twentynot2000.com : a website on how we are going to say "2010"

Today is the last day of 2009 . That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s .



Say “2009″ outloud. Chances are that you’re saying “two thousand and nine.” But if you think about it, that’s weird. Say “1909″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “nineteen-oh-nine.” It makes some sense, since we weren’t going to pronounce “2000″ as “twenty hundred,” but for whatever reason, going forward, we never moved to something like “twenty-oh-one” for “2001″ and so forth.


TwentyNot2000.com, a website came up in nick of time with the sole purpose of breaking the peoples habit of saying "Two thousand and ten " rather than just Twenty ten . But why do we just care? The answer is simple it takes more time to say "Two thousand and ten " rather than just "Twenty Ten"
The site also has a facebook group and Fanpage , just to drive the point home. The fan page actually has over 17,000 fans.

For more details just check out their website.

And a very happy new year to all readers :).

Bing beats google for "Times Square" Bomb threat news

Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing . A search for “Times Square” on Google turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”).

Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page.Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page. Incidents such as this one show why those realtime results should be on the homepage as well, for both Google and Bing. If this was a real incident, hiding the realtime search results doesn’t do anyone much good.

Google to get caffeinated.

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web.Google has been testing the technology codenamed “Caffeine,” since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google.
Well most people wont be able to notice its effect. The look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine is an upgrade to Google’s search index algorithms. But it will significantly speed up how fast Google can present results, especially across different media types such as photos and videos.

An independent study conducted in September by SEO firm Summit Media suggests that for generic search terms, Caffeine gives more weight to news and social media results, while more specific keywords are more likely to turn up websites about that topic.The finding includes.
* Rankings are unlikely to fluctuate. Taken across all of the keywords for a client there should be a tiny percentage change in ranking.
* Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that’s not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important.
* There have been no changes to give one sector any new advantage over another.
* Generic terms against long tail terms in Caffeine show a greater priority for News, Information and Social Media – which fits with generic terms being less clear in terms of the searcher’s intent.
* Only 5% of urls contain exact matches for the searched keyword, 6% of the total point score is made up by exact match urls.

When Caffeine does go live, not only should Google feel zippier, but many of the results will feel more newsy and realtime, particularly for generic searches.

370 passwords that you can't use on Twitter

Twitter passwords are no longer easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked. It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do is to take a look at the source code of that page to get the list of banned passwords. Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and you are done.


This isnt a security issue ,in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. Here are a couple of them.

- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters


Click Hereto download the full txt file.

zynga starts testing sms notifications

Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones.

It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.

One obvious concern with the new feature is spam — Zynga has made a habit of exploiting any way they can find to grow its userbase and increase revenue.And if you ever get sick of the messages, you can just reply to Zynga’s messages with ‘STOP’, and the feature will be disabled.

SMS alerts aren’t the first step Zynga has taken to wean itself off of Facebook Platform. Last month, it launched Farmville.com, a standalone site dedicated to the company’s massively succesful game. Farmville.com is still reliant on Facebook Connect, but it gives Zynga more control over the user experience.

We spend more and more time online

Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week.

To put things in perspective: Harris surveyed 2,029 adults by telephone for an entire week in July and October 2009, and has been doing these types of polls since 1995.

Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that.

There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002.

Read More..



The age groups that spend the most time online are those aged 30-39 (18 hours) and those aged 25-29 (17 hours) and 40-49 (17 hours).

You Tube gets its own short URLs

Looks like Google is really going full steam ahead with its shortened URLs. Only a week after the search giant launched its own Goo.gl short URLs, its subsidiary YouTube is launching its own short URL service: youtu.be.
In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which means it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.

Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically. You can also create the link yourself in this format:

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you’ll see it redirects to that video.