Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Industry News
Foursquare Down for Nine Hours
Oct 5th
Users were saddened and angered today by a marathon outage at Foursquare.
The dominant player in the geolocation/social space has been out for nine hours so far; while staff say engineers are peering at “the light at the end of a tunnel,” we have no exact word on why the service is down or precisely when it will come back online.
Earlier today, a staffer posted on the company’s official Twitter account, “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP.” This message was followed by the hashtag #caseofthemondays, a reference to a quotation from Office Space. A variant of this hashtag popped up in an update six hours later, indicating the engineering team had made little headway in repairing the server issues.
Then, about one hour ago, @Foursquare tweeted that the company’s entire engineering team had been called to work on the servers, vowing #NoSleepTillUptime.
Another Fousquare staffer wrote in an email, “Our engineers are working nonstop to get the site back up and running as quickly as possible. We’ll be putting up a detailed post mortem once we’ve resolved the issue tomorrow.”
UPDATE: Foursquare is back up again! A hearty congratulations to the engineers for restoring service shortly before midnight More >
Google Chrome Only Browser to Show Measurable Growth This Year
Oct 4th
All very unremarkable, except that Internet Explorer lost .75% share in the same interim, even amidst the release of its upgrade IE9.
Still, less than a percent movement in either direction is not especially worthy of note, until you consider change over time.
Of course, browser market share is a difficult thing to measure, as there’s no guarantee that these stats are 100% accurate. But the measurement in change over time does seem to suggest that Chrome is carving out a nice foothold in the browser war. 7.98% does not a winner make, so it will be interesting to see how things play out over the course of the next few months.
What is your favourite browser and why?….
More >Facebook “Like” Worm Spreading Through Javascript Exploit
Oct 4th
The result is thousands of wall posts for a page entitled “Shocking! This girl killed herself after her dad posted this photo.” Clicking the link enclosed spreads the worm further. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve heard of such an exploit.
Do not click any of these links or go to this Facebook page. It will force you to like the page and spread the worm further. As far as we can tell though, the exploit doesn’t compromise your account or steal your password. We’ve put an e-mail out to the Facebook team for more information.
Android apps found sharing data
Oct 2nd
New PCs ‘could boot in seconds’
Oct 2nd
Facebook Exceeds 500 million users
Oct 2nd
50% of Android Apps Secretly Share User Data
Oct 1st
Study Finds that 50% of Android Apps Secretly Share User Data
A study of 30 of the 358 most popular apps for Andriod devices found that 50% of them sent location information to advertisers without users’ knowledge.
Some apps dispatched location information as often as every 30 seconds, even when an application was not running. One sent this information to advertisers before it was even run for the first time. Seven apps shared unique identifier numbers, and others dispatched phone and SIM card numbers.
Buying An Android Phone Just Got Easier
Sep 30th
Posted via email from areatrade’s posterous
Google Flintstones
Sep 30th
Posted via email from areatrade’s posterous
Google Shows Government Requests, Google Traffic
Sep 22nd
“This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone,” adds Drummond. “By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualize disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.”
The United States, by far, has made the largest number of data requests, with Brazil coming More >