With the Facebook like buttons, facebook has been dominating the web. At least for WPBeginner, it has become the second highest source of traffic surpassing Twitter. From my knowledge, it has surpassed twitter for a lot of my top blogger friends as well. Most blogs either have both the facebook like box and the like button, or one of the other. And when facebook went down few times this past two months, it created chaos on the web. Does that mean facebook is becoming dangerous? Are we feeding a giant that is unsustainable? Well I think so.

Not saying that I will stop using facebook because it will be a stupid business decision on my part, but I think facebook is onto ruling the web. It has already surpassed Google in terms of time spent on the site. I think with the new rumors of an email service, Facebook has a great chance of challenging GMAIL (that is only if they have a better search and organization feature).

Facebook gift cards are now on sale in Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. It still surprises me that there are morons who are buying fake products such as Birthday cakes on Facebook. I guess the line between meta physics of reality is just becoming very very thin. I think this aspect of Facebook business will grow not only on virtual products, but on tangible / digital goods as well. I can see facebook competing with eBay because their marketplace is so much better. I have sold tons of stuff for very decent prices on Facebook and I am very happy with it.

With the amount of sites now incorporating Facebook Connect, I think it is not too far away that facebook creates it’s own payment cart. I will use it if facebook doesn’t fluctuate it’s codes as much as they do now. It is equally beneficial for webmasters to use facebook because it is the largest membership site on the web, so almost everyone has an account there. If and only if facebook charges less fees than paypal, I can see paypal going byebye in the next 2-3 years. Because when is the last time you saw connect with Paypal option? I think Facebook connect is a very powerful feature, and it can put facebook as the head of the web.

Basically what I am saying here is that those facebook gift cards can be used to purchase tangible products if/when facebook adapts it’s own payment cart.

Facebook is working on making it’s photo galleries better, so good bye Flickr. I know quite a few people are pissed off with flickr because they ban accounts without any explanation. I think facebook can take over flickr and completely destroy it. If there was a way to embed Facebook photos in WordPress, I would get rid of my flickr right away.

Ladies and Gentleman, I see facebook dominating the web in the next two years. Should we be excited? Afraid? Will this be the Big Brother that we want to avoid?

If you don’t know, Mashable is one of the leading Social Media Magazines that cover everything related to Social Media and then a little bit more to earn some extra cash from their advertisers. Recently when Google Buzz came out, like always Mashable jump on the bandwagon to get a lot of followers. Which is not really hard to do when you already have a massive readership. They added a mini little Google Buzz button which actually is not really a Buzz button. It posts your articles to Google Reader, so if you are new don’t hit the Buzz it button on any website because they are all doing the same thing. Now this is understandable, everyone is working around technology.

But Mashable loves to take it one step further. They came out with this one article called Google Buzz Buttons learn to count which basically tells you how they are trying to help the industry by collecting data.

“We’ll be gathering the stats about how much people share on Google Buzz (Google Buzz) versus Facebook and Twitter, and we’ll be sure to report back with our findings!”

That is the quote exactly from their website. The truth really is that the data that they are collecting is SKEWED. It is not really how many people buzz their story, it is how many people click on that link. Which they too mention in the article that they are using bit.ly stat API.

Now my attention was brought to this when a lot of my clients wanted to incorporate this technique on their site, and I had to explain to them that this is a dirty trick. I am a firm believer that it is better to be not informed at all rather than be misinformed. Which is exactly what Mashable is trying to do right now. Web users, they are going to come up with a new data that shows that more readers Buzz stories then they share it on facebook, and half of the web will jump on this bandwagon where the truth is that these stats are manipulated.

The Number Game, Psychology trick – People tend to feel a social pressure when they see a high number of people doing something. Now if I can simply click on the Buzz link and refresh the page 50 times, or create a mini script to do that. It will show that all of my articles have been buzzed 50 times, or even 500 times. Then other people will want to Buzz it as well. (DIRTY)

Let me show you how easily it can be manipulated.

This post is the one about google buzz count button. It had 778 Buzz and I took 30 seconds and manipulated the count to 794…. Now imagine the validity of this count button.

I always thought these cheap tactics are employed by one of the lesser quality sites, but Mashable doing something of this level is just despicable. I think this post deserve to be heard, so Retweet, Facebook Share or just plain simple let others know about this, so they don’t think that this is something really cool.

