“Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards”

The New York Times

The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter. These unique awards are for the Twitter community, by the Twitter community. Online voting is public and democratic, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in 26 official categories as well as those in brand new crowd-sourced ones.

The second annual Shorty Awards nomination process has begun! In January 2010, the community is invited to nominate Twitter users for excellence over the past year. The awards recognize each content creator’s entire body of work, not just an individual tweet. Nominations are made by sending a tweet, whether it’s through this site or on Twitter.

In February, the nominees will be narrowed down to six finalists in each category. Winners will be determined by a combination of popular vote and by the members of the new Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. An awards ceremony, complete with 140-character acceptance speeches, will be held in March in New York City.

shortyawards.com

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

blog.nielsen.com

It was a big year for technology: Twitter and Facebook’s popularity exploded, while new smartphones, e-readers and a host of other gadgets cropped up to compete for our plugged-in affection.

But into each electronic life a little digital rain must fall.

We polled a handful of the most tech-savvy folks we know for their thoughts on the worst moments in technology from 2009 — the most epic “fails” of the year.

And now, in no particular order, our 2009 Tech Fails …

Y2-what? Zune gets off to a bad start

Technically it was a New Year’s Eve surprise. But many owners of Microsoft’s Zune media player started 2009 with little more than a paperweight with LED lights.

At midnight on December 31, all Zune’s 30-GB MP3 players froze up. Microsoft explained the problem as a problem with the way the device’s internal clock recognized (or didn’t recognize) leap years.

The glitch only lasted a day, but didn’t help a device that was already failing to gain ground on Apple’s iPod.

TwitterPeek fails to pique interest

The reaction of many in the tech community to the release of the TwitterPeek device was a collective, “Huh?”

Sure, there are some people who don’t have smartphones and don’t want to pay for expensive mobile plans. But is there really a market for a $199 device that does nothing but let you manage your Twitter feed?

“I already have a $200 device to update Twitter,” said one techie we spoke to. “It’s called my iPhone.”

The folks at Peek, makers of TwitterPeek, had already made the Pronto — a device that handled only texts and e-mails. Maybe a combination of the two gadgets is in the works. But even then, would enough people be interested? Probably not.

Facebook backtracks on owning your stuff

OK … so every time Facebook makes even the most minute changes, it sparks an outcry among its 350 million members, not to mention (irony alert) dozens of new Facebook groups geared at making the site change back.

But a terms-of-service change in February went further, implying that Facebook owned the rights to anything users uploaded to the site. Another change suggested that Facebook held those rights forever, even if people quit the site or took the material down.

Facebook responded that it simply needed those rights to be able to post information to other users. But when the backlash continued, the site eventually switched the terms back to their former wording.

Sidekick punts user info

In what one observer called “an almost incomprehensible data disaster,” T-Mobile told users in October that a server error at a Microsoft subsidiary had lost users‘ personal data it had stored for the devices.

All of it.

Phone numbers, contact lists, calendars and other information was gone — and even new data would disappear if users turned off or recharged the phone.

Users were offered free service and rebates in the wake of the mess, as T-Mobile scrambled to recover what little of the data it could. But that didn’t stop the lawsuits, Internet griping and ill will generated by the snafu.

Hacking Twitter

It started as a story about someone hacking the accounts of several Twitter employees. Then, after Twitter said the attack was limited to personal information, not sensitive, company-related stuff, the hacker behind the attack struck again — in a different way.

He sent 310 documents to leading technology blog TechCrunch. The blog published a small portion of them and sent the documents to Twitter, which is when the company learned that they included financial projections and notes from high-level executive meetings.

Twitter responded by reportedly closing the security holes that allowed the attack.

Enough with the updates, already!

This was the year that online social media exploded. That’s good news for the future of Facebook, Twitter and the like.

But sometimes it just got to be a bit too much.

Members of Congress abandoned any pretense of paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech by updating their Twitter feeds as he was speaking.

There was the groom who updated his Facebook relationship status at the altar. And the women who tweeted during childbirth. [In fairness, the most high-profile tweeting new mom was Sara Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams].

And that’s not even mentioning all those friend requests you got from your grade-school teachers and members of your mom’s knitting circle.

Hyped-up Conficker fails

This is a failure we’re glad to report.

The Conficker worm was, by all accounts, a serious bit of malware that infected as many as 10 million computers worldwide. Instead of attacking those computers, it was designed to control them, paving the way for later attacks.

When researchers spotted the date April 1 in the worm’s coding, speculation began mounting that a major April Fools’ Day attack was on its way. Instead, it was mostly quiet — a false alarm of Y2K proportions.

