Read more on this over at Business Insider.

WordPress 3.0.4 security fix

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is advising all self-hosted WordPress users to apply the update to 3.0.4 immediately.

In a statement, Mullenweg says:

[This] is a very important update to apply to your sites as soon as possible because it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES. I would rate this release as “critical.”

Bloggers using WordPress.com hosted blogs will automatically have this update applied and need take no further action.  However, if you use a self hosted version of WordPress, it’s highly recommended that you upgrade to 3.0.4 as soon as you can.

As always, make sure you back-up your blog’s files before you apply the update.  You can download the WordPress update here.

They basically all wrote the same post: They listed the announcement, quoted from Williams’ post and that’s pretty-much it!  That’s because at the time of the announcement, Williams’ blog post was all there was to actually write about or quote from.

This was treated like every big announcement in the tech industry.  It was a race to write the same story, first.

Only after a few hours, did we start to see a few posts written with anything new.  That was when journalists / bloggers started speaking with insiders and uncovering what the announcement ACTUALLY MEANT for Twitter and Twitter’s users.  Those posts were about capturing the reader’s attention, by offering some news on the subject.

People may say that I am confusing news with analysis.  That’s simply because as news consumers, we have become accustomed to everything being reported before there is any real fact finding.

The need for speed

Remember the balloon boy hoax?  Hundreds of US news outlets wasted hours, filming a balloon, assuming there was a boy inside – Before anyone checked the story out.  That kind of balloon could not travel that high, with that weight inside.  It was a clear hoax, by a guy who wanted to be on TV.  The need for speed is what got that non-event televised to millions. Had they spoken with a balloon expert first, the story would never have been broadcast.  That’s not analysis, it’s simply good reporting practice.

One of the few advantages of old school newspaper reporting, was that reporters had deadlines to get news out, which were often measured in hours, rather than minutes.  Now, it seems to be more about who can write anything with a catchy title, first! In the fight for page views, it’s starting to feel like we are missing something.  The old model relied on the quality of the reporting – not the speed.  The new model allows us both speed AND quality.

The question is, who’s going to sacrifice speed for quality, when an extra couple of hours may lose them valuable page views?

In my opinion, their use of Twitter is  also an example of the confusing mixed priorities and fuzzy focus, which seems to happen when a ‘tech company reaches a certain size.  Let me explain.

Microsoft on Twitter

Apparently, the official Microsoft Twitter account is updated / monitored by Sandra LeDuc and Lou Gellos.  It follows just 270 people, with a following of over 130,000 people.  At time of writing, Microsoft have chosen to primarily follow other Microsoft personnel and Microsoft brands, plus some Twitter celebrities.

As well as this primary Microsoft Twitter account, they have scores of other Twitter accounts for their various divisions and countries.  Many of these are far more social media friendly, and follow “normal” users. 

So, 2 very different Microsoft Twitter strategies.

Microsoft off Twitter

According to respected Microsoft watchers like Paul Thurott, Microsoft internally has a similar issue in the real world.  This is often cited as a reason that Microsoft product launches and announcements get in each other’s way.

There is a top level of decision makers, headed by Steve Balmer, which makes the main operating decisions.  Then, there are many mini Microsofts, with often conflicting remits, who go in what seem to us on the outside, as different directions.   The Microsoft Kin phone, axed just 2 months after it’s launch is the most recent example.  The phone wasn’t as bad as many have claimed, but it was launched at the exact same time as another Microsoft team were preparing the media for Windows Phone 7.

This isn’t a Microsoft only problem!

Maybe there comes a point, when ‘tech companies get SO BIG that they lose the ability to focus and plan as a cohesive unit?  Google have shown us this year, with the death of Google Wave and the less than successful launch of Google Buzz, that they too can produce very good services, which fail through lack of focus.

Many industry watchers claimed that Wave floundered because of the extremely poor launch information.  Remember Wave’s launch?  Few people knew how to use it or what to use it for and the launch video famously ran for over an hour!  The problems that caused an International outcry from privacy groups when Buzz was launched, apparently occurred because it was launched, having only been tested on Google Engineers – who were happy to have all their email addresses made public.

