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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal
Jun 18th
Since the PRISM news broke, nearly every day has been a record search day for DuckDuckGo, including Monday, June 17, where it broke 3 million searches for the first time. That is nearly double its pre-PRISM daily search totals.
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DuckDuckGo Passes 3 Million Searches, Just 8 Days After Hitting 2 Million
Jun 18th
Another week, another traffic record in the alternative search engine space. DuckDuckGo (DDG) tweeted this morning about its latest milestone: more than three million direct searches in a single day. As the company’s traffic page shows, it happened on Monday when DDG had 3,095,907…
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Pinterest Developers, After Years Of Waiting, Can Take Hope
Jun 18th
The developer community has a message for Pinterest: what’s taking so long?
Ever since March 2012, the image-sharing network has promised developers an API. And it’s in demand – according to ProgrammableWeb, the Pinterest API profile is the most frequently viewed page on the site, revealing the community’s anticipation for the feature.
Whatever the reason, the lack of API access from Pinterest is not sitting well with the developer community.
Promises But Little Progress
An API, or application programming interface, is a group of requirements that permit one device to talk to another. They’re essential for developers who want to build applications on top of an existing site’s functionalities.
Most social networks have wised up to how vital APIs can be for innovative features. After Twitter launched in March 2006, it only took the company six months to release a public API. Facebook’s came less than a year later, in May 2007.
As it approaches its fourth anniversary, Pinterest is no longer the newest social network on the block, and still no API. Any particular reason?
A Pinterest spokesperson told ReadWrite the company is being “thoughtful” about the release. That’s no less vague than the comment a spokesperson gave me when I visited Pinterest HQ last September, that the API was “in the works.”
That’s not to say, however, that there hasn’t been any progress at all. In May, Pinterest launched a Developer Site as a resource for site owners and developers who are building with existing Pinterest tools, like the Pin It button and rich pins. The week of the launch the site even had a pinboard for API documentation, a pinboard that now leads to a 404.
There’s also a Google form developers can fill out to become the first to know about updates to the Pinterest API. However, since signing up on this form after the first announcement in March 2012, I haven’t heard a peep.
Why We Need It Now
Without a public API, there’s only one way to create applications that work on top of Pinterest – data scraping, the automated gathering of data through a site’s interface. This is exactly what existing Pinterest applications are doing now.
Repinly, a Pinterest statistics and ranking site, is one example. According to founder Rami Madi, the lack of an API has forced him to get creative.
“Since we don’t use an API, we crawl Pinterest and we index the information of top pinners, popular boards and trending pins,” Madi said in an email.
But without an API, Madi’s data is only accurate up to a point. While an API would allow Repinly to communicate with Pinterest in real time; data scraping only updates his resources hourly. The top pins on Repinly will not be up-to-the-minute. And no matter how much Madi perfects the tool, there’s no way to really improve without an API. That’s to say nothing of how labor-intensive and time-consuming data scraping makes Madi’s job.
Centered around window shopping, Pinterest is an exceptionally lucrative social network and there’s no shortage of developers who want to build applications for it. But even the best developers will have accuracy problems until the API is released.
How Much Longer?
One of Pinterest’s newest hires may be a sign that the API could finally be on the way. In June, the company hired John Yi to head “Marketing Developer Partnerships.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, Yi spent the last four years at Facebook, where he appears to have been heavily involved in API integration. If that’s the case, it could be that Pinterest has hired him to do the same thing.
Once again, Pinterest has got developers excited about its API. Hopefully they won’t be let down this time.
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How to Report Organic Search Traffic Gains After Filtering ‘Bad’ Traffic
Jun 17th
SEO reporting has little to do with ranking reports. Ensuring strong analytical measurements is key to gain trust with your clients/company executives, because that transparency shows what is truly working, rather than managing based on “feelings.”
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Matt Cutts’ Take On SEOs After New Update by @smorgs13
Jun 3rd
How’s everyone doing post Penguin 2.0? This update only affected 2.3% of search queries, yet some of our users said the following about the new update: “It is working..now i can see lots of variations in ranking.” “I just checked my ranking. some sites are down and some sites are up.” “I [...]
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What Will Happen to Your Photos, Emails and Documents After You Die?
May 27th
Google recently announced a way for people to pass on their digital photos, documents and other virtual materials to someone after they die or become disabled. The “Inactive Account Manager” option can be used to order Google to pass on the data from Google Drive, Gmail, YouTube or Google+ to specific people after the account becomes dormant. They [...]
