This won't come as a surprise to, well, anyone who has spent considerable time on the Web, but a new study found that people act much differently online than offline.
According to eMarketer, which published the report on Monday, "cyberdisinhibition" has caused many Web users to behave much differently online than they would in a typical offline setting. In fact, the market-research firm, which cites findings from Euro RSCG Worldwide, says 43 percent of U.S.-based Web users feel less inhibited online. It also found that "the effect is most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54."
Of course, being less inhibited online can lead to both positive and negative behaviors. The research firm found that the Web helps 55.6 percent of men and 51.4 percent of women feel more "able to to meet new people." Users are also using the Web to "be empowered to do something they wanted to." The study found that 33.9 percent of male respondents and 29.2 percent of female respondents do things on the Web that they might not otherwise feel able to do offline.
That said, Web users are also more likely to take a company or brand to task online than they would in person. The study found that 24.4 percent of male respondents have "lashed out" at companies on the Internet. Women did it a little less with about 15.8 percent of respondents saying that they had lashed out.
eMarketer's report also highlighted an interesting change in the way people prefer to communicate. A whopping 48.7 percent of respondents said they find electronic communication far more convenient than communicating with others in a face-to-face setting.
From a social perspective, 57.6 percent of respondents said they disagree with the assertion that "online socializing is for sad, antisocial types." Phew. That's how I communicate these days.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
If you're contemplating switching to another e-mail provider, but have been too lazy to do a feature comparison of the competition, there's a new tool that might be of assistance. Aptly named E-mail Service Guide takes more than 100 hosted e-mail providers, and lets you comparison shop by feature.
This is handled gracefully with a search tool that lets you plug in which options you want, like whether the service has POP3 and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) support, or customer service by phone or e-mail so you can talk to an actual human if something goes wrong.
It can also tell you how much each service will cost, by breaking down its price according to how many months you're planning to use it. This includes things from the fine print like sign-up fees or required contracts, all of which can be simply sorted by column.
Looking for the e-mail provider with the biggest attachment size? This tool lets you sort to see which one is the tops.
(Credit: CNET)Since the tool is focused on premium services, missing are consumer-grade options like the vanilla version of Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. Instead you have providers like Zimbra, GoDaddy, and Rackspace--many of which have service license agreements, multi-user seating, and more generous attachment size limits.
See also: Wikipedia's chart of Web mail providers
Oh, snap! I'm not even getting a fail whale!
Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an "ongoing" denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DoS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional.
Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6 a.m. PDT.
"We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," Twitter's staff posted at 6:43 a.m. PDT on the service's status blog.
Then, around 7:49 a.m. PT, the company posted, "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly."
Around 8:15 a.m., the status blog post was updated with "The site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." (I still was unable to access Twitter.)
Perfomance monitoring firm AlertSite says that Twitter's home page went down at 6:05 a.m. PT and was showing 40 percent availability at 8:04 a.m. PT, but that timeouts were continuing from most of its monitoring locations at 8:30 a.m.
Way back when, Twitter outages were so commonplace that it was worth reporting when it didn't crash--as when it stayed afloat during the entire South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2008. Now, a few million dollars of venture capital later, the service is far more stable.
Twitter wants to establish itself as a communications standard rather than just a social-media brand. It's been a crucial platform for information exchange in the face of global events where more traditional means of broadcasting have been inaccessible or blocked.
Problems at Facebook, too
Some features of Facebook were also experiencing uptime issues on Thursday--one reader speculated that log-in servers may have been down--which raises the issue of whether a hosting company problem is to blame. Alternately, a denial-of-service attack could have been targeting both high-profile companies.
Facebook responded later in the morning on Thursday with a statement. "Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors," the statement read. "No user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We're monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."
About an hour later, the company revised the statement to confirm that a denial of service attack was involved. "Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users," the updated statement read. "No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."
But the Facebook outages were not on the same scale as Twitter's by any means, said Ben Rushlo, a senior consulting manager at performance firm Keynote. "There's been a few slow data points but you couldn't even put them in the same sort of stratosphere of comparison," Rushlo told CNET News.
Publishing site LiveJournal also appears to have been affected by attacks on Thursday.
Botnets, bot herders, and DDoS attacks
DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks typically come from a collection of compromised computers called a botnet, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Internet security firm Sophos. The botnet computers can inundate a Web site's servers with communication requests, legitimate or malformed to cause extra trouble.
Botnet-based DDoS attacks are difficult to deal with because it can be hard to distinguish legitimate communications from those that are part of the attack. And just blocking access from the IP addresses of offending computers poses complications: "You don't want to block legitimate users. The computers probably sending (the DDoS) traffic to Twitter belong to legitimate people," Cluley said.
