gaining incoming links.

That said, be sure your methods of promoting your website follow conservative and discreet practices. Think about what might turn users off about your site with every potential link you post, and whether or not it has the probability of being interpreted as spam before you go through with it.

When SEO Becomes Spamming: Crossing The Fine Line originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 27, 2009.

But now the search engine giant is radically changing their entire search engine, behind the scenes at least. And it’s not even labeled as “BETA” as Google products typically are for the first 5 years in production, either.

What’s New?

First, a side-by-side comparison:

The current Google

The New Google

…so nothing has really changed on the front page. Even a look at the client-side source code shows that nothing is really “new” there, so what gives?

Real-Time Search

Google is jumping on the bandwagon that even competitors like Bing and Cuil are joining: Real-Time Search, or what we’ve only seen half-assed attempts at.

Firstly, my personal opinion is this: Real-time search is a necessity, and one which Google has always had the ability to do yet never practiced (in fact, I find Google very slow to index and rank pages).

Bing! is “somewhat-realtime”, and Cuil comes very close while providing a very nice UI in their new interface revision. But Google just might trump all of them with their new version.

And the best part is, there’s no easy way to “try out” real-time search. Unless you’re a news website like us and have the power to post something then immediately search for the headlines and F5 (refresh) until you see your result, there’s no easy way to determine whether or not a search engine is “real-time”.

But Google is claiming to be this, and we are to be experiencing this “new phenomenon” whenever we search. I thought Google was already getting better at indexing pages faster in its regular search engine, but from what I’ve heard the new Google is to be much better at it.

All the fingers point at an attempt at Real-time search, but one thing’s for certain: The results are different.

Impact on SEO

This is going to sound like I have nothing to write here, but its the honest truth: there is no “Google V2” crawler/spider out there indexing pages especially for the new revision. Its just the same retrieval method, with no known algorithmic indexing updates.

In plain English: just keep up your current SEO practices, nothing is new in the way Google determines content-importance; just in the way and amount of time it takes to Pagerank a page and get on search result pages.

When does it go live?

I personally found no indication from Google as far as when the new engine is to go live. With Google’s practice of keeping stuff in “Beta” until kingdom come, there could be an implication that the sandbox is a sort of “pre-beta” for the new page.

So the results are different, the speed is better, and the indexing is the same. Just keep up your current SEO practices for the meantime, and keep an eye for more developments and innovations with the new, hopefully rapidly-approaching Google search.

Meet The New Google originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 26, 2009.

Those AOL trial-goers would drop dead if they saw the new project being led by MIT’s Aaron Zinman, titled “Personas” (alternatively “Personas Web” or “PersonasWeb“. Not sure which one it is, exactly).

What Is Personas?

The page aims to be a data-mining utility aimed at showing just how much the Internet knows about you.

Pulling information from a private(?) database of mined information presumably from crawled web pages, it categorizes all resulting information into labels including but not limited to “Sports”, “Online”, “Legal”, “Illegal”.

The web page is simply one static HTML web page, using extensive JavaScript and AJAX to make remote queries to the main servers where the information is processed. All they ask for is your first and last name, and the engine then dumps everything it knows about you back into the page via AJAX requests.

How Accurate Is It?

I tried my name (first and last), and it didn’t yield very much. Then again, I never put my full real name on the Internet in the first place, so I have little to worry about.

Individuals with a fairly heavy online presence, such as The Coffee Desk’s own Anthony Cargile, yield much more information. It even gets more interesting when individuals have duplicate names, such as in Anthony’s case and others with generic names.

But as far as how extensive its database is, I’ll be the first to tell you: it’s nowhere near Google-sized. In fact, it’s pretty limited.

Anthony’s name only brought up results from the very bottom of this website, and a firefighter award someone with the same won in the state of Texas. Nevermind the fact that he has two whole websites with his name plastered all over it, and a public Twitter bio.

Tips: try your own name, then those of celebrities and generics like “John Smith” to see the varying result set.

Should We Be Worried?

Fret not, fellow tin foil hat wearing friends – this project is nowhere near a useful datamining utility until it gets better crawlers or gains direct access to Google’s index.

Compared to other datamining tools like Google, Facebook and other social media searching, this site looks like nothing more than a small hobby, size-wise.

And from the looks of it, that description isn’t too far off. It is merely an experimental educational tool.

But be aware: if Persona’s hidden index continues to gain intelligence via more in-depth crawling and other enhancements, then this could spell trouble for those whom value privacy. It may already spell out trouble for people fitting such as description as it stands now.

The Internet Knows Everything: MIT PersonasWeb originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 24, 2009.