All posts by GuruOfSales

Announcements, Tools

Facebook Chat. finally!

4 Comments

facelogo

Let’s see, I have Yahoo messenger, MSN/Live messenger, AOL’s AIM, Skype, Google talk, ICQ and social IM.

I had to put them all in one application so I used Trillian for a while then switched to pidgin and I extremely recommend pidgin for everyone.

Then to keep in touch with my friends on facebook, I installed a new application: Social IM.

Just today, facebook came up with their own chat service, very similar to the one from within Gmail, it is online and it’s in the form of a nested tool bar on the bottom of every page from within your profile.

Great idea really, now there is a way to instantly chat with friends and (even better) find out who is online right now.

Not that I have anything against facebook’s messaging/email system, as a matter of fact I liked it a lot, because it took the form of a real chat (Just like Gmail) when you are messaging someone. But it still had a delay factor in it. Well that’s OK now because I can see who is on and who is not and chat with them instantly. And as an added feature, facebook respects your privacy, so they added the option of not showing that you’re on by making yourself unavailable.

Overall I think it’s a great addon to the facebook platform and I think they chose the correct location for it.

By the way, you can add me as a friend on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=540610872

Go facebook go 😉

General, Tools

Barack Obama Vs. Hillary Clinton, Online!

2 Comments

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Again, I am making the statement that my interest in politics is zero, at least to the public 😉

But I found this a great way to see how powerful the Internet and Web 2.0 in general.

Doing some research earlier I found that in 2 of the most visited sites (Twitter, and Technorati) that Barack is way much more popular on both.

More followers on twitter (His twitter page have the most followers on twitter ever at this point) and he ranks first on Technorati most popular tags.

That’s only 2 sites that I researched, I am sure there is more ways out there to predict the future and Only time will tell if the Internet is right.

Follow me on twitter here: twitter.com/guruofsales

And don’t forget to add me to your Technorati faves here:

techfav

Announcements

Alexa’s new ranking (I’m loving it)

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Did you notice a huge jump in your Alexa ranking today or yesterday?

I know I did. It changed to a lower ranking for the 3 months average but a much higher for the week average, probably because my inactivity last week because of my vacation.

Alexa is finally listening to their users and adding more algorithms and ways to calculate the global ranking, instead of just relaying on their toolbar input alone.

The new ranking is much better as it shows more real time ranking and a much better "True" rank.

Here is some questions and answers from the announcement page:

My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

Will you change the rankings again?

We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don’t foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it’s done we like it even better. We hope you will too.

We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Do you want to know what I think about this?

Definitely. We’ve been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we’ve done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.

 

All I can say is: Thank you Alexa team and that the new ranking methods are almost real. If they only tell us how they are doing it now. Fear nothing, they will reveal some secrets within the next weeks and months.

A new era of true ranking is here. 😉