Facebooking is now a stronger addiction than the worst narcotics. Half of the business owners have banned Facebooking form offices citing plunging productivity reasons. But it has its own benefits and that is why its the new phenomenon on web. A phenomenon strong enough to challenge Google in online marketing arena. The current King of Social Media.

If you are reading this I will take you as a Facebooker – one who has a facebook account spends more than 10 hours on facebook a month. With this post I am attempting to highlight some hidden dangers to which Facebook users could be prone to. The major concern is Scoial Security. But I wont be bragging about parental guidance and online stalking. I feel the online stalkers and child predators should be shot in the head and dumped in land fills.

So what Dangers await me on Facebook?

Privacy Settings – A farce on Facebook

Facebook redesigns its site a few times a year. Everytime the privacy settings go back to default values where everything you put on facebook is accessible by third parties.Facebook does notify of these changes but not many people respond to it instantly. By the time you do respond and change the settings (which get complex with each update) it could have been too late.

Who see your information?

If you thought only your Email Id or profile info is being shared with third parties then you are grossly mistaken. Even your updates and comments on friends activities are being shared. Facebook has even introduced a new feature called OpenGraph where they plan to track every silly thing you do and share the information with advertisers in the disguise of giving us a personal experience. Facebook has now become a great source of information for spammers to find targeted data about real people and then spam bomb them with offers.

Security Loopholes

Almost every week a new security hole is being found on the site. We understand that its a growing site has a lot to learn and implement. Just a few days ago TechCrunch reported error where a user could access his friends chat. Experts are of opinion that this vulnerability could have existed for a long time now.

It has become so chronic that some hackers are offering 1.5 million facebook accounts with passwords in the hackers and spammers underground. Though facebook did a good job on it and declared the claim as dud. But the fact still remains that even though not in millions but hackers do have real account information in thousands. More here on verisign

Quality of Ads and Apps and Games

I have to say I am sick of the Facebook apps policy and scrutiny. They allow third parties to create apps that can help other parties create more apps easily. This way they loose total control of where things are going. I was personally pissed off with one such app…kal Kya Goga. It was publicly slandering me when I was not even using using that app. One of my friends had subscribed to it and it was pulling information about me as well. So we really don’t know what the social games like Farmville and mafia wars are gathering about us and our friends. I had reported about Zynga’s (creators of farmville and mafiawars) murky past sometime last year. It was eventually hushed up.

It has now come to light that some of the ads being displayed as banner ads on Facebook are loaded with virus. Recently one of the ads that claimed to be antivirus program was actually uploading viruses. Even Farmtown has been known to have been laced with malicious codes. FYI farmtown game on Facebook has about 10 million users.

This is the first instance of anti-trust litigation European Union against Google for breach of fair competition guidelines set under the Libson Treaty for “abuse of dominant position”. This move was triggered by complaints from three online companies who have alleged that Google’s search algorithm is penalizing their business.

google-vs-microsoft : It gets HOT now

Three companies Foundem, Ciao and ejustice.fr have demanded justice this time. Foundem is a price comparison site, Ciao an online shopping site and Enjustice is a litigation firm. The first two companies have Microsoft backing. While Foundem is funded by Microsoft Ciao was bought in 2008 and re-branded as Ciao Bing. Some people even conjecture that the French law firm is helping the cause as well. So we have another Google Vs Microsoft stage set.(telegraph reports)

In Foundem’s case Google claims it has almost no original content and hence the lack of visibility on SERPs. While in other cases there is no apparent reason for penalities. Google normally penalizes spam sites and sites that attempt to hijack its search algorithm. But the prosecution claims they have been banned despite being legitimate sites. Further they also claim that Google discreetly demotes them because “It may not be coincidence that, collectively, these services present a nascent competitive threat to Google’s share of online advertising revenues.”

Google defends itself saying “We’ve always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way, through technological innovation and great products, rather than by locking in our users or advertisers or creating artificial barriers to entry.”

There are not many sites with good SEO jokes around. Half of them are lawyer jokes with SEO replaced in place of lawyers. So really enjoy these jokes l lot and I believe you will like a lot of them if not all. I have kept them one liners or lesser than 140 chars to allow an easy RT.

Warning: Some of them are my own and some have been edited to twitter format or for a smarter punch.

If you want to add some thing to it feel free to comment. (your suggestion will be acknowledged). Here we go.

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Hey, this site is now ranking nr. 1 in Google!
Reply: Ok, and what if you turn your personalized search off? #SEO #jokes

What did the SEO do on his honeymoon? A: He put a “nofollow” outside the door. #SEO #jokes

Q – What’s the difference between a seo consultant and a used car salesman? A – The used car salesman knows when he is lying. #SEO #jokes

Why won’t sharks attack SEOs? Professional courtesy. #SEO #jokes

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California all the SEOs? New Jersey got first pick . #SEO #jokes

Old SEOs never die, they just lose their rankings.#SEO #jokes

Priest : you may exchange rings now. SEO: I am glad this is a reciprocal link. #SEO #jokes

2 SEOs negotiating a case. SEO1 :“Look, let’s be honest with each other.” SEO2: “Okay, you first,” End of discussion. #SEO #jokes

“What do you call Zelda in lingerie? Link bait.” #SEO #jokes

A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content. #SEO #jokes

Two SEOs watching a girl with big boobs on trampoline? 1st:I hate it? 2nd: What, the trampoline? !st: No the bounce rate. #SEO #jokes

Alexa Ranks you but Google ranks your left little finger, appendix, white hairs too. #SEO #jokes

Twitter announced on its blog about its association with Microsoft and Google in Real time search. So finally the deal is through and we shall see search results that are actually live in coming days. The stupefying amounts of status updates that traverse the twitter-scape every second are important because of their real time information content. (I am not sure if “RIP Kayne West” was information) Gathering information out of what people are talking about right now is the next big thing in search technology. No doubt Google and Bing are taking it on high priority.

Google’s Cofounder popped up at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco to announce the deal just a day after Microsoft’s Vice President for Search products did the same. Many industry experts had raised questions about Twitter’s business models and some even went on to predict that Twitter would die by 2011. Twitter now justifies the Billion dollar valuation with the two biggest search technology companies fighting for an association.

Indexing of web content takes time and with trillion plus pages on web already even feels the need for twitter feed that are live. Same goes true for Facebook. Facebook snubbed Google to make status feeds form its public profiles available for live search through Bing. Facebook has around 300 millions users that are 10 times more than twitter. Microsoft is already leading the race against Google. Microsoft’s Bing is ready with a standalone service to search Twitter. The search interface is definitely attractive and more informative than twitter, where the information is duplicated and advertisers spam the keywords. Google’s shot at fame is to be available in a couple of months.

With Social Media redefining the Search technology, SEOs and SMOs need to rethink and re-plan their strategies. Will Social media kill SEO? We shall be glad to hear your say over this though. Please feel free to comment.

We just installed Thesis and began blogging on our spanking new blog. Got lots to add and designing to do. Stay tuned.