Facebook overtakes Myspace in unique visitors (again)….

MySpace which is running out of surveys that still place it as the #1 social network in the US. Gave up the position to Facebook earlier this month in the stats released by Compete.com, today, the social network slips to second place in the latest numbers from Nielsen Online.

According to data from January, Facebook saw 62.4 million unique visitors, besting MySpace and its 60.6 million uniques for the first time in the survey. At the end of 2008, MySpace still held a narrow lead, with 58.4 million unique visitors in December compared to Facebook’s 55.2 million.

Take a look at the latest stats for the top 20 US social networks below:

Back then in 2007, MySpace claimed 3x more traffic, 3x more engagement, and claimed to not only be America’s most popular social network, but its most popular website.

Here is a report from compete.com on where Facebook and myspace stand.

All of this despite Facebook’s ongoing efforts to shoot itself in the foot with the recent TOSgate.

Wow…. I got so much spam in my inbox

Today I noticed that I’d been getting so much spam in my inbox…. I wonder why? But thanks to Gmail’s spam filters they directly goto my spam box :)… Gmail uses advanced spam prevention techniques to fight spam… To check out the a quick video on how it works, click here

Here are some tips to prevent spam, if you don’t use Gmail:

1. Never, ever reply to a spam message. This includes buying a product that is for sale or clicking the often-misunderstood “unsubscribe” link, which actually informs your spammer that you exist. If you can tell from the subject line that a message is spam, don’t open it — delete it. Spam subject lines usually promise you a better sex life, a more youthful appearance, prescription drugs without a doctor’s approval, love, thicker hair, or a better mortgage rate. They also use attention-demanding punctuation, such as exclamation marks or all caps.

2. Don’t click any links in a spam email. Spammers often have multiple, unique pages on their sites. Often, when you click a URL in a spam message, this tells the spammer that you — and only you — received the message he or she sent.

3. Disguise your email address. Don’t put your email address in plain text on your Web site. An effective way to trick the spiders that traverse the Web to harvest email addresses is to disguise your email address by stripping out periods and “@” symbols. For example, “YOURNAME AT YAHOO DOT COM.” You can also make the “@” an image, which will prevent crawlers from identifying it. You make also wish to disguise it in your signature file, in case your recipients forwards your email.

4. Don’t forward an email from someone you don’t know to a list of people. You remember those “forward this email to 20 of your friends” messages? They are perfect for spammers to harvest email addresses, even if the sender of the original email did not have this intent. These types of sign-and-forward emails often appear in the form of a petition — and they don’t work.

5. Don’t use your home or business email address. when you register on a Web site or in a group. If you must sign up for services, want to receive more info, register for newspapers or domains; use a free email address from a site like Yahoo or Hotmail to create an address especially for that purpose. This also goes for posting to the Web, in a listserv, newsgroup, on a contact page for a Web site, or on a resume that is posted on the Web.

6. Before you join a list, make sure the list owner or Web master will not sell your address. Check to see if you can opt out of receiving unsolicited email from the site where you’re registering. If you are unsure about this, read the site’s privacy statement.

7. Preview your messages before you open them. Outlook (and many other email clients) let you use a preview mode to peek at the contents of a message before you actually open it. To do this in Outlook, go the View menu and select Preview Pane. Instead of double clicking a message, click it once to select it and you’ll see the message displayed in the Preview Pane.

8. Use a complicated email username. Spammers’ software will look for the easy and obvious addresses first, such as those with identifiable names “john1977@hotmail.com,” as opposed to “sjk839@msn.com.”

9. Use a spam filter. One to try is SpamBayes for Windows, which you can find in TechSoup’s Free Downloads section. Another is Mailshell, which is available on TechSoup Stock. (Visit the Mailshell page for details).

10. If your organization has an IT department, forward any spam that gets through to it. This way, they can perhaps better tweak the filters.

11. Make sure your privacy settings are set so you don’t receive marketing from other sites in your AOL and Yahoo profiles. Many listservs use Yahoo lists as the list provider; you must unselect these pre-selected choices in your personal privacy settings.

12. Never use your email address as your screen name in chat rooms. It will give spiders or human email harvesters an absolute yes to a questionable email address.

Well now that you have a better understanding….. I hope this helps you fight spam better :)

I’m an SEO specialist and the SEO strategy keeps changing all the time with new trends and it’s really hard to keep up. So, having a natural positioning strategy is essential, especially in our country where over 90% of Internet users search Google. Therefore, when creating and maintaining a website we must consider some parameters in order to appear at the top of search engines.

Here are 10 Firefox add-ons that will help us to better manage and monitor the SEO strategy for websites.

1. SEO for Firefox – http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Perhaps one of the most popular and powerful tools for natural positioning for this browser. This plugin allows you to get marketing data, searches of various statistics and web rankings like Alexa, Technorati …

2. SeoQuake – http://seoquake.com/
This integrated program for Firefox lets you view real-time results of various search engines.

3. SEO Link Analysis – http://yoast.com/tools/seo/link-analysis/
This plugin enhances the data that can give you the Google Page Rank and link information for Yahoo, for example.

4. Rank Checker  – http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
This extension allows you to analyze data from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Furthermore, data can be stored on your computer to display to other users.

5. RankQuest SEO Toolbar – http://www.rankquest.com/download-toolbar.html
This bar goes straight to 30 SEO tools such as application validation, metatags and search engines, among other options.

6. HTML Validator – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249
Perhaps this is more interesting complement to web developers and programmers since it examines the website for possible errors that may hinder the search to the “spiders” of search engines.

7. SEO Open  – http://seopen.com/firefox-extension/index.php
For the uninitiated in this area, SEO Open offers basic tools to get into the subject. The tool allows you to have a bar or open in a portion of the window.

8. Google Global Firefox Extension – http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/google-global-view-results-different-locations/
This handy tool both for SEO and SEM can see where we are among the millions of Google search results. You can access both the menu bar like.

9. Socialphile – http://socialphile.com/
We must not take account of social communities in our SEO analysis. To do this, this plug allows you to browse the links at the moment, only to Digg. However, the tool is being expanded.

10. KGen – http://kgen.elitwork.com/
If you want to take control of keywords, this tool will be useful. The supplement discusses the terms that stand out in any website.

These are the sites that I mostly use for analysis of sites and to know about the recent SEO analysis changes around the SEO world. Do you know or use any other tools? Post your comments below and share your thoughts!

Did you update your Blog’s footer copyright notice with the new year? Here is 2 simple ways to let your footer auto-update itself with the new year :).

If you’re running Wordpress like me, then all you need to:

* Open the footer.php in your theme folder
* Paste “<?php echo date(“Y”); ?>” instead of the copyright year
* Save the file

And if you like JavaScript more than PHP then you could prefer and use the JavaScript version of the script.

Here is the script:

<script language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
document.write(‘&copy;’ );
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
document.write(‘ YourSiteName.com – All Rights Reserved.’);
//–>
</script>

Indeed a simple thing helps save lot of time… BUT make sure the date on the server is correct otherwise it’s going to be wonky :)