A Facebook executive has confirmed that the recent downtime issues and Denial of Service Attacks on Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google and Blogger were all part of the Russia-Georgia crisis and were targeted at silencing one man from reporting.
A blogger, based in the Republic of Georgia, with username Cyxymu, was the victim of a simultaneous attack on the bloggers personal Social Networking accounts, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. The claim reinforces reports that social networking sites are being dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis for allowing users to report on the issues.

Max Kelly told CNet. “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Google, whose infrastructure protect its sites from being taken down by the recent activity are quoted as saying:
“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

The internet is a portal for free speech and allows bloggers to share their opinions without restriction of content. Political propaganda and crisis information is freely available to view and publish on the internet without political censorship, but this obviously poses a threat to political activists. Are we seeing the start of a new wave of Cyber Warfare and will social networking sites need to offer more hardened security to protect against such attacks?

Article by Creative SEO – Search engine consultant

Twitter has now been down for nearly 3 hours, a denial of service attack has been blamed for the downtime and the Twitter team are still battling to bring the site back online. Twitter services appear to be running again, so if you use an API or desktop Twitter application you should be able to start Tweeting again. We are currently using Tweet Deck with no downtime.

The issue has caused waves all over the internet, Facebook reportedly slowed right down with some users receiving error messages when trying to view there profiles. Other social network displayed error messages as social user’s flooded servers. One report even acknowledged that work productivity was up as a result of the downtime.

The Twitter website is still down and we will keep you informed of the issue as we find out more details.

Twitter is down, yes you heard correctly, Twitter services and the main website are experiencing serious downtime issues. It’s been over an hour and the site is still not coming up. The last time Twitter experienced this level of downtime was back in 2007 and 2008, at that time it was a regular occurrence so what is the problem?

Twitter has just acknowledged the problem on the Twitter Status Blog but shockingly they do not know what is causing the problem.

“Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”

We will keep you updated of any changes in the service, Let’s hope it’s nothing serious.

In the mean time I’m going to call my sponsor, I’m going cold turkey. My names Creative SEO and I’m a “Twitterholic!”

UPDATE: Twitter is currently fighting against a denial of service attack, more details as they come!

Delicious.com, one of the forefathers of social networking, has been updated with a whole bunch of great new features. Finally Yahoo has taken the time to upgrade this ageing dinosaur with a set of fresh new features which embrace real time search, social sharing and provide more relevant information to its users.

Delicious has remained extremely popular with the online marketing community but its appeal to general users has been over shadowed by the likes of Digg, Stumble and Twitter. The “Popular” page generated massive amounts of traffic for anyone lucky enough to be part of the list but finding relevant information was always difficult for the average user. The new updates are set to improve the user experience and include a newly designed “fresh bookmarks” section, new sharing features and an improve search facility.



The most noticeable addition is the integration of Twitter content; you’ll notice that related tweets are now attached to bookmark listings. This is not just a great addition way of monitoring what people are saying about a bookmarked page, it is also an essential part of the ranking process for bookmarks. The new algorithm uses both Twitter and Delicious popularity to generate rankings, which it has to be said, seems a very intelligent method of gauging the importance of a topic. The biggest concern is the potential to spam and manipulate the ranking of Delicious bookmarks. Delicious will need to carefully monitor the ranking process in order to provide relevant results.

The new send tab allows users to login to their twitter account and share their bookmarks directly with their followers. Ok this really isn’t giving us anything new but it does help to improve the sites user experience.

The new and improved Delicious search is perhaps one of the more important updates to the site. The new search features a filter by tag option and displays a timeline of tag performance. This cool new feature could be used to identify tag trends or identify high popularity tags, a very popular addition which will be utilised by the marketing community.

Since Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 we have seen little if no major changes to the network. The new updates are an extremely important move by Yahoo to improve the quality of its assets in light of the recent Yahoo Bing partnership agreement.

What we can say is the changes are a massive improvement on the original platform and let’s hope this is just the beginning of a new interest in the development of Delicious by Yahoo.

Article by Creative SEO – Search Marketing Consultant

Cofounder, Biz Stone wants to make Twitter more user friendly, to appeal to a larger audience and to become a valuable business tool. The whole point of updating the homepage was to give new users the ability to understand the concept. So why is the new design so minimal?



Everyone is baffled by the changes; the new design looks great and suits the brand, but surely a more “new user” friendly approach would have ensured an increased level of user growth? Let’s face it a lot of people just don’t get Twitter, “why would I want to talk about my cat or tell people that I’ve hung out the washing?” The problem is Twitter is so much more than this, it’s a powerful social network and communication tool, a real time information portal.

“Defining a “tweet” for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. “Why would I want to do that?” is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?” Biz Stone.

Twitter has approached the new homepage not as a place to share updates about the lives of the users, but as a real-time information and search portal. This I think is a work of genius, yes the concept and use of Twitter is still hard to explain to a new user but the data that is being accrued by Twitter users is priceless. Real time topic and opinion based news and information which can be shared within the community. No wonder Google is looking to broker a deal with Twitter.

I still think it’s a shame that Twitter did not embrace both areas, a more user friendly approach, with user guides etc. Would have been a nice touch. But let’s face it, Twitter can’t really do much wrong at the moment.

Article by Creative SEO – Search Engine Optimisation