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Geek Film Review: Iron Man 3 Reveals It’s A Tech World After All
May 24th
Iron Man 3 is a great – nearly classic – summer blockbuster, filled with awesome special effects, stellar performances, fewer plot holes than explosions and a heartfelt geek message at its core: technology drives and inspires us, enables us to save the world – and how we control our tech ultimately determines our humanity.
Iron Man is the role that Robert Downey, Jr. was born to play, though Ben Kingsley nearly steals the show, deliciously playing the dual roles of evil terrorist and drunken British footie fan. The film’s entire lead cast is spot on, in fact, with each character able to stand out amidst the many loud rockets very bright red glare.
The story is surprisingly well-constructed, if a bit boilerplate Hollywood: America is under siege – only, this time it’s personal. Media-savvy terrorists have turned humans into walking bombs. But not even Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, can save us. In this third installment of the series, we require not one but a battalion of Iron Men, some human, some not – it’s not always so easy to tell – to vanquish our enemy.
In the end, superior technology – or at least the tech with the fewest major bugs – wins the day.
We Are Our Tech
Iron Man 3 doesn’t just revel in all its high tech wonder. High tech is its purpose, its reason for being, and the driver of the plot. Terrorists have developed, with Tony Stark’s unwitting help, something called “Extremis,” which can re-grow limbs but also turn people into walking bombs. It also creates a battery of super-strong villains able to take on the well-suited Tony Stark, though at the cost of their sanity.
In Iron Man’s world, we are each the tech we put in or around our bodies – so choose wisely.
Tony Stark may be a “genius, billionaire, philanthropist” but he is also most definitely a geek. Stark’s sanctuary is his basement, where he relentlessly tinkers – creating voice-activtated Iron Man suits and relying upon what might be Google Glass 2.0 to help construct his visions.
Stark builds several Iron Man suits, expertly repairs them when needed, hacks into a news truck’s satellite feed, heroically soars above the clouds and commands computing power likely still a few years away from today’s reality. His newest suit wraps itself around him at will. Think the rumored iWatch, only for the entire body and with military-grade weaponry standard-issue.
Hollywood Follows Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is leading the charge to construct the programmable world. With Iron Man 3, Hollywood follows, expertly dramatizing these changes.
Tony Stark, himself, is the stuff of Silicon Valley dreams: even smarter than rich, witty, equal parts computer programmer and mechanical engineer. He quit running his own mega-company, Stark Enterprises, to concentrate on the more visionary stuff and, Sergey Brin-like, spend his time building cool new gadgetry.
Offered without irony, Stark inadvertently places his life in danger – and threatens the future of America – by turning down one hell of a start-up opportunity.
Spoiler alert: The man Tony turned down, the smart, nerdy, hapless and ultimately evil Aldrich Killian, well-played by Guy Pearce, possesses a product – Extremis – that can “hack into the hard drive of any living organism.” If there is any cautionary message in the film, it’s that technology that surrounds us is acceptable, but tech we put inside us remains to be feared.
The Whole World’s Gonna Be Watching
In Iron Man 3, the female characters – yes, there are more than one – are badass, smarts are highly valued, terrorists are as stupid as they are evil, technology absolutely can make us better, children can do much more than we suspect, the good guys always have someone at their back, and you get better as you get older.
All that plus the gadgets, the rocket attacks and the big finish, makes Iron Man 3 the perfect start to the summer blockbuster season. It’s fun, loud, action-packed, well-written, well-acted, filled with awesome special effects that almost but do not quite overwhelm the characters.
You probably want to go see it again.
ReadWrite will provide reviews of other summer blockbusters. Next up: Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Image of Sergey Brin courtesy of Flickr. All other images courtesy of Marvel.
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How Traditional Guest Blogging Practices Will Change After Next Major Penguin Update
May 20th
The most popular way of building back links right now is guest blogging. Why is it so popular? Simple, it’s so effective at driving up keyword rankings – when it’s done consistently and when those guest posts are published on authoritative domains that are relevant. It’s been in the back of my mind for some [...]
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Black Hat & Link Spammers Less Likely To Show Up In Search Results After Summer
May 13th
A video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, today answers some of the questions about what webmasters and SEOs should expect in the near future in regards to SEO. The question Matt asked and answered was, “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for…
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4 Steps to Take After a Google Manual Penalty is Removed
Apr 14th
The same activities that were responsible for ascending to number one in the SERPs were also responsible for your manual penalty. So now what? It’s time to acquire high value editorial links. Here are some of the best methods for doing so.
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