DDoS attacks can be motivated by people seeking ransom money or seeking to make a political statement, but Cluley suspected that's not the case in this particular attack. "My guess is this is most likely some kid in a back bedroom who has access to a large botnet and is showing off to his friends what he can do," Cluley said.
Twitter is unusual in that much of its use comes not through its Web site but through an application programming interface (API) that lets software such as TweetDeck interact with the service. API access also suffered during the outage.
"Often there is collateral damage" during a denial-of-service attack, Cluley said. "Other servers can begin to fall over."
There have been a notable number of DoS attacks recently in the social-media space: On Wednesday, URL shortener Trim claims that one such attack rendered its truncated URLs inaccessible for some time; earlier in the week, blog network Gawker Media was downed by an attack that targeted The Consumerist, a property that it recently sold but still hosts on its servers.
Denial-of-service attacks are actually waning these days as bot herders rent their botnets to those who want to use them to send spam or host malicious software that can be used to compromise other computers, said John Harrison, group product manager of security response at security software company Symantec.
"Organized crime and other groups have gone off to other things. It's more lucrative for them to use the Internet, not to take the Internet away," Harrison said. Using a botnet in a denial-of-service attack can reveal computers to be part of a botnet, for example when an administrator notices high network traffic from a compromised machine, so keeping a low profile can save the botnet for use another day.
To keep a PC from becoming part of a botnet, Harrison recommended keeping the operating system, browser, browser plug-ins such as Adobe Systems Flash and Reader, and other software up to date, and naturally to install antivirus software. "All it takes is one vulnerability to potentially have malware installed," he said.
A massive series of DoS attacks hit the Web a decade ago, long before either Facebook or Twitter was remotely close to existence. They hit the likes of CNN.com, Amazon, E*Trade, eBay, and Buy.com, and were such a serious problem that the FBI held a series of press conferences to address concerns.
There has been no indication that a single party, or groups of hackers in tandem, was responsible for the Facebook and Twitter attacks, or whether there was any connection to the other DoS attacks on smaller sites earlier this week. But it's probably not a coincidence that they all happen to coincide with the annual Defcon hacker convention.
One security expert thinks he may have found a connection. "Today's outage is happening at the same time a new version of the Koobface malware has been found in the wild that is using both Twitter and Facebook messages to send invitations that are designed to lure potential victims to fake AV web pages," an e-mailed statement from Paul Henry, a security analyst at the firm Lumension, explained. "The speculation is that the onslaught of bogus messages that are directing users to malicious pages may in fact be overwhelming Twitter."
More to come when we hear it. Last updated at 12:10 p.m. PT.
CNET News' Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
I thought Twitter hype had reached a fever pitch with the big Oprah appearance. Boy, was I ever wrong.
If it isn't Time magazine's "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" cover story, it's the widely-circulated Comedy Central clips of co-founder Biz Stone's April appearance on "The Colbert Report," or it's chairman Jack Dorsey, in New York for this week's Internet Week festivities, showing up in society-blog photos from the sidelines of a Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. (OMG!) When I was joking about Twitter's executives reaching pop-idol ubiquity, I didn't think it'd be this soon that they'd start to seem like a slightly older, slightly less puppy-faced set of Jonas Brothers. Twitter and its creators are unavoidable.
But there's something nobody's really saying about Twitter throughout all this: Not everyone is going to use this service. Far from it, in fact. Its mainstream impact could very well have nothing to do with TweetDeck, hashtags, or even the name "Twitter" itself.
The Business Insider did a nice by-the-numbers of exactly what Twitter's explosion amounts to: 60 percent of users quit after a month, ten percent account for 90 percent of all "tweets," et cetera. All these numbers point to one fact: Twitter is high-maintenance. Even if you're only using it to read the latest updates from a few publications and some of your favorite bands, you're still reading about them in short bites that flow in a relatively inefficient manner. Parsing the noise takes effort; participating in it takes even more.
Compare that to Facebook: you can create a static profile, check in every few days, get an e-mail alert when a former high school classmate has added you as a friend, and you're all set. There are loads of apps on the social network if you feel like playing a round of poker or pretending to turn your friends into vampires, but at its most basic level, it doesn't require much effort to stay active on Facebook. Not so with Twitter.
The company's executives seem to acknowledge that in order to reach those who won't get involved otherwise, Twitter has to think outside the 140-character box (er, stream) and get the news industry involved. These people who don't actively participate in Twitter--you know, the 60 percent who drop out after a month--are going to know Twitter as something that enhances the news they already read and watch.
