links for 2009-03-21

Within the past week, Facebook has rolled out their latest redesign. While at first I wasn’t sure if I cared for the new format, after a week of using it, I’m really starting to like it. As a matter of fact, I like it better then any of the previous designs.

The most noticeable change is the filters and the real-time news feed. Being able to monitor these steams of text, photos and videos by the filters I have setup has been extremely useful. Being able to separate my friends by geography, niche, family etc. I am now finding Facebook more easy to use.

I run a series of conferences. Logistically, they require the same things most conferences run on: great speakers, relevant exhibitors and sponsors, and eager attendees. The goal is to get the right speakers to draw the right attendees who might also be of interest to the exhibitors and sponsors. It’s a kind of ecosystem. It’s also not exactly the easiest business in the world. People don’t have a lot of budget to spend on attending events. Companies aren’t exactly sending them any more. It’s not all doom and gloom, but it does require more work than it used to, with regards to moving interested people from their office to my conference hall.

We're all about ways you can start BitTorrent downloads on your home computer no matter where you are, and now popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay adds one more way: personal RSS feeds.

The IRS is holding special Saturday hours tomorrow, offering free tax help and advice at approximately 250 IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers and other free community tax sites nationwide. That means free help for lowering your income taxes.

It’s known as the butterfly effect based on the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the earth can create a tornado on the other side. While the concept is largely born from literature, real life butterfly effects are now evident online everyday. In fact, Twitter may well be the perfect metaphor for the real life application of the butterfly effect. And I have the case study to prove it. It shows the effect of a single Tweet in creating a virtual tornado of web traffic.

Darren Rowse is a pretty visionary sort of guy. As the driving force behind Problogger and TwiTip, he’s been at the forefront of social media monetisation. So I guess the writing was well and truly on the wall when he posted an April Fool’s prank last year promoting a new pay-per-tweet service. Of course, Darren was only joking. However, it was only a matter of time until Twitter whoring became a reality. Yesterday seems to be the day it officially went mainstream, with popular singer John Mayer openly introducing paid ads into his Twitter stream. Ugh…

Yesterday’s most significant browser-related event wasn’t the release of Internet Explorer 8–it was the upshot of day one of the Pwn2Own browser-hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition offered cash and hardware incentives to attendees who could exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, IE 8, and Safari.

totally sick

Who do you talk to most often on Twitter?
Who are your closest friends?
What does your social network look like?

Hotshots, rock stars, geek heroes – many of us follow a lot of the same people online. But who do they pay the most attention to themselves? The influencers of influencers are of interest for a lot of different reasons, most appropriately because finding them is a good way to dive deeper into niche topics.

More Twitter Clouds and Fascinating Games
In response to my post yesterday about clouds of followers at Twittersheep, Mark Kolb (@outwitme) sent me a link to his site, OuTWITMe, that has, among other fun and games, a cool three-dimensional cloud of major words found in the most recent tweets of a user you specify or Twitterverse at large. Poking around the swirling cloud and following the train of consciousness it engenders is a stimulating experience. The two-dimensional snapshot posted on this blog doesn't do justice to what Mark has provided.

The Chicago Tribune has Twitter-ized its masthead!

The flagship newspaper of the embattled Tribune Company included its editors' Twitter accounts underneath their names on the masthead Thursday:

Twitter is vulnerable to a serious cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could allow an attacker to hijack users' accounts or, in conjunction with other exploit code, compromise their computers.

If the constant coverage of Twitter hasn't convinced you, Twitter is popular.

Visits to Twitter have increased 1,382 percent since last year – from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, according to Nielsen.

In a blog post, Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis, who will be speaking at MediaPost's OMMA Global Hollywood event in Los Angeles next week, explains the reasoning behind his offer to pay Twitter $250,000 to make him one of the service's "suggested" users. For starters, he says, the offer was for Mahalo's Answers product, not for Calacanis' personal account, which he says is "probably bigger than it should be" at 60,000-plus followers.

As you probably know, President Obama is taking a lot of ribbing over his use of a teleprompter. And we’re guessing Jay Leno is going to bring it up tonight.

Obama's teleprompter has a twitter account

Today is my last day at Google.

I started working in-house at Google almost three years ago. I built a team from scratch. I was fortunate to hire a team of a very talented designers. We introduced Visual Design as a discipline to Google. And we produced amazing work together. I’m very proud of my team, and I wish them well. They have a lot of challenging work ahead. But for me, it’s time to move on.

Does Google depend too much on data over design instinct? Yes, says former Googler Douglas Bowman, who posted a goodbye note to the company on his last day there today

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