Techcrunch lead on a $100m investment by Google in Zynga the social network gaming company. It’s the latest in a long line of Google failures in a vital area of capturing web traffic – or, “organising the world’s information” as Google diplomatically puts it.

Canny move or desperation?

When examined in detail for such a blazingly successful company as Google are their record in social really is shocking: a near-continuous stream of failure with little apparent success on the horizon anytime soon. Something is playing up in non-evil algorithm land.

Dead

• Dodgeball
• lively
• Jaiku

Not Dead

• Latitude
• Wave
• Buzz

All are relatively unsuccessful on either Google or their own niche terms.

All elements of organising a user’s network around their infrastructure and not someone else. Each one concentrating on a certain social metaphor and each one failing in their own anonymous way. What will be different about gaming? What will make users skip their existing social accounts and networks that already have these games? While they tend to be pretty limited in depth what will Google do that will be different?

Obviously I’m highly sceptical but when you look at the stakes it’s vital for Google that they find a social something that sticks. Especially when the CEO has always seen them as a media company first and foremost.

Facebook with their über-targeted ads has a technology and reach that is arguably more powerful than Google’s. It is a big threat to continued adwords growth, which despite all the moves against Microsoft & Apple is surely Google’s #1 priority.

If gaming really is the leverage to unseat Facebook then Zynga may turn out to be a great choice – the 3 year old company is already rumoured to be projecting $1bn in revenue for 2011, signalling the undoubted importance of this much derided gaming sub-industry.

It may be blood from a stone attempting to get Google to admit it’s worried about anything – least of all a single web site – But putting yourself in their shoes it’s difficult to see Facebook’s rise as anything less than the #1 threat to their existing revenue model.

Perhaps, when attempting to convince users your browser is rock solid haxor-proof, it’d be advisable to demonstrate to them that your sites can detect which browser they’re currently running?

First off I point out that although FB Pages are public, Facebook adds rel=”nofollow” to all external links posted on users & pages walls, meaning no benefit for seo.
However I have seen a number of SEO-sites claim that adding one of the many RSS feed apps to their fb page and configuring it to auto publish their target site feed will result in the fb link juice flowing back to them.

not so.

A cursory glance at the structure of fb pages dispels this myth:

The special tabs that display these feeds are rendered inside special CDATA sections that facebook javascript libraries then parse themselves. And search engines don’t crawl this data – especially in it’s ugly preprocessed javascript-escaped format.
The only way to display untampered urls within facebook is in a fully fledged application iframe – and even then these are the poorest inbound links possible as users installing them on their facebook profiles is still optimistically hoping the profile will be a) public in it’s entirety and b) indexed by Google.

They also ask about page apps like RSS Graffiti, Networked Blogs or Social RSS but the bottom line is it’s impossible for them to publish indexable links within the public facebook page structure (and besides, some of them mangle your links through their own forwarding service anyway). So don’t waste your time – Faceook links are not an aid to SEO.

I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important

For this reason I believe a netbook is superior when veging out in front of the tele – after all, I don’t hold the remote continuously while watching a programme so why should I have to hold a computer to surf the web?

No ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser – Chrome – coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy – attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains – initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net – each time resolving to an address in China).

I ran a full AVG scan and two files were suspect – both resident in System Volume Information – the area where System Restore settings reside. Delete wouldn’t work (looking into it further if system restore is turned on these files cannot be manipulated) so I went for seemingly the next best option – system restore to a point before Chrome stopped working. Looking back this was a stupid thing to do but at the time seemed logical enough. A thought process that no doubt the hackers had already wargamed out in their heads prior to deployment. User sees app not working, reinstall doesn’t work, anti-virus identifies but can’t clear the Trojan, proceeds to system restore hence running the virus the hackers managed to plant somehow in Sys Vol Info.

Needless to say, the system restore failed, but now a plethora of hacked files had now successfully and relatively silently installed themselves on my OS. The rig included their own embedded db instance of Sql Anywhere, the a.exe worm that amongst other things engages in Process Hijacking described above, a bunch of reg keys that pointed device drivers and startup configs to the original hacked Macromedia directory, a hidden rootkit type process that ensured these keys and the directory were not tampered with and the actual downloader Trojan itself, W32/Agent.GBS!tr.dldr.

The process hijacking was something else. It would wait until I’d start an application and use the app’s virtual memory for it’s own devices. Hence why I was getting the Sygate reports of IE getting a life of it’s own. Wasn’t just browsers that were vulnerable, even MalwareBytes Anti-Malware software’s memory was hijacked. Each time the stolen app tried unsuccessfully to phone home to China.

By now it was obvious to me I had been infected with a particularly nasty virus and ran AVG a 2nd time. But now the Trojan was so well embedded AVG didn’t pick up anything more than a few measly HTTP cookies. I did wonder about Sygate at this stage but it still seemed to be successfully blocking all malicious packets so I was still just interested in removal. Spybot Search and Destroy was my next bet but it returned nothing. What’s more that TeaTimer process monitor it installs is a real resource hog – 128meg of virtual memory. That’s a bit more than a mere heartbeat in my book. Especially on my netbook! Got rid of that then was pointed to the MalwareBytes app by Matt @ BleepingComputer.com. The hackers obviously see it as a threat – after I installed it I tried to update it’s malware db but was prevented from doing so, presumably by the a.exe worm. It instead forced MBAM to attempt another connection to tolule.net. Proceeded with the scan anyway. Result? Every malicious file was identified.