This coupon would work for the Baby Plan on Shared Web Hosting Page.

So first you would need to go to Host Gator, and then click on Web Hosting Tab. Select the Baby Plan.

This plan offers you:

Unlimited Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Domains

Enjoy all other benefits such as Fantastico and unlimited everything else with this account.

Follow through the process, and when it comes to the coupon part enter the coupon: WordPress

This would get you 99 cents for your first month, and then you can pay $9.95 / month. This is a huge saving for your hosting account if you were going to get the hosting with host gator anyways.

I just thought this post would be helpful to all new webmasters or old ones who are deciding to get hosting. Spread this coupon out if you like

I was bowling for team Affiliate Summit with Tim Jones from The Real Tim Jones, Richard, Myself, Amanda, and my cousin.

We had a blast, Missy Ward showed up a bit late thats why she didn’t bowl with us. Or atleast that is what I think.

Anyways our team won 2nd place and we got little trophies. Check out some pictures of us bowling.

Well we had a blast and we supported these kids. You can do the same by donating to Childhood Alzheimer’s Fund

They have been prescribed the medications that help extend their lives at an annual cost of $190,000 a year. So MarketLeverage has stepped up in a big way with all of the proceeds of the Bowl-A-Thon going to Niemann-Pick Children’s Fund in honor of Parker and Brisan Stults.

So if you live in Florida, specially in the Orlando area don’t miss this opportunity away. You can do something for a great cause as well as network with your fellow webmasters in the area. The cost is only $25 to bowl your night away. Their will be door prizes, and free t-shirts.

If you are not in Florida and still want to help. Well then you can still help out by sponsoring the event, for as little as 10 cents per pin. For more information please contact Dina at 407-268-7667 or dina [at] MarketLeverage [dot] com.

If you would like you can simply donate to Brisan and Parker. Your donations will be most appreciated and help with research and grants that will eventually lead to a cure for this horrible disease.

I know when I went to Market Leverage office, Dina, Rebecca, and I were playing bowling on Nintendo Wii and I was telling her how they should organize an event in Orlando area. A bowling event. Well, this fulfills my wish and it is an awesome event of networking for a great cause.

Kudoos to Dina and Market Leverage for putting on this great event!

Location / Timing

Airport Lanes
190 E. Airport Blvd. Sanford, FL, 32773

Tuesday March 31st from 7 pm to 9 pm

$25 entry fee per bowler.

I will try my best to be there

Darren Rowse over at Problogger asked this question on his blog. Which would you pick, twitter followers or blog readers? I would appreciate if you guys go and vote there.

Right now the vote for Blog readers is at 701 and Twitter followers are at 107.

I voted for Blog Readers. Why do bloggers go to twitter? To get more readers. So at the end of the day, you want more blog readers. You can’t put everything you want to put in 140 characters. Twitter is too limiting. If I am selling a product, I am better able to do so on my blog. I think my blog readers are more important to me than my twitter followers. Blog readers can contact me through the contact form. Twitter, you can only Direct Message me, if I follow you back. I can’t follow everyone who follows me, so it defeats the purpose.

Twitter is great to get beta testers, perhaps get a quick poll, only if your followers are active. If not then you are screwed.

I will say that I will pick blog readers any day. The best example is that I would’ve never seen Darren’s post on twitter, but since I read his blog through my feed, I saw it.

What do you think?

You Don’t Have A Choice!!!

That’s right. I read the FAQ page and found:

We are currently planning to have all accounts transferred by February 28, 2009. At that time if your account has not been updated, you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.

Why the heck is Google doing this?

Personally I think they are retarded for doing this because it takes up my time because of all the things that I had to change. Well the real reason for them doing this is they have more things planned. Eventually, you will be getting more features with Feedburner, and you will be able to put your adsense in your feeds. All to all the stats will be more accurate! (Seriously Google, it wasn’t accurate before?) Ah well just follow along.

Process of Moving

Pretty darn simple as google would like to call it. Well you login to your feedburner account. You will see a move link toward the top. Click on it. Choose the feeds you want to move. I am hoping you will move all of them unless you don’t care about one of your feeds. Give it 5 minutes, and it is all done. Hah thats when google’s part is done. Ofcourse their part was easy. Your part will be a living hell. Your Feedburner url is now changed.

