As if history never repeats itself. Bebo, which was once one of the most promising social networking sites on the web is finally bowing out of the cutthroat social networking rat race after its parent company AOL, pulled the plug on further funding and development.

This can only mean that the failed AOL venture would either be shut down or sold.

Too bad for the 400,000 or so Kiwis who are registered members of Bebo.

But then again, this might not be taken as badly, whose preference for social networking sites have switched, unsurprisingly, to Facebook. Currently, Facebook has swept the NZ market, pulling in around more than a million users in the country alone.

But this wasn’t always the case. A few years back, Bebo had the momentum going in NZ, making it a popular destination for social networking users. A few years and an AOL buy-out later, however, Bebo’s growth stagnated and Facebook took over without a moment’s hesitation.

Experts blamed the demise of Bebo to its AOL sale, and for good reason. History has shown us a lot of good examples of how small, innovative start-ups wither and die at the hands of monster umbrella corporations, which stifle creativity and innovation. Bebo should have looked to the past for clues about its future.

Now, all seems to look bleak for the site, and it is yet to be seen what future awaits the ill-fated company.

In light of our celebration of Fraud Awareness Week this week, we are taking a closer look at social networking site Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter and other similar websites and how these sites, though popular among many, are actually prone to providing criminals with enough personal information about users to commit identity theft.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the website, along with other similar social networking sites are going to help usher in a new and unprecedented trend in sharing among users, one that isn’t just real-time, but also of greater volume. He predicts that as Facebook grows ever more popular and more people continue to patronize it, people are going to share more information about themselves, their activities and their preferences.

This is quite a bit alarming since we’ve also received word that identity crime is increasing. Two things seem to be helping cyber criminals along. One is that as technology is getting more sophisticated, these criminals are becoming more cyber savvy; and two, people are sharing more and more personal information on these social networking sites, making it easy for identity thieves to access personal information and commit their brand of crime.

In the past year alone, the cost of identity crime in New Zealand has soared to $200 million - a staggering amount. National Cyber Crime Center’s Detective Sergeant John van den Heuvel said that people freely posted information on the internet – from their date of birth to their pets’ names, where they worked and what they did.

This breach in security is also compounded by the fact that these social networking sites also have weak security, and often users do not even bother to avail of that security setting, leaving them susceptible to phishing scams and identity crime.

So, a word of caution to the trigger-happy micro-blogger or the enthusiastic status-updater slash photo-poster, be careful what you share about yourself on the internet, and filter the people whom you add to your circle of friends. If you do not know them, do not add them. And if you’re not sure that the information you want to post can be compromising to you in any way, don’t post it. If you can’t help it, then familiarize yourself with the site’s privacy settings and protect yourself as much as you can.

It’s no secret how popular social networking sites have become over the past few years. Testament to this is the meteoric rise in the number of users of Facebook. I mention this because it is the only reason I can think of why Google would want to come up with something similar by creating Buzz – literally.

To Gmail users reading this, you probably already heard of Buzz, or encountered it when you opened your Gmail accounts starting last week. Buzz is Google’s answer to Facebook. It is a social networking tool that allows users to connect with their friends, loved ones and acquaintances by relying on the principle that your email contacts, especially the ones you send messages to the most, are also the ones you would want to keep in touch with on a social basis; and much like Facebook, it works by allowing you to post status messages, upload photos, links and the like to share with this network of people.

If you think about it, Google was actually working on a really good premise by allowing email contacts to interact with each other. After all, that’s how you usually find your friends on Facebook too, aside from the Friend Finder method. One of Facebook’s chief tools for helping you find friends is by importing your contacts list from your primary email accounts.

The problem, however, that cropped up in the first week of its release was that Gmail users who were introduced to Buzz (and let me emphasize here, usually without really wanting to use it, because Buzz is integrated with Gmail and if you want to check your Inbox or send a message off to someone, Buzz is right there, a colorful little tab in your left hand panel, attached, bonded and packaged with Gmail) found out that they were now following email contacts or were being followed by said email contacts automatically!

Definitely an issue of privacy. Why so? This is because Gmail assumes that the people you email automatically pass your privacy screening standards, and doesn’t ask for confirmation of whether you want to follow or be followed by them. A big no-no for people who keep a contact list over email whom they don’t want to interact with socially – like bosses, or clients and the like. It also exposes your contacts to each other, allowing say, a boss to find out that you are also in contact with, say, a rival company.