Maybe these technology giants are simply more visible, with their every error reported on in detail, and they are no less focused than smaller ‘tech companies?  What do you think?

Ten, twenty – Maybe a hundred?

OK, what if you were Leo Laporte, one of the best known and most respected people in your field with hundreds of thousands of followers and fans?

The answer might surprise you!

Leo Laporte & Google Buzz: It’s complicated

Yesterday, Leo Laporte was checking his Google Buzz account when he noticed that a recent post had not been published.  He looked again and saw that in fact, not one of his posts for the past 2 weeks had been published.  Moreover, according to Leo, no one even noticed he wasn’t posting to Buzz!

Now, Leo has hundreds of thousands of listeners and viewers to his various Internet TV shows and his nationwide radio show.  He also has a following on Twitter (at time of writing), of almost a quarter of a million people (including me.)  Ironically, he is also one of the most followed people on Google Buzz, with over 17,000 followers there.

Leo’s missing.  Why didn’t anyone notice?

The general belief is that Leo primarily uses social media to broadcast, so there was a complete communication breakdown.  The suggestion seems to be that he either wasn’t listening or when people saw he wasn’t posting, they assumed there was no point telling him, as he’d be highly unlikely to respond to them.  This, by the way, is based on an incorrect assumption – Leo DOES connect (more on that in a moment.)

However, I can understand where this suggestion comes from.

It did, after all, take Leo 2 weeks before he realised that 50% of his “communication” stream was broken (the broadcast part).  Had he been listening, he would have heard the defining silence and immediately noticed the drop in conversations with him on Buzz.  Ironically, Leo does communicate a great deal with his followers.  His challenge is that he is active on a number of social networks and between them all, he has hundreds of thousands of people sending messages to him, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In other words, I believe his error was that he spread himself too thinly, across too many networks, to effectively communicate.

Is it even possible to communicate with that many followers?

I only have 16,000 followers on Twitter, but hundreds of thousands of followers must make 2-way communication almost impossible.  I have personally “chatted” many times with Leo on Friendfeed and equally, I have also had many messages ignored!  However, the same can be said of any “tech celeb” with a large following.  I’m guessing Leo’s Twitter stream looks like The Matrix, because HE IS seen by his followers as approachable and interested.

Clearly, if you follow someone with a massive following like Leo (or Veronica Belmont, Pete Cashmore etc), you need to accept that the way they connect via social networks will be very different from the average user, with a more manageable network of contacts.

Further reading

I found 2 really good posts on this subject:

• This post by Brad McCarty on The Next Web makes some excellent points about social media’s strengths and weaknesses.
• This post on Techcrunch, by Paul Parr is also well worth a read.  It widens the discussion to look at where to, and not to, post our content.

Photo Credit: Leo Laporte

So, smart idea, right?

Well, maybe not!

Google announced last month that sites that load slowly will be penalised with a lower search ranking.  Twitter is known for poor reliability (fail whales) and slow load times. See where I’m going here? So, by pasting code on your site which is having to wait for twitter to get moving, you may be slowing your overall load speed and thus, get penalised by Google.

Whilst it’s a pain in the ass to manually do a screen-grab of a tweet and then upload it to a post, at least there’s nothing in that process to slow your load time down; especially if you compress the image and are hosted on a nice, quick server.  It will be interesting to see what the feedback is once people have been using the new embeded tweet feature for a while.

Thoughts?

By following that one list on Twitter, you can keep up with Twitter updates from the tech news providers, who I trust for their opinions (and entertainment value in a few cases too.) By the way, if you look at the Twitter widget on the sidebar of this blog, it’s a live feed of all the people on that list.

If you want to add the Twitter List widget to your blog, you can get it here.

So, is there anyone missing from this list that you think I should add?  If so, let me know!

Twitter business model to include advertising?

This got me thinking.  In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website.  Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too.  These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.

Both Tweetdeck & Seesmic Desktop are superb apps, but they are also a lot more resource hungry, than simply using a browser to access the Twitter website. Now that users are able to get all the core functionality direct from Twitter.com, using their favourite lightweight browser – There’s less motivation for NEW Twitter users to bother installing the aforementioned Twitter apps.

