This morning I’ve received a notification email from Facebook, notifying me that my friend Asaf left me a new message on my wall. This seemed to be OK until I read the message:

“hello Arik, hehe.. you could be tht naughty i didnt knw..really hard to see tht from my eyes lol

have a luk urself…

http://www.google.com.id.ewv1g6d2.ij4s0h.2b99df1a.cn/gallery.php?id=dd83hikzt&auth=9490559&cyua=iy2qpfpelm

(click open or run when prompted)

The contents of the message was suspiciously similar to the Messenger virus messages. Another look at the URL gave out the fact that this is not a Google url, but a phishing site. Because I use Ubuntu at the moment, I wasn’t concerned too much of being hit by a virus, so I followed the link. The link goes to a download page of Picture_dl.exe, which I guess is some sort of a virus/worm.

I couldn’t find this message on my wall, so either Facebook removed it already or the email didn’t come from them. Either way, I’ve notified their support about that, and I hope they will act accordingly.

Bottom line – beware of viruses being spread via Facebook/look like Facebook notifications, and don’t click on every link…

Arik

For the non techies:

• line 3: commented out – the previous friends limit defined
• line 4 – the new friends limit

Shocking.

Arik

Have you ever wondered what makes this Web 2.0 web sites so great? What make them different from the old web sites? If you look closley, and search for similrities among them (and you can take Flickr, Digg, Del.ico.us, Technorati and more as an example) you might find things like:

1. Tags
2. RSS
3. Comments
4. API
5. Community

This five technologies/concepts drive the Web 2.0 to success. Are they?

I believe not. They do bring new concepts to the Web, and changed our web-usage experience, but it doesn’t explain why some Web2.0 websites are just GREAT and others are just “okay”. It doesn’t explain why some being ranked as no.1 in their field and other standing behind them.

Examples for this you can find everywhere – Blink.com was launched long before Del.ico.us, and had more capital, and still Del.ico.us took the crown of no.1 bookmarks sharing web site (why? read some explanation here).
Vimeo was the first internet video sharing service. Google Video was launched in June 2005 (beta) – just 4 months after the foundation of YouTube. But hey, that’s GOOGLE and on the other hand there just two geeks. And still YouTube became no.1 video sharing service, and Google had to buy them out.

Why you ask? So you can blame it on the fact the Google didn’t give the ability to immediately playback videos, or blame it on the fact that Blink didn’t have tags or some other features right on the beginning. But that’s not reason – it’s the effect. The cause is simple and was perfectly introduced in Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich Book. What all this guys had was – desire, faith, imagination, persistence and a lot of love to their user community. They didn’t just made a product, they lived their product and always strived to make the user experience better.

Anyway that’s what I believe what made them so big. On the other hand maybe it was just plain luck

Arik

P.S.

I’m not a native English speaker, so please excuse me for the language… I will try to get better.