It was known that late last year, the Gawker website was hacked. Hackers got hold of the site’s database which contained both the usernames and the passwords of about 1.4 million individuals who have posted comments at the Gawker site and its popular affiliates including gizmodo.com, deadspin.com, lifehacker.com, kotaku.com, jalopnik.com, and jezebel.com among others.

Worst, the hackers didn’t keep the database all to themselves. Instead, they uploaded everything to thepiratebay.org, a public torrent tracker, including the database’s rough analysis, 200,000 decoded passwords, plaintext credentials for some Gawker employees, and the 1.4 million email addresses, encrypted usernames and encrypted passwords.

The technical details on how the hack was done are not yet entirely disclosed, but Gnosis, the hacking group accountable for such has taken responsibility for what happened. Together with the database uploaded at thepiratebay.org was what looked like an angry shout-out aimed at the company.

Based on the occurrences, it looked like Gnosis guessed or decoded Nick Denton’s, Gawker founder, password which he used for his Campfire team-collaboration portal account. This account is used for internal communications and chat among the staff. The moment Gnosis gained access to this, they’re able to get hold of valuable information from the 4-gig chat logs.

Also, it seemed like the MySQL database password was divulged somewhere in the logs. It’s a petty issue for Gnosis to dump what they had gathered. Unfortunately for Gawker’s part, their passwords were encrypted using the criticized and ancient DES or Data Encryption Standard which made use of the 56-bit encryption key. With such poor encryption system, passwords with more than eight characters can be truncated to eight prior to storing in the database. Those users using more than eight characters
for the password will not be entirely compromised. However, account access is still possible once the first eight characters are cracked. Gnosis had successfully cracked about 200,000 passwords in the Gawker database, out of the 1.4 million passwords stored.

Analysis of the passwords hacked from the database were quite surprising and at the same time horrifying. Some highlights were the facts that 2,000 passwords used the word “password” as password; another 3,000 passwords used “123456;” 150,000 passwords consisted of all letters in lowercase; and Nick Denton used a password comprised of all the numbers. Pretty specific, huh?

Whoever had left a comment at any Gawker site may possibly be compromised. In addition, some individuals who used the same password for their different online accounts may likely be compromised too. Reports of social media accounts were uncovered such as Twitter accounts. Therefore, vary your passwords. Do not use only one password for all your online accounts.

Two social networking sites are in very close range with each other, vying for the most coveted spot as to which is better and who’s more popular. They’re two of the biggest names in social media, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook comprises 78% of traffic among social networking websites, while micro blogging website, Twitter, is accountable for the 5%. However, Twitter’s “tweets” are favored with 19 clicks, as Facebook’s embedded links get three clicks only.

A marketing firm offering social media marketing campaigns had assessed over one million shared links using the Tell-a-Friend widget, which allows people to share any information on sites. SocialTwist determined success rate based on clickthrough rate; meaning, the total number of clicks a particular link gets to take the user to a particular destination. As the survey was conducted, more and more surprising outcome were uncovered. One of which is the fact that MySpace still acquire a 15% market share.

Any social media user must be aware of each site’s pros and cons. Both are highly favorable yet as a user, you should keep in mind your intent and objective for needing such medium. It helps to be aware the specifics of what the sites can and cannot provide to better attain the desired outcome. So here are the pros and cons of both Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter (Pros):

Bloomberg has reported that presently, Twitter has about 165 million users. And with the site’s improved layout, expect the number to rise. The new layout introduced a split-screen/view pane idea to allow users to share photos and videos conveniently. Clearly, Twitter is for the social media savvy. It can be used directly from its website or through a third-party application which offers features such as scheduled tweets, searches, retweets, paneled views or other similar Twitter metrics and identities.

Twitter (Cons):

On the other hand, the downside to Twitter is its similarity to a cocktail party wherein people momentarily gather around to have conversation, or to listen, or to partake any interesting find, and then wander off again not long after. There are also security issues with Twitter, albeit it has been minimized with the revamp. Sometimes, when users opened some unknown URL’s, malware may spread rapidly. This is a tactic planted to spread viruses or to download account data. Lastly, Twitter’s dependability is questionable specifically in reference to its Fail Whale application. Twitter’s Fail Whale icon is popular. Such icon appears to explain or to inform user that Twitter is over capacity or simply down. Although its dependability is now better compared to how it was before, still the site continues to experience hiccups and service outages.

Now let’s tackle Facebook’s cons and pros.

Pros:

Unlike Twitter, Facebook has become rapidly popular with about 600 million users to date. This is not altogether a surprise if you already know that people can do more than just add or search friends in Facebook. You can do more like play games or take quizzes. Certainly, there are lots to do with Facebook in which one can easily waste his or her time on.

