MySpace, the social networking site, has been lying low for a while. Once the top social networking site in the world, MySpace has seen Facebook and later Twitter overtake them in terms of popularity and number of users. While there may be many reasons for the downfall of Myspace, they are certainly trying to be back in the reckoning now. This can be evidenced from MySpace's co-president Mike Jones's recent blog post that Myspace results will appear as part of Google search results.
Here are a few excerpts from the blog :
In December, Google announced plans to implement the MySpace Real-Time Search API, which would push publicly available updates from our users to Google in real-time. The implementation is now LIVE on Google and we couldn't be more excited to be the first social networking platform to light up real-time integration with Google.
Beginning today, when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you're searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.
This could well be the stimulus that MySpace so desperately needed to fight against the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world. Will they regain their lost glory? It should be an interesting few months ahead of us.
Webmasters and website owners will know how important it is to ensure their web applications are performing as expected for end users. Site24x7’s web application monitor makes it easier for them to keep track of the availability and performance of web applications such as customer logins or shopping cart purchases. The monitor sends out notifications if it detects any problem with the transaction, such as an unwanted downtime or a slow response time.
An important use of web application monitor, which sometimes gets overlooked, is its ability to assist in fine-tuning the performance of applications. Since the monitor provides you with historical data of key performance metrics, you gather a substantial amount of useful information about your web application over the course of time. This information can be used to proactively improve your web application and make it an absolute joy for customers to interact with.
Scott Savage has explained this beautifully in his blog. In fact, he mentions Site24x7’s web application monitor as one of his top 3 tools for fine-tuning web applications.
Some excerpts: Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24×7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).
Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage.
It has been an exciting and eventful year for us here at Site24x7. We grew a lot this year, both in terms of features added to our monitoring service as well as expanding our user base. Here is a quick recap of what went into Site24x7 in 2009.
- Five new locations were added to our global monitoring network. Servers were added in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Sweden.
- Support for 10 new languages including French, German, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, etc.
- New monitor types such as POP, Port, SMTP.
- REST APIs for developers.
- Enhanced SLA monitoring capabilities
- Major enhancements to website monitor including 3-minute monitoring intervals, option to mark trouble as downtime and downtime as maintenance, etc.
- Reseller programs for businesses.
- iPhone client
- Uptime buttons to help webmasters showcase the uptime of their websites, and more.
We want to thank you for your fantastic support throughout 2009. We promise to keep improving and to keep introducing new features/enhancements in the coming year as well.
Happy holidays and a prosperous new year!
As you must have known by now, Twitter was recently hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army. The hackers managed to compromise Twitter's DNS records and left a defacement message on the website. Both twitter.com and status.twitter.com were down and some users faced a temporary problem with sending tweets. There has been extensive coverage of this downtime in various tech blogs such as Techcrunch.
The Twitter status page provides the latest updates on this incident: We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.
Update (11:28p): Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon
This hacking, although lasting only for a short duration of time, did manage to garner attention.
Now if this can happen to the best of services, it can happen to your site as well. In most cases, hackers have political intentions and they leave politically motivated messages on the site as in the recent Twitter example, or alter the content of the site. If your website encounters such a problem, you can set up website content monitoring to be aware of the problem before it affects your website visitors/customers.
On some occasions, hackers manage to gain access to your DNS records and make them point to alternate sites. If you are monitoring DNS records, you can instantly become aware of this problem and rectify it quickly.
For webmasters and website owners, it does make sense to follow the relevant security guidelines and best practices to keep the hackers at bay. Even then, hackers do manage to break through even the toughest security controls and gain access. The least a webmaster can do is to use a good website monitoring service such as Site24x7 (shameless plug
) to continuously monitor websites for any defacement!
It's festive time in most parts of the world now and in keeping with this spirit, we are offering some cool bargains on Site24x7.
If you upgrade to a monthly subscription, you will get 30% off your first bill. If you choose yearly subscription, you will get 40% off your first bill. This offer is applicable on all our user packages: Standard, Professional and Enterprise.
If you already have a free/trial account with us, click the 'Upgrade' link within your account to avail this offer. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for a free trial and then upgrade.
Happy Holidays!
Our Chinese monitoring location has been temporarily rendered out of service. This is due to an unprecedented disruption of network activity at the datacenter level, and this reportedly affects tens of thousands of websites. You can read more info on this downtime from our web host's blog:
http://blog.sinohosting.net/china-servers-downtime-notice/
In order to ensure our China location users are not affected, we have routed the monitoring to our Japan server. All users who have configured China as their primary monitoring location will now have their monitoring checks coming from Japan.
We thank you for your understanding and regret the inconvenience caused. We will be shifting the monitoring to China as soon as the connection is restored.
What do you think is the fastest growing domain name on the internet? It is the Chinese (.cn) domain. As the Chinese economy is growing, so is the number of internet users in China. In fact, the number of Internet users in China surpassed the US in 2008.
According to CNNIC, there were 298 million Chinese Internet users by end of 2008 and growing at 800,000 new users per day. It is currently 22% of Internet users worldwide, and could surpass Internet users in Europe very soon. This is to say the least an impressive growth rate.
Also, there is a new top level domain that will be offered to users. (.China) will solely consist of Chinese characters. Until now China has had to settle for .cn, which is incomprehensible to the typical Chinese Internet user.
.cn is today the largest ccTLD and the 2nd most registered top level domain after .com with almost 17 million registrations. Since CNNIC has made it very easy to register .cn domain names, .china is expected to have similar regulations. So it can be expected that the new top level domain will surpass .cn inside 2-5 years after launch, and .cn will only serve for users using Latin characters.
As announced in an earlier post, we’ve recently introduced monitoring servers in Brazil and Sweden. The Brazil server is located in Rio De Janeiro and the Swedish one is at Stockholm.
These additions further augment our global monitoring network and takes the total location count to 17. The Brazil server is our first in South America. The Sweden server is our fourth location in Europe to go with UK, Netherlands and Germany. We now offer monitoring from every continent except for Antartica!!
We will be adding more locations to our network based on user demand, so stay tuned to this space for more updates.
We recently had an update here at Site24x7. Here is a brief overview of the features/enhancements that have gone into this update.
1. Option to integrate website uptime and performance data into intranet portals/applications:
We have provided access to secure public views for all the monitors in your account. These views display the uptime and performance data of the websites you are monitoring, and these views can be easily integrated into any third-party application or corporate/intranet portals. Users can thus get a perspective of the performance of their websites from outside the datacenter, and they can get it right within any application or corporate/intranet portal.
Below is a sample Dashboard View integrated into ManageEngine Applications Manager product.