"One thing that's missing from it is the editorial. I think a cohesive narrative around all these reports is missing," said Jack Dorsey at Internet Week's I Want Media panel on Wednesday, just a few hours before he was looking worthy of any gossip magazine's annual eligible bachelors list at that Diane von Furstenberg show. "Bringing journalistic integrity to this mass of messages happening in real time is still very important."
In other words, Twitter's executives realize that the product in and of itself doesn't suffice universally for a legitimate, lasting mainstream reach--namely, an impact on people who aren't going to use Twitter otherwise. There are already dozens of developer applications making it possible to customize and enhance the service. The company is now working actively with media outlets on what it calls the "creative API", integrations of Twitter into content like Current TV's news programming and MTV's forthcoming "It's On With Alexa Chung." That's the beginning of what Dorsey was alluding to on Wednesday.
As more media deals roll in, the question to explore is whether this will, paradoxically, dilute Twitter's reach (and potential for profits) as a company. Once something becomes a standard rather than a brand, it gets tougher for a single company to make money off it. Think about instant messaging: Millions of us use AIM, but AOL isn't getting any ad revenue from those of us who are using it on universal IM clients like Pidgin or Adium.
The Twitter guys have built a great product, and to their credit, I don't think any of them have ever gone on the record saying that they hope to turn all six or seven billion or however many people there are on the planet into active users. It's not that this "Twitter is revolutionary" talk isn't true. Twitter is revolutionary in the sense that it turned the world on to a whole new form of information consumption--real-time, public conversations, aggregated and searchable. But just like blogging or instant messaging, this is going to get bigger than a single brand or company.
Jack Dorsey said in the same event at Internet Week New York that "Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it." He's right. But that implies a few things: one, that the hype and wildfire adoption will die down; two, that Twitter will fade into the background as the mainstream starts to recognize it as something they see on TV news broadcasts rather than a nifty, trendy tool for informing the world what you're doing; and three, that as other innovative companies catch on, the "real-time streaming conversations" phenomenon will expand beyond this one microblogging service. Twitter's legacy may very well have the word "Twitter" left out of it.
For the 140-zillionth time, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Caroline McCarthy rightly rebuts all the "so-and-so will buy Twitter!" nonsense, but there's a very good reason for this nonsense:
The microblogging service still makes little to no money, and the assumption is that it will continue to fail to do so, absent a big-brother type that can turn its community (that word again!) into cash.
As Google discovered with YouTube, however, big community doesn't necessarily equal big cash. The same is likely true of Twitter.
Some communities simply aren't designed to be monetized directly. Unfortunately, advertising isn't the panacea we once supposed, either, so Twitter can't just fall back on that tired Web 2.0 fix-all.
Hence the need for a big brother. Silicon Alley Insider insists that Microsoft should buy Twitter, MyStoreCredit's CEO suggests that Amazon.com should, while Valleywag's noncommittal declaration is that Apple "could" buy Twitter.
Of course it could, but it almost certainly won't, as McCarthy points out.
And yet, we continue to prognosticate about who will buy Twitter when. Twitter has no business, and so it must be rescued by someone that can gift it a business model.
Unfortunately, this is the very reason that would-be buyers remain on the sidelines: perhaps they don't know how to monetize Twitter, either. Twitter has a rich community of users but a poor community of payers. Back in the dot-com days, that seemed like a winning combination. In the recession, it's a recipe for failure.
So, here's my prediction: the minute that Twitter demonstrates an ability to make money, it will become ripe for an acquisition. Guess what? That's the same minute it won't need one, which is why if it does get bought, its valuation will be stratospheric.
Funny how that works.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
With a new product called Vine, Microsoft is tackling the issue that, in the Digital Age, contact management is no longer static--where you are and what you're doing at a given moment can matter just as much as what your cell phone number is. But instead of focusing on roving business travelers, Vine's slant is community management and emergency preparedness. It's in a private beta test right now.
Here's how it works. You download a "dashboard" application, and then you log in with your Windows Live account. Its interface takes the form of a map, where geo-tagged notifications pop up if a news story or public safety announcement--sourced from 20,000 news sources as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)--happens in a specific location. (You can set preferences to only display stories from locations and areas of interest that you care about.)
Your contacts are also listed on the dashboard, where you can check out alerts that they've sent you or even just keep tabs on their Facebook status messages. "Alerts" pop up like instant messages (or text messages, as you can opt to get them on your cell phone). You can also "check in" to let your neighbors know you're at home safe if, say, there's a tornado on the rampage outside, or if you're out of town.
Existing real-time, find-who's-where applications typically have a nightlife slant, like Buzzd and Foursquare. But Microsoft hopes that the same tools of convening can be used to organize community activities and stay in touch in the event of an emergency.