Another of Facebook’s advantage is its being dependable. Yes, it experienced outage for 2 and a half hours sometime late last year but it’s really nothing compared to the frequent appearance of Fail Whale by Twitter. And more than anything, Facebook ha a variety of tools which users can access on. These tools include videos, news, quizzes, photos, and links; while Twitter just began offering photos and videos on its site.

Cons:

Admittedly, Facebook’s advantages are also its disadvantages. Like Twitter, it has numerous people from children to moms to grandparents, baby boomers and millennials even. For this reason, business entities may find it arduous to find the right target or market. Still, businesses can be noticed in Facebook but only after a broad campaign and connection through several users, different with Twitter in which it is undoubtedly a more focused medium.

Facebook is said to be more similar to a dormitory rather than a cocktail party. This is so since with twitter, people there are more likely to be interested in the “talk of the hour.” Granting this is true, Facebook may be likened to a college dormitory hallway or a cruise ship lobby where users see each other but don’t become friends instantly until days or weeks after, months even. Thus, Facebook may be a medium to bare one’s sentiments but not the place to make a hard sell, unless of course, your exemplary social media effort takes place.

Now, which one is best to use: Twitter or Facebook? Actually, it does not come as a surprise to find out that people opted for Twitter for their marketing choice since such has more return of investment to offer, other than its more savvy population, fast approach to conversation, less time more exposure approach, and few distractions from countless streams of flowing information.

Indeed, Twitter and Facebook are two different social websites. Therefore, businesses and anyone should be aware that they’ll have to adapt with each site and formulate campaigns fitting to each service’s strengths..

True enough, Facebook isn’t the only search item on the net, yet is surpassed Google as the most visited site in the United States last year, according to an Experian Hitwise report.

It’s the second year for Facebook to top in America’s Internet search list. The term “Facebook” covered 2.11% of the total searches, as Hitwise pointed out. More so, the popular social networking site had its 3 variations into the top 10, namely: www.facebook.com at #9, facebook.com at #6, and facebook login at #2. If combined, these terms accounted the 3.48% slot of all searches, which meant a whooping 207% increase since 2009.

Other search terms who made on the top list include Mapquest, YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Craigslist, and eBay. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, ESPN, and Verizon were some of the names that were responsible for the searches. Apart from all that has been mentioned, the term “games” was able to appear in Hitwise’s 50 search terms as well.

But even more surprising is the fast ascent to Hitwise’s number one list for being the most visited site. From January to November of 2010, Facebook was held responsible for 8.93% visits, beating Google at 7.19%; and following the lead were YouTube with 2.56%, Yahoo Mail at 3.52%, and Google at 7.19%. Nevertheless, with Google’s properties combined, Facebook was not able to beat the former’s traffic.

Apparently, only time can tell when Facebook overturns all of Google’s online empire. As per comScore, Facebook in the US increased traffic by 55% last year. Thus, Facebook is on its way to becoming an online magnate greater than Google.

Facebook is one of the social media websites which popularity has far exceeded other networking websites. With about 600 million users, Facebook is a name that’s yet to boot. If you plot the social connections of Facebook users based on their location, you will then unravel a world map of social inter-relationships, just as an engineer of Facebook did. Yet, the data was not gap-proof, but still the result was amazing, showing a picture of a socially connected world. And though the data which Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, visualized has gaps at particular areas wherein the social networking site is blocked or wherein major competitors are in, such as China. But all in all, the picture was an amazing sight as you can see below.

Paul Butler’s interactive world map of Facebook’s social connections… View high-res (3.8MB)

Butler started with his discovery by taking samples of Facebook users from the site’s data warehouse. After which, he combined the gathered data with each user’s location, added the number of friends in between each cities and immersed with the latitude and longitude of each city. To come up with a more visible data, Butler “defined weights” for every coupled city which served as the Euclidean distance between each location and the number of friends in between.

Butler admitted to being surprised with what he saw. What started out as a mass of data eventually turned out to be an outstanding map of the world, to which, continents were not the only ones apparent but international borders were seen as well. On top of this all, what struck as marvelous to Paul Butler was the fact that the lines didn’t represent political borders, rivers or seas, but real social human relationships.

So where’s this data now? Deleted. Pretty much similar to what an outside programmer, Peter Warden, did before. Warden gathered millions of profiles and analyzed them to discern connections between states and countries, and from those connections, he was able to come up with interactive maps. However, Facebook denounced to file a lawsuit for scraping users’ profiles was a violation to their terms of service. Hence, Warden was left with no choice but to obliterate the data.