Facebook's 'Spam King' now hanging out at Google+

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a. the "Spam King," surrendered to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday after being indicted on criminal charges for sending millions of unsolicited messages on Facebook.

The U.S. Department of Justice said a federal grand jury in San Jose indicted Wallace, 43, of Las Vegas, on multiple counts of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer and criminal contempt.

Wallace appeared in court Thursday and was released on a $100,000 bond, according to the DOJ. His next court appearance is Aug. 22. He could get more than 16 years in prison if convicted.

His attorney, K.C. Maxwell, declined to comment.

Facebook was elated. "We applaud the efforts of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI to bring spammers to justice," Chris Sonderby, 

 

Facebook's lead security and investigations counsel said in an e-mailed statement. "We're hopeful that this kind of persistent pressure will act as a deterrent against those attempting to trick and annoy people on Facebook."

 

Facebook sued Wallace in 2009 and won a $711-million civil judgment. As part of that judgment he was banned from Facebook. Read More...

 

 

Google goes in search of friends

Google+ users can follow anyone

without being accepted. Photo / AP

It is one month since the launch of Google+, a belated attempt at a social networking tool that invites users to follow friends' activities in their news feed and share favourite content by marking it "+1".

If this sounds familiar, it shows the extent to which Google is playing catch-up with Facebook, which is brewing a public offering next year that could value the firm at US$100 billion ($117 billion).

Even Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Google has been late to the social networking space and the lucrative commercial opportunities.

But with Google's proven commercial success nudging its market value towards US$200 billion, and data vaults that hold the browsing histories of most of the online population, is Google really on a downward trajectory and is the era of search really ending?

Ben Gomes has worked on every aspect of Google's core search product and is leading exploration into the social navigation of search.

Despite Google's forays into everything from video communities to mobile operating systems, he insists Google is still a search company at heart. Read More...

Is Google suffering from Microsoft Syndrome?

By Ben Elowitz, contributor

Gmail and Maps came out of Google's famously decentralized early days. But new products risk becoming Microsoft-like in their integration with search.

FORTUNE -- From early on, Google seemed determined to be more than a search company. And one of the most admirable traits of Google's structure has been its decentralization: The company's deliberate decision to forego synergies to give product groups the freedom of independent thought and action has created tremendous product variation and innovation. Distinct product groups and a culture that prized fresh original thinking created great products like Gmail, Google Apps, and Google Maps; and all of these products

delighted users even as they initially passed up the value of synergies that big companies often tout.

And yet, it seems that those at the Googleplex are increasingly giving in to the temptation to integrate new product development into a "synergistic," if monstrous, whole. Integrating new products into existing ones, the story goes, should give a new product a boost with a built-in user base and in-product feature merchandising, not to mention enhanced "strategic" and "platform" value, which basically translates to customer lock-in.

I understand the attraction of this. And it makes sense in principle. But the trend is concerning, because it sacrifices the essence of Google's (GOOG) greatness: its focus on the simplest possible product to meet user needs. Instead, products are increasingly being morphed into tack-on feature sets of bigger products.

But the downside here is that the influence of the core product consistently invades – even where it shouldn't – and this overwhelms what could be a terrific new stand-alone product. As a result, great now too often becomes good at Google. And, if this new-product dilution and diminution continues, it will be increasingly difficult for the company to successfully innovate and take advantage of the burgeoning social Web.

One classic example: instead of solving a real need for all the Web's users, Google Buzz was, as MG Siegler noted at TechCrunch, "shoved in everyone's face by way of its somewhat unnatural home in Gmail." My mother has taught me to put people with advanced degrees on pedestals, so I can't help but be stunned that legions of Googly Ph.D.'s missed this by integrating Buzz into Gmail. It's pathetic, but true: Google forgot that most connected people aren't even on Gmail. And, obviously, the value of the network is far lower when most people aren't on it. So, instead of being a great social product with a clear use case, Google Buzz became a controversial feature with ambiguous purpose that was added on as an appendage to Gmail. Read More...

