Surprise Surprise… My new facebook username / vanity URL is http://www.facebook.com/karmona

Go and get yours before someone else will @ http://www.facebook.com/username/, although it is probably too late ;)

Good Luck!

Google, Yahoo, Ask and Lycos have released* their top search terms for the past year (2008) and I have aggregated it to your convenience in one happy table below.

I don’t have anything smart to say about it but I did manage to pull out five intriguing  insights.

My Five Cents:

• As done last year, it seems like Y!  have removed all the  navigational queries from their report (I wonder why ;)

• “Poker” is the “Top Search Term Of The Year”  for for the 3rd consecutive year on Lycos… (what is Lycos? :)

• Though she didn’t make it to the White House, US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin captured the zeitgeist of internet users in 2008 while Obama in the 6th place.

• IMHO, Ask.com is just being too honest in their report – 50% of Ask search terms are navigational queries and the rest are boring.

• Britney Spears has been the most popular search term at Yahoo for seven of the past eight years! 

Top Search Terms | 2008

Update (18 Dec. 2008): Top 10 search queries that people used on Delicious in 2008 are: news, blogs, reference, wiki, restaurants, hotels, css, web 2.0, artists, music… I think it is loud-and-clear that the biggest bookmarking site isn’t fulfilling its search potential (!)

____________________

* Note:  Microsot (Live) didn’t released the updated list until now and AOL didn’t break out overall terms so wasn’t included here.

This post is a weird collection of three Internet Conspiracies from the last 24 hours.

Note: I do realize that this post is a creepy testimony to the fact that I might be building a search engine and reading too many blogs and the affect it might have on my sense-of-judgment…

Conspiracy I (Google thinks Facebook is a dangerous Phishing Site)

Google Chrome browsers around the world have claimed today that Facebook is a dangerous Phishing Site (read more on Facebook Developer Forums)

Conspiracy II (Searching for a compatitor ’search engine’ with Yahoo)

Searching ‘Google’ in Yahoo, results with suggestion to use Yahoo search: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.” (it also works with ‘ask’, ‘aol’ and ‘live’ :)

Conspiracy III (Apple Anti-Virus or not)

Two weeks ago, Apple updated a technical note on its Support Web site that says:
“Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”

Yesterday, Apple removed the KnowledgeBase article from its support site (KBase Article HT2550 now points to a bare error page – see below) and Apple spokesperson Bill Evans explained:

“We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate… The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box… However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, running antivirus software may offer additional protection.”

…

“You can always start a weekend experiment but you can never know how it will end”  (Moti Karmona, 2008 ;)

I was very curios and wanted to take the GAE for a quick test drive but the Google documentation have few inaccuracies and isn’t sufficient if it is your first Python encounter so I lost three hours of precious beauty sleep and compiled this blog-post-capsule for future generations.

How to setup your development environment to work with Google-App-Engine 

• Get yourself a GAE Account  
• Install Google App Engine SDK, Python and Eclipse.
• Install the PyDev Eclipse extension
  • Help –> Software Updates –> Available Software –> Add the http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates site –> Install it –> Restart Eclipse
  • Configure Eclipse to use the Python interpreter by navigating to Window –> Preferences –> PyDev –> Interpreter –> Python –> New and select the location of python.exe on your system
• Create your first project
  • File –> New –> PyDev project and click next –> Name your project and make sure Python 2.5 is selected.  
  • Add necessary App Engine libraries to your project | Right click your Project folder –> Properties –> PyDev – PythonPath (see image below)
    • C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine
    • C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\lib\django
    • C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\lib\webob
    • C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\lib\yaml\lib

• Create your project files (e.g. GAE examples)
  • app.yaml  
  • Your first python file 
• Test your Local application
  • Update your Run configuration (see image below)
    • Change the Main Module field to C:\Program Files\Google\google appengine\dev_appserver.py
    • On the Arguments tab, type in “${project_loc}/src” 
    • Name this configuration and click apply and click run.
  • Open http://localhost:8080 with your browser and enojoy your stupid app :)

• Upload your code to Google App Engine
  • Open a command prompt and navigate to your application directory.
  • Type appcfg.py –email=yourgmailaccount@gmail.com update src\ 
  • To publish code within Eclipse, open Run –> Run configurations and make a copy of your previous run configuration.  Change the Main Module to appcfg.py, and change the argument tab to –email=yourgmailaccount@gmail.com update ”${project_loc}/src”
  • Your code is now live! Test it by going to http://yourapp.appspot.com

Enjoy :)

P.S. More about the framework in future posts.

Last weekend I was wasting time on my Blog performance and all I got is 10 sec. and this lousy post.