The Twitter team are actively, suddenly doing everything they can to make Twitter.com stickier.  Obviously, this keeps MORE new users on Twitter.com.

Here’s why I think these recent moves by Twitter are so interesting, from a business model point of view.

Twitter’s business model puzzle

One of the biggest challenges Twitter has had to deal with, is how to turn the popularity of the service into an effective business model.  A big reason that this has been such a challenge, is that only a small percentage of tweets are sent via Twitter.com.  As a result, Twitter gets just a small percentage of the ‘eyeballs’ it could have; rendering Twitter.com far less attractive for potential advertisers.

I believe the recent introduction of Twitter Lists, project retweet and now the new ‘updates’ feature,  show that Twitter is focusing hard on developing a key part of their business model around advertising on Twitter.com.  As I mentioned some time ago, Twitter users in some Asian countries already see small banner ads on Twitter.com.

Conclusion

Whilst many longer term users will want to stick with their favourite Twitter desktop apps, there’s less and less reason for new desk-based users to want to use them.  This should see a significant increase in the number of people using Twitter.com and as a result, transform the site into a more attractive platform for future advertisers.

Very few users of Twitter are likely to object to ads, particularly if they are somehow targeted around the user’s tweets, so they are relevant.  Maybe Twitter users with an objection, could opt to pay a fee to have these ads removed; like wordpress.com do for their users.

What do you think?

BTW: You can follow me on Twitter here @thetechnewsblog

Here’s what Buchheit just told me, in full:

Jim, there may be a few new things, but as I said, the team is mainly working on fb platform and openness, so it’s unlikely that there will be any big new features of ff (except maybe one that I’ve been thinking about for a while…).

So, whilst reports of Friendfeed’s imminent death seem to be premature, Buchheit’s message suggests that the platform is no longer being actively developed.

This news is of little surprise, coming just weeks after Friendfeed was acquired by Facebook in a multimillion dollar buy-out.

Friendfeed after Facebook’s acquisition

However, following Facebook’s acquisition, Friendfeed has been left to gather dust. Certainly, many of the users I used to connect with, have either left Friendfeed or hardly use it now.  Take Robert Scoble for instance.

Scoble is the most followed or ‘subscribed to’ user on Friendfeed.  Here’s what he said recently;

“I can’t keep focusing on a site that isn’t getting developed. Sorry. That’s not what I do.”

Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talking in riddles

Scoble is not alone! Last weekend, a number of other high profile users started openly debating its future.  This was Friendfeed’s opportunity to kill the rumours.  Instead, a PR-Speak message was left by Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit.  Sadly, Buchheit has raised more questions than he answered.

Here’s what he said:

There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge :)

Friendfeed users ignored

After that comment, Buchheit was obviously asked to clarify what on earth he was saying – ya know, in English!

Sadly, he declined.  In fact, at the time of writing this, he’s not replied to a single question.  It’s worth remembering here that most tech commentators saw Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed as a ‘talent grab‘ – a way to buy great quality people. Few people believed Facebook had any interest whatsoever in the Friendfeed platform.

For example, is his reference to “bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world” saying, as some suggest, that they are exclusively developing Friendfeed as an ‘add-on’ for Facebook (the larger world) now?

Equally, these riddles and the silence that followed, are of no help to the developer community, who have asked if they should still be investing their time, developing apps for Friendfeed.  Again, no reply.

Friendfeed – Not so ‘friendly’ any more

It’s sad that many of the users that Paul Buchheit (and his colleagues) are now ignoring, are the same Friendfeed users, who helped him build the platform’s user base – A platform they have reportedly sold for tens of millions of dollars.  Way to treat your users guys!

Whilst I now spend hardly any time on Friendfeed, I’m NOT deleting my Friendfeed account.  I am going to keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.  Who knows?  Like most people, I have no idea what Buchheit was talking about and the future of Friendfeed remains to be seen.  It is still an amazing platform.

Do you speak Buchheit’s language?

I’ve spoken to half a dozen people about what Buchheit has said and none of them could agree as to what his actual message was.

What’s YOUR take on this. Get in touch!