Who's Running Facebook?

What do Facebook users really want? The site makes unilateral changes, and users get up in arms. So Facebook invites user participation before changes are made, but voter turnout is abysmal. Just how much should Facebook let users run its business? And how much time do users really want to spend poring over the minutiae of the social network's policies?

Apparently, all that small type that recently appeared at the top of your Facebook page -- directly above the "What's On Your Mind?" status box -- was actually about something important.

That may sum up the feelings of many of the social network's members after Facebook on Thursday announced the results of a community vote regarding site governance. The notices that ran for a week on members' pages had announced that the network was asking users to vote on new rules that would replace the former terms of service agreement. Yet judging from user comments and a low voter turnout -- 600,000 out of more than 200 million registered users -- many Facebook members were either unaware or chose not to participate.

Facebook wanted a minimum 30 percent turnout. "We'd hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users, just like it was a first for Facebook," General Counsel Ted Ullyot wrote Thursday on the Facebook Blog. "We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we're going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding."

The vote itself was the result of an earlier controversy regarding a terms of service change that many users felt took away their rights to uploaded data and images. However, a user protest over that change and a recent flap about design changes that seem to emulate rival social network Twitter have prompted questions not only about Facebook's processes for adopting changes, but also its ability to adapt to its stunning rate of growth.

The Need for Community Management

Facebook sought counsel on its terms of service controversy from the likes of Jonathan Zittrain, codirector of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, as well as the network members who set up the largest Facebook group to protest the previous terms of service changes. However, what Facebook may really need is a dedicated community manager, according to Jack McKee, chief strategist for Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice.

"It's easy to get overwhelmed by complaints," McKee told TechNewsWorld. "It's one reason why you don't have community management as part of the function of the executive team. You have to break it out separately and have the ability of that manager to be an advocate for both sides of the story. It's not just about transparency; it's about the ongoing discussions. My mantra is that everybody goes home happy -- maybe not that they all get what they want, but they at least get a resolution."

Facebook's rapid growth has resulted in lost connections with what the users wanted in the social network in the first place, according to McKee, whose clients include Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) . It may also have to do with how the vote was presented to members; even though the announcement was at the top of the page, many members may not have actually read through the text or may have viewed it as just another "click and forget" boilerplate message that gets in the way of the network experience.

"That's what community management comes down to: If you had a robust system in place, they would have immediately said, 'The way we're presenting this is something they have to get past in order to get back to what they're doing.' The style is telling them you don't need to care about this," McKee said.

The New Way of Doing Business

Facebook is part of a new business culture -- social media -- that gives the customer more say, said Caroline Dangson, IDC's social media analyst. However, she doesn't think the inmates are running the social network asylum.

"They are certainly at the forefront of empowering users -- consumers want control of what they purchase, and this taps into that," she said. "But I [would] be naive to say that Facebook is going to say, 'You guys run the show.' But it is a new way of operating -- not old-school, old-business hierarchy. They've always said they want to take advice from and empower the customers, and that's what keeps ... customers."

That's a standpoint with which McKee agrees -- up to a point. "Integrating yourself with a community isn't about putting the workload on them," he said. "It's about making your job easier with their help. What they are there to do is help you refine your thinking. You still get paid eight hours a day to come in and do something; they don't. This all requires better engagement, a channel of conversation."

That said, bad marketing of the vote and an aspect of crowd dynamics -- many members might think others will take action on something and one's own participation isn't necessary -- may have combined to depress voter turnout, Dangson told TechNewsWorld. "This clearly shows that [members] really want Facebook to take the lead on this. They don't feel a social responsibility for voting and actually writing the terms of service."

Three-quarters of those who did vote approved new rules of governance that do indeed provide more power to customers over the old terms of service, Ullyot wrote. The new rules make it clear that Facebook does not own user content and won't share it with applications providers or anybody else without getting permission first

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Relevant Tags: Social Bookmark,Friends,Internet,News,Tech,Blogging,Page Rank,Traffic,

What is SMF?

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software - and best of all it is and will always remain completely free!

Broadband Britain: who'll pay?

For American readers this is probably a bit of an ordinary day - you go about your business and there's every chance that when you wake up tomorrow things will be much the same as they were when you woke up today. In the UK that's not the case. In the UK the chancellor of the exchequer (the head of our Treasury department, or its equivalent) has been delivering his annual budget speech.
Not all of the changes are IT-specific of course, but one caught my eye. He's promised that by 2012 there will be ubiquitous fast broadband in the UK.
OK, we can take it as read that what counted for fast broadband ten years ago pretty much already is in the UK, and what counts as fast by 2012 won't count as any great shakes a decade later. This sort of pickiness aside, I do wonder who's going to pay for all this.
It's worth noting that many of our phone lines over here are years old. Granted they're not quite Victorian but neither are they as shiny or adaptable as many of their counterparts in America. And yet apparently we're going to upgrade the lot over the next three years.
This is of course going to cost money. Although our higher taxes are going up, I can't see how they're going to end up paying for even half of this. Contrary to what several wise voices in the press will tell you, nobody's certain exactly how long this recession is going to last. We've been overinflating the world economy for quite some time and are now paying the price. America and the UK are among those countries which have put a lot of resource into addressing the shortfall, propping banks and industries up. It's not been pretty and it'll need paying back.
And here we are talking about spending more on an infrastructure which, although not the whizziest or shiniest in the world, actually does the job for which it was designed pretty well.
I can't see how this is going to be affordable. I'll look forward to being proven wrong. I hope.

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IBM: Who Cares About Sun/Oracle, Anyway?