Quick profiling with FireBug and YSlow FireFox extensions have done great wonders with my amazingly slow, not-really-that-interesting, hosted (webhost4life) WordPress blog.

Main action items:

• I have removed the sitemeter performance penalty widget
• I have installed the WordPress Super Cache Plug-in which wasn’t that simple with my webhost4life hosting limitations.
• I have removed couple of images and reduce the blog top image size from 80k to 5k (!!!)

Results:

• Main blog page returns after ~1 sec.
• I am still getting a lousy grade with the YSlow tests (62) but it seems like the YSlow blog post announcement have failed too… (57 :)
• Post pages are still slow (~2-4 sec.) but I know what I have to do the next time more than 1 million readers will complain…

Have fun!

This is a cool set of simple APIs that can give you access to everything you ever wanted in Y! but was afraid to ask for…

Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP)
// The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
// The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL (see example below)

OAuth Authentication
// OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.

Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP)
// Currently very limited and in a restricted sandbox.

________________________________

Example: How to use YQL APIs to access MyBlogLog profiles?

Simply ask for all the community members of MyBlogLog community with this YQL:

select * from mybloglog.members.find where community_id in (select id from mybloglog.community.find where name=”Karmona Pragmatic Blog”)

And once you have the IDs you can ask for my personal profile by:

select * from mybloglog.member where member_id =”2008070609482910″

Well… together with the existing BOSS API, this set of APIs is a powerful enablers to the Y! development network and I am sure some cool stuff are going to emerge from this innovative move…

Amazing!!!

________________________________

* You can have more YQL experiments using the YQL Console

** Boss Hack Day is coming to Tel-Aviv | November 6, 2008 @ Feature (!!!)

First, I really “prefer” my spam in English / Hebrew.
Second, Mr. Gates didn’t keep his promise* (what???) to a world without spam…
Third, Spam isn’t personal, everybody have it and Symantec have some nice monthly statistics** about it so we could all feel normal back again.

______

Spam highlights from last two reports (8-9/2008)

- More than 80% of our emails are spam!

- Top spam “stories”

• Breaking News…McCain Chooses Paris Hilton as Running Mate
• Download IE7 … the Latest Version (I know someone who tried it :)
• Malware + Spam + Phishing = The Trifecta of Threats to Financial Institutions (I got a lot of these…)
• Olympic-Themed Spam Continued in August 2008
• Spammers’ Bullseye: Obama, McCain and the Olympic Games
• World War III Spam Hoax (I must admit, this one is really innovative :)
• Phishing Email Targets Microsoft POP3 User Data
• Bilingual Spam Messages Emerge

- Spam categories

• Internet 27% (was 18% in June)
• Products 20%
• Financial 17%
• Health 17%
• Scams 7%
• Leisure 4%
• Fraud 4%
• Adult 4%

______________________________________________
* “Two years from now, spam will be solved” (Bill Gates, DAVOS – Switzerland; Jan. 2004)
** Each month Symantec publishes its State-of-the-Spam-Report highlighting major spam events or trends observed during the previous month.

I must admit I was really waiting for this shitty report and I hate the fact that I need to see this reports in shards (will be released in five consecutive daily segments) but it was worth waiting until now.

2008 Blogosphere statistics includes:

• 133 million blogs (indexed by Technorati since 2002) was 70 million last year… (The State of the Live Web, April 2007)
• 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days
• 1.5 million blogs posted in the last 7 days (did you? ;-)
• 900,000 Blog posts in 24 hours = ~10 Blog posts per sec. (!!!) – Technorati claims that spam filtering have reduced the numbers they published last year (1.4 million blog posts per day)
• 66% of bloggers are male…
• 63% are ages 25 to 44
• 79% personal blogs
• 59% have been blogging for more than two years.
• 44% are parents
• … and with the mean annual revenue of $6K blogs are also claimed to be profitable (a.k.a. not mine)

WOW (!!!)

We have launched the Delver alpha an hour ago…
F5 on the monitors and statistics, geeee what a rush!!!

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/delver_launches_social_search.php#more

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/delvers-social-graph-search-engine-now-open-to-all/

http://mashable.com/2008/07/15/delver-alpha/

http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/15/delver-opens-social-powered-search-to-the-public/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9991378-2.html?tag=blog.1

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/3975

…

Dunbar’s Friends is my definition (and trademark ;-) to those few “real”, trusted and known people in your huge** online social network***.

—

* Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, non-human primates have to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through grooming (and not “poking” as you might be expecting :-). The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain.

** Did you know that Robert Scoble is following 21,060 people in Twitter, 2,992 in FriendFeed and only 71 “lousy” friends in Flickr…

*** Social Network for Dummies – Lee and Sachi LeFever (a.k.a. the CommonCraft’s family :) have created a wonderful video explaining social network in plain English.