“I think the joke’s on us a little bit, which you would have expected, having an April 1 date,” Holly Stewart, threat response manager for IBM’s X-Force, a computer security service, said at the time.

Attacks cripple Twitter, Facebook

On August 6, the concept of computer addiction didn’t seem so silly.

A massive denial-of-service attack hit Twitter, Facebook and the LiveJournal blogging site. Twitter was by far the hardest hit, completely blacking out for several hours.

The attacks were believed to have targeted a blogger in the country of Georgia who had been critical of Russia. The attacks, the blogger said, coincided with the one-year anniversary of renewed violence between the two countries.

What was telling was how freaked out people became. Users described feeling naked, jittery and upset without the ability to post on Twitter. When the site came back up, the top topic of conversation was the hashtag for “When Twitter Was Down.”

Gmail crashes

We heard some different views on this year’s string of outages or slowdowns of Google’s popular e-mail system.

Some thought coverage was overblown.

But as more computing power moves “into the cloud,” people and businesses are relying on programs like Gmail not just for e-mails, but to archive documents, chat with friends or co-workers and store contact information.

Gmail went through several high-profile crashes in 2009, including one in February and two in September. While e-mail crashes are nothing new to any provider, 2009’s were the first since Google begain offering offline support.

Response to the crashes simultaneously showed how many people depend on Gmail and how easy it is to make fun of those people. Social-networking blog Mashable responded with a list of five things to do while Gmail is down (No. 1: “Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming, ‘Gmail is down!’ and inquiring, ‘Is Gmail down?’ “)

I got Google Wave — now what?

OK, so it’s a little early in the game to call this one a total fail. But after the breathless anticipation that greeted Google Wave and the hot rush to get an invitation for its beta testing, lots of users found themselves asking, “OK … now what?”

Google, for its part, released an 80-minute tutorial video — leading some observers to argue that if you need an hour and 20 minutes to explain what your product does, you might be in trouble.

It’s designed as a platform to allow users to communicate and collaborate in real time — a tool some predict will be used effectively by developers in the future.

But for now, it’s inspired the creation of a Web site — Easier to Understand Than Wave — on which users compare the online tool to other sometimes obtuse subjects (Both Ozzy Osbourne and the geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia are easier to understand than Wave, users voted, while Sarah Palin and Scientology are both more difficult).

www.cnn.com

Search engine Yandex has decided to close the top popular blog posts. Told Anton Volnukhin, project manager for “Blog Search“, in a company blog. From the site Yandex top blog entries will be removed in December.

Volnukhin explained the decision was that the top entries, which was conceived as a mirror of the blogosphere has become a media platform. Many bloggers use a social twist, asking friends to put links to their records and thus bring them into the top.

In addition, as noted in Yandex, the rating was used to attract media attention by all, including the radicals of all stripes.

The developers’ goal of Blog Search “offered to all who wish to access the programming interface rating. With it everyone can create its own rating of popular recordings. Entries are given in raw form. Users of the software interface will have to sort them yourself.

Search for blogs and forums Yandex launch on Dec. 22, 2004 and is the largest such service in Ru.net. As of November 3 they had indexed over 11 million blogs.

lenta.ru

A familiar workhorse of Internet advertising is the display, or graphical, ad. Roughly a third of all online ad spending goes to such ads, yet Internet users are increasingly reluctant to click on them.

A recent study, by the research firm comScore, has found that the proportion of American Internet users clicking on display ads at least once a month fell to 16 percent from 32 percent over the 20-month period ending in March. And on top of that, just half of those clickers accounted for the overwhelming majority of all clicks on display ads.

That is bad news for the hosting Web sites, which often are paid by the click. But measuring an ad’s success by the click “grossly understates the importance of an advertising campaign,” said Andrew Lipsman, comScore’s director of industry analysis.

Mr. Lipsman said comScore studies had found that merely looking at a display ad increases the likelihood that a viewer will later search for the brand or make a purchase. And many ads are aimed purely at building brand awareness, a form of value that isn’t captured by clicks alone.

www.nytimes.com

The scale of a phishing attack originally thought to be directed at Hotmail may be larger than previously thought.

BBC News has seen a list of more than 20,000 more names and passwords that have been posted online.

The list contains e-mail addresses and passwords from Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other service providers.

The list was published on the same website as the original list of 10,000 Hotmail login details.

Some of the accounts appear to be old, unused or fake. However, BBC News has confirmed that many – including Gmail and Hotmail addresses – are genuine.

Other addresses include Comcast and Earthlink accounts.