Talk about IBM buying the company spanned weeks. Despite initial talks falling through, Sun had allegedly told IBM they would agree to breathe new life into old discussions as long as Big Blue made a solid commitment to buy. Two days later, it was all over and apparently, IBM couldn’t care less.
IBM was going to get a ton of press either way. If it had purchased the struggling Sun, we’d want to know why and what the company had planned for its newest acquisition. If someone else purchased Sun, we’d want to know why IBM let the company get away and what the company thought Sun’s chances were under its new parent company. CFO at IBM Mark Loughridge did what ZDNet describes as, “the conference call equivalent of a shoulder shrug,” yesterday.
“What’s really changed? I think nothing,” Loughridge stated boldly.
We don’t even know where to start with that one, except to say Sun and Oracle, along with nearly everyone else in the industry, disagree.
Yesterday Oracle described Java as the most important piece of software the company had ever acquired. President Safra Catz also detailed just how lucrative the Sun purchase would be for Oracle. Sure, that might mean squat to IBM, but try this: Recent rumors say Oracle may hold on to Sun’s software and shed or sell its hardware divisions to the likes of HP. However, until that day comes, Oracle has entered the hardware market and over night has become a huge player in the game. To say that kind of acquisition changes nothing is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “Lalalalalalala.”

Source : Tom's Hardware US

301 & 302 Redirect in htaccess

"Is canonicalization sabotaging your website's performance? Find out how to fix/avoid this common issue with 301's & .htaccess"
Moving pages or remodelling? Have you decided to move your site to another domain? Do you want to move a cluster of files to another directory within your domain? Or do you want to move an entire directory to another location on your server? For example maybe you have a blog incorporated into your site and would like to move it to a subdirectory? URL redirecting is really about the art of sending a visitor (spiders and humans) to another location, often a new URL location.
For many reasons, it's becoming more common these days for webmasters to want to update their sites - some for seo purposes, much of which involves restructuring a sites architecture. Usually when a sites architecture changes, pages and directories move to different locations on the server. When pages get removed from their previous location and no page is left to replace it, the location becomes non existent. Visitors to the location will have no where to go (the nasty 404 error messages) and for your human visitors it can become frustrating, resulting in leaving your site to the point of no return. And this is of course not what you want, so to avoid this type of issue learn to setup a 301 redirect. Below we'll examine what they are and how you can use them on your site(s).
Before we begin it's important to note there are two types of redirects; 301's and 302's both of which share a common purpose however are distinctive of one another. Basically a 301 redirect refers to a permanent redirect, or what other experts may refer to as a hard redirect, whereas a 302 redirect refers to a temporary redirect, or soft redirect. One of the most effective ways to redirect your visitors from a location on your site that no longer exists to where you intended for them to land is to implement a 301 redirect. Don't be discouraged by its technical label, although it does sound kinda cool, as it's really quite simple. 301 redirects serve to inform visitors to your site that a requested page has been moved permanently and is now situated at a new location.
How do you implement a 301 redirect? First there are several ways to implement a 301 redirect and this can depend on what type of server your hosting is operating on. For example 301 redirects are setup differently if you're working with an Apache web server or a Microsoft IIS Web Server. To complicate things a little more, 301 redirects can also be written differently if you're setting it up in PHP (hypertext preprocessor) or in ASP (Active server pages). To find out how to do 301 redirects in Apache .htaccess, IIS, PHP, ASP, and Cold Fusion I'd suggest following the link. I've done the homework for you and cross referenced these scripts with W3 Schools and they are very identical. Thus, if implemented correctly they do work.
To configure a 301 redirect for an entire site in .htaccess include the following code in the .htaccess file in the root of the old site:
Redirect 301 /http://www.newdomian.com
This will allow all URL's pointing to the old domain to be redirected your new domain. However if you wish to only redirect a single page or a set of single pages you can also use the following 301 redirect in .htaccess.
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.domain.com/new.htm
Advanced SEO technique tip: Did you know that a lot of webmasters and site owners out there are oblivious to the fact that much of their websites content is unnecessarily duplicated by the search engines? In fact there seems to be a consensus among other SEO experts about such SEO best practices. It seems that many have unanimously adhered to the fact that the top search engines have not yet correctly fixed the canonicalization issues with the [www] and [non-www] version your site (i.e. the search engines still consider http://www.amanticode.com and http://amanticode.com to be separate which can lead to the problem of duplicate content.
Canonicalization: "The process by which URL's are modified and standardised in a consistent manner"
This can mean that link 'juice' to these (same) pages is actually split between them which can mean lower search engine rankings. How can you correct or avoid this common issue?
Simply put, utilising .htaccess to redirect specific requests for pages on (or no longer) on the server aims to find that request and if so, forwards the visitor to the page you have specified. In order to correctly execute this, I would highly recommend implementing the following 301 redirect to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This code will instantly and automatically eliminate the potential problem of duplicating your webpage's content by informing the spiders that both URL's reach the same webpage.
Server side SEO experts suggest;
"While implementing 301 redirects on Linux/Unix servers using .htaccess be careful, as sometimes even a small mistake can be hazardous to your site, you will also have to keep patience as spiders take time to understand the changes in your URL structure to register in search engines. After applying a redirect you should inform the change to your link partners so they can make any necessary adjustments"
To implement a 302 redirect in .htaccess file, assuming the web server allows it, it is easy to implement a 302 redirect in .htaccess. Just implement the following code(s):
Redirecting a page
Redirect /file-name.html http://www.yourdomain.com/tempdirectory/temporary-file-name.html
Redirecting a directory
Redirect /directory http://www.yourdomain.com/tempdirectory/
Redirecting an entire site
Redirect / http://www.temporary-yourdomain.com/
Overall for the best Google and SEO results it's best to use a '301 redirect' rather than a '302 redirect' although it depends on the reason and intention for your redirects.