PleaseRobMe Hits Foursquare Users with a Dose of Reality

Update: Fousquare has issued a respons to the attention PleaseRobMe has brought to potential privacy issues associated with location sharing. What it boils down to is that Foursquare "takes privacy seriously" and it's "really a bigger question about the pros and cons of location sharing in general". Read the company's entire response here.

Original Article: Yesterday at about 2pm PleaseRobMe went live. PleaseRobMe is a site set up by a few developers who want to spread awareness about how easy it would be for people to rob your home if you share too much information about yourself online, specifically your location…even more specifically through Foursquare. The site displays a list of messages asking people if they know the whole world has access to their location. All of these are drawn directly from the PleaseRobMe Twitter account.

We asked Boy Van Amstel, one of those developers if they were concerned that followers of PleaseRobMe's Twitter account could actually be interested in robbing people. Van Amstel responded, "With just the information [from] pleaserobme.com it would be almost impossible to do so. However as people share more information about themselves, such as their home address, it might become a possibility. We think it's important to think about that and what it means if you share location information on services like Twitter...it's very easy to get it, even directly from Twitter's search page."

So far, Van Amstel says Foursquare is the only service it watches to determine who is sharing their location with the world. "It's not about the service, it's about the information that's being shared. We think it's important to realize that something you post on Twitter isn't necessarily private. Everybody is able to read it, unless you protect your messages."

One can only assume that FourSquare isn't entirely pleased with the launch of PleaseRobMe. That's the second time the service has had a not-so-positive light cast upon it this week. Earlier in the week, there were reports of Foursquare cheating. This could have an effect on the decisions of businesses to give Foursquare users special offers, a practice that is becoming more commonplace.

Regardless, PleaseRobMe bluntly delivers an important reminder to socially active people that just because they're using the “virtual” world, that doesn't mean it can't potentially have real-world consequences.

Link Signaling Google Chrome Extensions Surfaces

Google Chrome might be compared to a racecar; both are fast, but lacking in amenities.  It looks like Google's about to give Chrome users the option of adding air conditioning, stereo system, and cup holder equivalents, though, as extensions may become available in the very near future.

Last night, Lee Mathews discovered that an interesting little change had been made to the page Chrome displays when you open a new tab.  He wrote, "Up until now, the corner of the page featured a small graphic which linked to the Themes Gallery.  Today, that image was replaced with . . . links to https://chrome.google.com/extensions."

Unfortunately, at the time of Mathews's find (and of this article's publishing), the link just redirected to Google.com.  Loyal Chrome fans can't yet spiffy up their browser, and developers and would-be users also remain out in the cold.

Still, Google doesn't make a happy of sprinkling useless links all over the place, and since we've been expecting Chrome extensions for about six months, a full launch could occur at any time.

Chrome's market share - and Google's reaction to ad-blocking extensions - will bear close watching following that point.

Have You Read This?

> Google Chrome For Mac May Hit Beta In December

> New Google Chrome Release Includes Bookmark Sync

> Google Releases Latest Version Of Chrome

Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

As you're probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime. Are you ready for Yahoo's switch to Bing? Share your thoughts.

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, webmasters are going to need to evaluate their need to address their own sites with regards to optimizing for Bing. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give this some special attention.

Presumably, it doesn't matter if you rank well in Yahoo now, if you don't rank well in Bing. At least it won't matter when the change comes. If you're ranked number 1 in Yahoo, but you're on the 7th page in Bing, you've got some work to do.

iCrossing Search Strategist David Shapiro gave some good advice in a recent blog post. To summarize, he said if Yahoo is driving a significant amount of traffic to your site, you need to determine what keywords you rank well for in Yahoo, but not in Bing, and before next year, you need to work on raising these rankings. He also said you need to determine which Yahoo terms you rank 6-10 for that may return "Quick Tabs". 

"With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable," says Shapiro. "Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select."

"If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better," he adds. 

There are differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft's stance on SEO isn't all that different than Google's. There are different algorithms at play, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you've optimized for Live Search in the past, you should be happy to know that Bing's not that different from that either.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper (pdf) for webmasters. "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBot."

Do yourself a favor and read that white paper. As Shapiro says, you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. He also suggests that in some cases, it may be a good idea to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.

There is a good chance you are getting a lot more traffic from Google than from Yahoo, so if that's the case, luckily you still have that going for you. In addition, social networks like Twitter and Facebook (not to mention blogs) are driving a lot of traffic to websites as well.

Read this for more tips on optimizing for Bing. On a semi-related note, you may also find this article on getting more traffic from Bing's Image Search useful.

Are you concerned about losing Yahoo traffic once it switches to Bing? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

Twitter Goes Down, No Cute Whale to Soften the Blow

While researching a story, I couldn't help but notice that Twitter was not working. It was timing out. The idea of Twitter not working is certainly not a new concept. In fact, it has kind of become accepted in some strange way and to some extent even celebrated.

You've probably seen a fail whale t-shirt somewhere, a reference, of course to the whale that Twitter ordinarly displays when it is experiencing hiccups. No whale in sight this time though. Just a cold error message:

Suddenly Twitter not working doesn't seem so warm and fuzzy. Twitter Search works though. In fact, the only aspect of Twitter that doesn't work appears to be the site itself. People are still able to tweet from other devices and applications. Searching for Twitter on Twitter shows that people couldn't wait to Tweet about Twitter search not working (this is starting to sound like a tongue-twister).

Twitter has acknowledged the problem on the Twitter Status blog, but doesn't share any clues as to what has caused the issue.

From this experience, I take away two points. The first one is that people freak out when they can't tweet. The second one is that Twitter's compatibility with outside apps and devices is a great thing for the company, especially considering that it "fails" so often.

I'm not sure how long exactly Twitter has been down, but it's been at least a half hour at the time of this writing.

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