It is not clear whether the list was part of the same phishing attack that collected the Hotmail addresses or a separate scam.

Phishing involves using fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank account details or login names.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said phishing was an “industry-wide problem”.

“Our guidance to customers is to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and that they install and regularly update their anti-virus software.”

Password change

Technology blog neowin.net was the first to publish details of the original attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1 October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code.

The Pastebin website is currently down for maintenance.

Its owner, Paul Dixon, posted a note on the site in the wake of neowin’s revelations saying that it had received “an unprecedented amount of traffic“.

“Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it’s not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications,” he said.

Security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos advised users to change their passwords as soon as possible.

“I’d also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it,” he said.

About 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, he added.

news.bbc.co.uk

A Russian Internet group, Digital Sky Technologies, has offered to invest $200 million in Facebook in a deal that would value the social networking site at $10 billion.

“Facebook is a private company, so as a matter of policy, we don’t typically share details about our financial plans or comment on rumor and speculation,” the company said in a statement.

Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies was not immediately available to comment on the report.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told the Reuters Global Technology Summit this week that, “If there’s an investment to be done on very good terms, we will consider it if for no other reason than to have more buffer if we want to do something in the future.”

“Some of the rumblings that people are reporting on, are just different conversations that have happened, but there’s really nothing new to talk about there,” he added.

Digital Sky Technologies, which owns a stake in Russia’s Mail.ru Web site, offered an investment of $200 million in the company’s preferred stock, which would value it at $10 billion, and an additional $100 million to $150 million investment in the company’s common stock, which would value it at $6.5 billion, the report said.

Facebook last got funding from Microsoft Corp in 2007, when the software company paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company.

Facebook has more than 200 million active users, double the number it had last August. The company also ranks as one of the top photo-sharing websites, with more than 15 billion pictures uploaded onto its service.

www.reuters.com

International Day of the Internet trying to enter several times on different dates, but none of them did not become a tradition.

In Russia the tradition was uploaded on September 30. Celebrating the World Wide Web “was initiated in 1998 by IT Infoart Stars, which is sent to firms and organizations of the proposal to designate Sept. 30 the Day of the Internet and conduct a census of ” population Runet “- at that time reached 1 million users.

In other countries, the International Day is celebrated on the Internet on April 4, the day of the medieval Archbishop of Seville, who created a prototype of the modern Internet – 20-volume encyclopedia of human knowledge. That is what many consider the holy heavenly patron of the World Network.

According to the Public Opinion Foundation in March 2009, the number of Internet users in Russia reached 37.5 million people, representing one third (33%) of the population. At the same time once a week in the Network in Russia leave 30.4 million people or 27% of the population, 20.6 million Russians, or 18% of the total population go online every day. The most active Internet users, according to the FOM, live in Moscow, where 80% of the total number of users or 4.2 million people go online every day, and 92% (4.9 million) at least once a week.

Most Russians go to the Internet from home: 79% of home users have online access, 34% of users go online from work. Using the cellular network in the fall about 9% of Russians (3.2 million). In Moscow, with 90% of users have home access to the Web.

According to the POF, the most numerous category of users from 18 to 24 years. It use the Internet 67% of respondents. Among users aged 25-34 have access to the network 54% of users. Among users aged 35-44 have access to the Web in 41% of respondents, while the least numerous web users in the group older than 55 years. Among them are Internet users, only 6% of respondents. Moreover, among Muscovites aged 18-24 and 25-34 years old web users are 93% of respondents, while among those older than 55 years – 17%.

Education Russia’s Web users in most cases is higher or incomplete higher education: in this group of Internet users 65% of the respondents. Among users with specialized secondary education in the Internet go only 33% among those with secondary education – 24%, incomplete secondary, – 5%. In Moscow, among those who have not even finished school, in the network goes nearly a fifth of those surveyed – 19%.

With the growing popularity of the Internet emerged and negative aspects of its application. In July 2008, at the annual meeting of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists, it was suggested that the generation of 1990, which the world without the Internet simply is unknown, can develop “potentially dangerous” view of the surrounding world and his own personality.

According to doctors, children who have become accustomed from the cradle to the social networks, may have difficulty in actual relationships with people, as little knowledge of the subtle nuances of facial expressions, tone of voice and body language. Japanese psychiatrist Himanshu Tyagi believes that these resources form the teenagers the wrong impression that love and friendship can easily win and just as easy to destroy.

Also, the psychiatrist said that people who are accustomed to the rapid flow of internet life, the reality may seem too boring, and they may try to “revive” it by making impulsive actions, including attempts to commit suicide – because they tend to understate the value of real life.