Although still not out of the woods – MBAM would freeze when attempting to quarantine the audio driver reg keys whose values had been changed from wdmaud.drv to a dll file in the fake Macromedia directory. After I deleted a.exe and ran MBAM again, this time it succeeded in changing the reg keys after a restart. I had tried manual deletion of the reg keys and fake Macromedia directory prior to this but as soon as I closed regedit the keys and files would reappear. MBAM must have required the restart to remove whatever in-memory process had been running to protect the hacked data.

So that’s pretty much it. Quite an organised payload that, and a very well thought out attack vector relying on unwitting end user participation as much as the original web vulnerability.

Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.

I get over the former as SO is a lightning quick method of accessing really knowledgeable people on demand – but I had to endure a case of the later a while back when someone obviously thought the answer to the question I asked was too blase and proceded to provide a solution for a completely separate issue. And this despite me explaining exactly why I didn’t want his solution in the preamble. So I went and got a workable answer myself, posted it and accepted it as the solution. Job done.

Except this caused numbnuts to vote down my answer without explanation. So I voted his down, and told him why. Despite this, he questioned why I’d want to know what I wanted to know in the first place and voted down the question. It was at that moment that I realised SO, while largely self-moderating, is still missing the last 20%^TM required to remove the clinically insane from the process. It gives me no pleasure to disclose the most efficient solution currently is to multiply your web leverage in traditional fashion; create multiple accounts and hit back with a bewildering array of counter-comments and down votes…

It is embarrassing though when apparently throwaway questions asked on your secondary accounts are rated higher than your allegedly thought-provoking and succinct real persona *whistles*

In true Bileblog style, programmers appear to be sarky contemptible bastards who like nothing more than jumping on the inaccuracies of accepted thought; hence phrasing a question along the lines of ‘My colleague says x is no longer a good way to do things…’ will likely stir the hornet’s nest of pedantry as each contributor seeks to provide a more arcane answer as to why x sucks than the previous response. Recurse until someone mentions lambda.

Google appears not to add pages that include the rel=”nofollow” meta attribute by default.

I submitted the url manually more than a few times in case google was failing to pickup the sitemap for some reason. None caused the post to appear in Google search results. Then I went a bit deeper and analysed what parts of the post were different that would cause this. The only structural change to my posts I made where the existence of the nofollow meta attribute on external links referenced in the article.

Although I had introduced this a few posts earlier (chiefly to prevent the mass of links present in my Friday linkdump from downsizing my pagerank), I guess Google give it a few posts before such content starts ringing alarm bells. And I know PageRank has become less relevant now compared with search page ranking according to specific keywords, but I like fiddling with these things.

So I removed the nofollow attributes and resubmitted to Google. The result was immediate – #1 post for the ‘google deadpool’ query on Google.com. So don’t use nofollow within your post content.

Dodgeball
This is what happens when the big G ventures outside of it’s tech stronghold: Tech invents something better and Google is left wondering why it got itself into some arcane mysticism it never really understood in the first place. Dodgeball, social networking on mobile before smartphone-based GPS services went nuclear – it even used SMS. Bless.

Google Answers
Two for the price of one here, as Google Q&A was a forerunner to Answers, and whose comedy value is far more interesting. Not today’s Q&A app that very few of you may be aware of, but an old web0.1 version whereby users emailed Googlers who responded for a fee, presumably with some answers. We never found out for sure though, as the service only lasted 24 hours. Nothing like fail fast, fail often eh Google?

Click-to-Call
More phone-based shenanighans here. Enter your number. Google calls and puts you through to an advertiser. Gave clickfraud a social networking element.

Google Browser Sync
Somebody must have been seriously running out of imagination for their 20% time. Users could upload Firefox cookies, bookmarks, history and transfer them between machinezzzzzz…

Google Web Accelerator
Although you can still get this on those software hoarding sites, it won’t work. Not a bad idea when the web ran on hamsters, but then Google held back 5 years and released it when there was no need for it. D’oh.

Lively
I get social networks moved online. I don’t get the obsession with reinventing every inane part of daily life. I don’t want to walk around a room online to meet people – it sucks and completely misses the point of well, not needing to walk around a room online. For this reason 2nd life will die out eventually too.

Walking around rooms != fun m’kay?

Jaiku
Twitter for the über Googler. I know it’s not dead, but ‘open sourcing’ something after pulling all your developers off it when you’re Google it is like throwing the chef off a destroyer class warship onto a life raft. In the middle of the Pacific.

Google Audio Ads
Yeah let’s do radio too. No. Next.

Google Notebook
Taking notes whilst browsing was handy. Especially handy for not a few people was the nifty firefox extension. Unfortunately though Google were developing a hundred thousand different wordsmith applications all at the same time. Redirect -> Google Docs || Bookmarks || Gmail Tasks.

Google Video
I have watched 4,653 videos on youtube. And I’m someone who has the flash furies. Nevertheless it pissed all over Google’s own in-house attempt at a DDOS attack on the world’s web browsers. No longer accepting uploads means you’re dead vidyo.

Mashup Editor
A cool idea, but a me-too one. And the original, Yahoo! Pipes, was (and more importantly Google still is) way cooler.

This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP

On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.

It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.

First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…

But.

Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.

Here is my attempt to map them out – everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.

You’ll find FreeMap here.