So from http://feeds.feedburner.com/balkhis the url has now become http://feeds2.feedburner.com/balkhis

Next thing is that the email code is changed. And by default it was disabled for my feed. I enabled it right away. Then put the new code in my website.

So make sure you make the template changes, and change all your prior posts which have the link to your feeds.

Earlier You Move, The Less You Will Lose

You are probably wondering why I put that in title. Well it is true. Due to the transfer, you will lose a good number of your subscribers for a few days. Well at least google won’t record it. So my subscriber count from 1900s it went down to almost 1340s which pissed me off. But I made the change last week. Now it has gotten back up to the normal amount. So the sooner you are over with, the better it is. You don’t want to start a new month, with your subscriber going down. Better to do it while the month is about to end.

Next thing was that I had to make template changes. Which wasn’t a big deal because you change one file thats all. But to change all posts that I have embedded my email box. That was a Pain in the ***. I think google should’ve kept the feedburner way and add the new way on top. To make our life a bit easier, but they are not very considerate. Any ways nothing in life is free. You have to pay some what a price. And this is the price you pay for feedburner.

I hope you guys move, and hopefully you can do it safely. If you get stuck, feel free to comment below, and I will try to assist you.

He says: “I typed in the term ‘windows xp serial number’, and the first one was it.” Now from my experience, the site have to be dead good to provide good serial numbers and stay up there for a long period of time. Now why did you think I thought it was for a long period of time? For competitive keywords new sites don’t rank really high. Google tend to rate older sites. But when the sites get some authority and have age, Microsoft usually catches the serial and disables it.

Well apparently when I went and typed the term, I saw the site and it was DIGG.

While it was no surprise for me to see digg rank high in google. But it was very surprising to see that it was ranking high for this. Usually either Microsoft, or Digg administration catches these things and remove it. But this submission was 1 year and 260 days old. WOW! And even sadder point is that it has 202 diggs up till now.

So what the fuck is the point of buying windows XP CDs if you can just get a torrent for it and use these keywords to make it work. Chances of getting caught is so slim. It just promotes more and more software piracy. I feel like a dumb ass for spending a lot of money for expensive softwares. But I do it because it is the right thing to do.

Well anyways after reading all the comments, This serial has been working. My friends say it has been working.

I think Digg’s Spam Control and Microsoft Spam Control need to do some work. Usually digg catches stuff like movies and what not. I know I stream movies and often times digg rank high for free stuff, but they remove it. I think this one just slipped their eyes. So I am hoping this get fixed.

You guys heard of the system called Aweber right. Yeah this is the email newsletter service. They actually can be combined with the feedburner stats to make your subscriber count look high. The concept of Aweber is nice, but with the way people are now abusing it is F**king ANNOYING. I loved reading Shoemoney’s blog. Heck this guy was the reason why I started this blog. My first design was inspired from Jeremy. Now I am annoyed by his blog. Every time I visit his blog I have to deal with this extremely annoying pop up that asks me to subscribe to his news letter. Ok one time is ok. But every time I go on his site I get that. If I don’t want to subscribe, then it should just ask once and never ask again. I am so frustrated with this popup that I have decided not to go on his site anymore. So there your chances of gaining subscribers might be costing you your old loyal users.

John Chow is an awesome guy. I met him at Izea and had a blast with him. I loved reading his blog, and I was a top commentator at his site too. My thing is I don’t subscribe to Newsletter. I subscribe to feeds, but I have to go to their site to comment and so on. Well there is this annoying pop up on his site also. I close it each time and it comes back the next time I go on his site. So John, I will not be commenting on your site again either unless I am really really desperate.

Following these big bloggers a lot of new bloggers are following this path also. I can’t remember the site I went on a few days back which I recently discovered. I got to the blog and saw the pop up. I exit out and now I don’t even remember the url. Great job on that pitch to get me as your subscriber.

By no means I am saying that Aweber is a bad service. I think email newsletter are a great addition to a blog. But keep it on your sidebar. If I want to subscribe, I would. But don’t force your readers. If you force them by throwing a pop up at them each time they visit then most likely they will leave. Like I did.

The choice is yours.