Other dangers in the Internet user – is addictive. The term “Internet addiction” is defined as an obsessive desire to enter the Internet, while offline, and the inability to withdraw from the Internet, being online. The number of people who are attracted to the virtual world so that they begin to prefer its reality, according to various studies, approximately 10% of users.

No wonder that over time the world community has to celebrate another holiday – International Day without the Internet. ” January 27 of each year, festival organizers invite all at least once a year to live exclusively in the “real” world.

On September 30 the Day of the Internet as part of the Contest Prize Runet traditionally starts on the main stage of the All-Russia online promotion “People’s Choice” in which Internet users for nearly two months to vote for their favorite projects online.

In the course of action “People’s Choice”, the participants determine the “People’s top ten” (10 projects leading up to the vote) and a “popular leader” – a project with the highest number of votes of Internet users, who will receive a golden statuette Runet Award – National Prize of Russia for contributing to the development of Russia’s segment of the Internet.

Day of the Internet has not yet been officially defined holiday. Similar holidays are celebrated on different days, for example, 4 April – in honor of the famous 404 error.

www.rian.ru

According to information received, at least once a month, read the news 77 percent of Russians surveyed – data RUmetrik. At POF and The Online Monitor figures are virtually identical – 65 percent and 66 percent of users are interested in news. About e-mail in the POF survey did not ask, according to the 2 other companies, e-mail use 74-78 percent of Internet users. Weather, according to their own data, interested 67-68,4 percent of users. Regarding search, the data vary: from 50 percent in POF, 69 percent have RUmetrik and up 81.4 percent at The Online Monitor.

Downloading and viewing, listening to audio recordings, videos and photos are interested in from 40 percent to 50 percent, post videos and photos 23-24 percent of users. Audio files at the same time publish a network of less than 10 percent of users. As for software, then spread his interest in upgrading or downloading – from 33 percent to 49 percent. Blogs and forums read 33-42 percent Runet, write to them – from 12 to 16 percent of respondents. In online gaming interest from 23 to 31 percent of users, online TV – from 16 percent to 19 percent. The acquaintance of a network of about 15 percent of respondents.

With regard to shopping online – they make from 17 percent to 21 percent of users, on average, every fifth. With regard to payment for goods and services, electronic money, then, according to various studies, the proportion ranges from 7 percent (FOM) up to 15.4 percent (The Online Monitor), the holding of other financial and banking transactions online – from 5 percent  (FOM) to 12,4 percent (RUmetrik).

For comparison, the report of foreign research team Pew Internet & American Life Project shows the usual daily activity of a global network of users outside of Russia. According to these data, the most common network service for Internet audience is e-mail – 60 percent of daily users check their electronic mailboxes. Their share in the last 7 years has increased by 15 percent.

Search the Internet popularity among users of a global network was on the 2 nd place with 49 percent of daily hits. According to Pew Internet, over 2002 popular Google, Yahoo, MSN and other such services grew by 69 percent. Reading the news, according to foreign reports, was in third position with 39 percent popularity, 30 percent are interested in the weather forecast online, 29 percent – are looking for information related to their hobbies, 28 percent – go to different pages for fun. Visit social networking sites ranked seventh (13 percent) in the list of daily activities of users.

Comparing the data on the daily activity of the Internet audience in Russia (RUmetrik ) abroad (Pew Internet), Rambler analysts have concluded that the significant difference in Internet audience regarding Internet search and e-mail-communication there. For example, 60 percent overseas and about 65 percent in Russia daily by e-mail, 49 percent are looking for information in a global network and 51,5 percent – specifically in RuNet. But reading the news every day Russians are paying attention to almost 2 times larger: 70 percent according to RUmetrik and 39 percent – Pew Internet. Weather in Russia are interested in 56.6 per cent against 30 percent of Internet users abroad.

www.bit.prime-tass.ru

Among the advertisers most interested in advertising on mobile devices is traditionally a segment of “Auto” – its share of total mobile budget amounted to 14,3%. Following are the companies offering telecommunication services (11,8%), medical and financial services (9.8% and 6%, respectively), as well as real estate (5.3%). This is the highest price competition of the potential client observed among sellers of pharmaceuticals, food, office supplies, tickets to events and services on the Internet. And the advertisers that help in the search for personnel engaged in insurance, books, advertising and communication services, on the contrary, relatively low prices attract new customers with contextual advertising, focused on the mobile audience.

Recall that “Begun” covers all active audience Runet daily showing more than 1 billion ads. This advertising Begun in mobile devices every day sees more than 1 million users.

begun.ru