The company has unveiled the product in its home city of Seattle, and, according to the Seattle Times, plans to beta-test it there in addition to a rural Midwestern town and an "isolated island community," which makes the whole thing sound just a little bit Dharma Initiative. Just a little.
All joking aside, the Web's biggest players are gunning for a way to appropriately harness social media for emergency preparedness. Google's nonprofit Google.org arm has launched a project called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD) with similar goals, and Google has invested $5 million in it. InSTEDD does not have a live software product yet, but organizers have said that it plans to use, among other things, a mash-up of SMS alerts and the Google Earth mapping application.
An e-mail snafu has led to the leak of Microsoft's decision to shutter its MSN Groups service, according to LiveSide.net. It's not a surprise, as MSN Groups was one of the last vestiges of Microsoft's Web services strategy pre-Windows Live.
MSN Groups will be closing on February 21, 2009. It'll be replaced with a new service, Windows Live Groups, which debuts on November 17.
Here's the catch: The LiveSide post indicates MSN Groups will not be migrating to Windows Live Groups; the new Windows Live service will be different enough so that the transition wouldn't be a clean one. Instead, the LiveSide post says that existing MSN Groups will transition to community site Multiply--in other words, Multiply is effectively acquiring MSN Groups from Microsoft.
Representatives from Multiply, which said earlier this month that it has reached 10 million registered users, confirmed the news. Microsoft representatives released a longer statement: "It is true that we are planning to close the MSN Groups service on February 21, 2009 and will offer you the opportunity to move your group to our new partner service, Multiply. We understand the importance of keeping your group together, so we partnered with Multiply to create a migration process that moves your group to their service to preserve your online community and its history.
This post was updated at 4:30 p.m. PT with comment from Microsoft.
Web-based chat and IM company Meebo has announced a few updates to its "Community IM" chat project, which it announced this summer as a means to power live chat features on partner sites. More specifically, there are more partners on board to add to the original eight.
According to CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg, putting Meebo on partner sites will mean that it has a reach of more than 70 million people worldwide. Eventually, there will be ads placed on the chat app, and revenue will be split between Meebo and the partner in question.
As was the plan this summer, movie site Flixster will be the first to roll out Community IM support. Meebo CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg said that this will be a snail-paced launch. "It's going to do a small rollout over time with a bunch of different partners, mostly because of scaling concerns," he explained. "We wouldn't want to roll it out to everyone all at once and then have the system collapse."
Sternberg said that the company has been smart with its expansion, given the fact that live chat takes a lot of hardware power, and high server costs have been cited as one of the factors that could doom a hyped start-up. "Meebo serves like 35 to 40 million unique (visits) a month right now, on what I think is 150 or less servers. For the number of uniques that we have, our server count is very, very low," he explained. "The server count is certainly going to grow with the Community IM...obviously that's going to put one heck of a strain on the back-end system, but that said, we're being very, very careful."
The current roster of Community IM partners, an array of blog sites, small social networks, and gaming sites, includes: AddictingCames, Bleacher Report, DanceJam, Dhingana, Fanpop, Flixster, GlobalGrind, IBeatYou, MyYearbook, OrangeShark, Piczo, PerfSpot, SparkArt, Sugar Inc., Tagged, UGame.net, Yaari, Zinch, and Zorpia.
Meebo debuted an ad network early this year and opened up the API for its "Meebo Rooms" group chat app.
Tokoni, a community site for "sharing stories," has formally launched after nearly a year of public beta. It has taken investment backing from eBay as well as the auction giant's founder, Pierre Omidyar, and was founded by former eBay executive Mary Lou Song and Alex Kazim, former president of the eBay-owned Skype. Kazim serves as Tokoni's CEO.
"We created Tokoni to fill the distinct need for an online community where individual stories of life's experiences have a voice and are valued, and where the collective wisdom of the community is celebrated," Kazim said in a release. "The growth of social media has enabled people to control how they create, consume, and share content and personal experiences online; however, participation in the social Web is still daunting to the mainstream. Tokoni makes sharing your own story easy."
Indeed, as an adult-focused "community" site rather than a social network, Tokoni's target audience is one that hasn't caught on to the blogging and Twittering craze, and offers a more Luddite-friendly forum for conversation by encouraging the posting, reading, and discussing of personal stories and experiences. Another site with a similar slant is Gather.
With the U.S. presidential election approaching, Tokoni (which means "help" in Tongan) has partnered with WomenCount.org to provide a forum for women to discuss political issues.
When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.
Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "Tech Talks" series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
"There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked," Heath wrote in a blog post. "And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate."
After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it's now available for free use. I'll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?