A social media professional takes a test spin on Google+

BY HESSIE JONES, WHATSYOURTECH.CA

Your Google+ profile will include “Circles” of friends drawn from other social media accounts

I'm so excited. After being on what seemed to be a perpetual waiting list, I've finally had my chance to try out Google+ – Google’s much-discussed alternative to Facebook.

It wasn't really daunting at all. What I really like and what has set it apart from Facebook is G+'s ability to segment your contacts from the outset. They have the usual suspects: friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers. But now there is the ability to create your own “Circles”. I added 'clients', high school friends and social media peeps. What I love about this is once they've pre-identified your list from your linked accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, Flickr, LinkedIn, you automatically bucket these contacts (once they join G+) into your Circles.

What's now great is that your status/wall post can now be distributed to all or to individual segments! That's so much cleaner than Facebook's Newsfeeds, which only shows you friends/family posts based on your latest interaction with them...#fail. My niece found me right away. That's because you get notified on the top right-hand side (it'll show up under your "circles") if one of your contacts joins Google+.

The Welcome Page provides you with a summary of the features: 1) Circles; 2) Hangouts (create a video hangout for up to 10 friends); 3) Sparks (feeds from stuff you like).

I love Sparks. This is one thing that's very different from Facebook. On Sparks you have the ability to pick topics of interest: I picked Jeffery Deaver, movie trailers, entertainment, Apple iPhone. This automatically generates feeds right to your home page. This is amazing. It's Google Reader within a cool user experience. And it almost negates the need for brands or product categories to be added as pages if the user has only interest in certain topics. We'll see how this plays out as Google figures out how brands play in this new platform.
Read More...

Web Host HostDime Offers Attracta SEO Tools to Resellers

By Nicole Henderson

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) --Web hosting provider HostDime (www.hostdime.com) announced on Wednesday that it has extended its partnership with Attracta (www.attracta.com) for HostDime's resellers to access Attracta's SEO tools at no cost.

According to the press release, Attracta's suite of SEO tools have been available to its direct customers for a year, but this partnership extension enables resellers to offer increased website traffic to their own customers.

This news comes a month after HostDime launched its affiliate program.

Attracta has made several similar partnerships with hosting providers lately. Most recently, Attractapartnered with HostGee.

Attracta's SEO tools are integrated directly into all of HostDime's control panels via a cPanel Plugin, according to the press release.

The SEO tools evaluate websites against Google's Webmaster guidelines, as well as other best practices.

The tools can automatically correct many SEO mistakes, including XML Sitemap submission, common SEO error identification and correction, as well as extensive search submission and business directory listings, Attracta says. Read more...

Google Image Search Is Caffeinated

by rbucich

As an in-house SEO, I don't have many opportunities to share my observations publicly, this is my maiden blog post here at SEOMoz and I hope you find it interesting.

Being an active photographer allows me to experiment on the side as a normal course of my hobby. Over the last year, I've been observing changes in Google Image Search that I'm finally comfortable sharing.

Because of my experience in SEO, I've become quite adept at getting an image to rank in the first handful of results (assuming I'm not going after some super competitive head term). This in itself isn't unique but having spent time over at the help forum I observed two things that I believe are connected.

First, there was a sudden influx of complaints in the forum a few months back from people who had lost a large sum of traffic from Google Image Search. Turns out that the bar had been lowered for the "moderate filter" and any images on a site that were remotely risque were causing all images to fall under the filter.

Two, indexing is happening at a blazing speed, I unoriginally call it caffeinated. This latter observation was difficult to detect because Google was intentionally grabbing small graphical elements such as badges from a site and ranking them highly for the target term in very short order. It baffled me at first how or why a badge without an alt attribute, nearby text or keyword in the filename would get picked up so quickly. When I say quickly, we're talking under 10 minutes! I have observed 3 minutes in one case. Read more...