Now, I can easily say that I don’t have to use Buzz, even as I’m using Gmail because I can just ignore it and let it sit its colorful bubble on my left side panel, but the fact that it exists, and that it does some things automatically that I am not yet aware of or prepared for is an issue for me. Hey, I didn’t sign up for it like I did Facebook and it being integrated in my mail automatically doesn’t fly well with me.

I would rather that Google had advised its users of the introduction of Buzz before actually launching it and providing users with the option to either agree to integrate Buzz into their Gmail accounts or reject it, leave it out of Gmail but give them an option to reintegrate their social networking tool at a later time. The fact that it’s integrated with email can be a big advantage over having separate accounts, but if that’s the case, users should have the freedom to choose to integrate or not, depending on how users actually utilize their social networking pages and the degree of privacy that they require, which, if you think about it is really the issue of utmost importance here.

To Google’s credit, after getting negative feedback over privacy issues in Buzz, the company has already begun to address issues of privacy control and are now working on ways to make Buzz a better companion to its infinitely better email counterpart.

If you love Google and are developing in C++ or Python; the latest development from Google is proberly going to be of great interest. So what is Go? well, it’s an open source language it’s live right now and it’s in a completely experimental stage.

Go will provide the security and performance of a compilled language like C++ while having the speed of a dynamic language like Python.

Go - The latest Google open source language

Who is Go aimed at?

Google describes GO as ” Go is an experiment. We hope adventurous users will give it a try and see if they enjoy it. Not every programmer will, but we hope enough will find satisfaction in the approach it offers to justify further development” You can find more information about GO at Golang.org which is the official site for the open source language.”

Google is using this language internally so this is a good testament. But, what will external users think of it?

Google describes Go in thier recent blog

“Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast. We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.”

Watch the video for more information about Google GO.. or check out GO for yourself

Google Wave is proving popular, what, you have’nt started to use it yet?

So, you’re already using social media, email and trying to share documents online between groups of people then you should check it out. Wave is likely to be able to rid you of issues of where-did-that-email-go-i-can’t-find-it-in-inbox-folder-sent-sheesh syndrome.

If you have not used Wave before it is It is a web application and computing platform that is designed to bring together your -mail, IM, wiki, and social networking, there’s a strong collaborative focus, mixed with spellchecker and some translator extensions, which are all able to work in real-time.

So if you’re a coding or desiging for a client and you’re using email as the primary communication tool and it’s going back and forth to communicate, you’re losing time waiting for the mail to come through, finding that you’re unable to decipher the ammendments, starting multiple threads its going to jeopordise the quality and standard of work.

Google Wave is prooving to be an ideal choice for

- remote brainstorming sessions
- meeting notes and data sharing
- projects, group projects, freelance projects
- interactive games

Ask any IT freelancer webdesigner about a project they had and why it wasn’t succesful the answer you are given is likely th to inlcude include poor customer/client mis-communications. Wave is proving to be a good option, view the video we found that cuts through the bloat to give you the overview you need.

Google Wave: The quick guide and explanation

“Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more” - Google

It’s amazing to find that email has been in the same format more or less for 40 years which also shares the same year that the lava lamp was invented. Are you using Wave in the workplace ?< >< ><-->

There are approximately 68 million .COM domains registered today compared to around 400,000 nz domains you can see that .com still reigns supreme

But if there are over 68 million domain names out on the Internet  many are just parked in some obsolete spot gathering dust and all kinds of age. There is a growing number of domainers that either buy domains to sell on, to keep, or to hi-jack by cyber squatting.  The most common names like confused.com. or elvis.com have been taken long ago and are proberly never going to come up for new registration again. So where does this leave you, if you’re looking for a domain?  

Did you know that here are 900 possible combinations for two letter sequences. But if you’re looking for “IT” then you just won’t find it!  Even allowing for digits, again every single web address is taken for .com Of course, that’s ignoring the fact that .com registrars now mandate a 3-character minimum length, so it wouldn’t be an option. Its well worth checking out what domain availability there is for the NZ TLD (top level domain) by buying and “land-banking” you could get yourself a really nice future investment.

Other ways to make great domain names
Many of the three-letter sequences are taken. Adding digits to a domain name creates a number of garbage domain entries. If you’re dying to acquire great domains and unique domain names, they’ll free up sometimes only to be auctioned off through unique domain name sales.  

Basically, the longer the domain name that you choose, the more that the possibilities are that it could be available presuming that you’re willing to accept an arbitrary sequence of letters and/or digits. For example, most organizations have 3 and 4 letter acronyms so you may have a chance using over 4 letters to get the domain name that you want in acronym style!

The best advice, we feel is to obtain a domain name that closely resembles who you are about which gives you and identity and brand on the internet.