Diaspora, the open alternative to Facebook, to be launched on 15 September

500 million users and $33bn worth, two numbers that best describe Facebook. Facebook has been lately the fastest growing social networking website and seems that nothing can stop it from its ascenssion. Recently, developers of Diaspora, an open alternative to Facebook, announced its launch on 15 September 2010 and what it seems as an impossible task – challenging Facebook – is something the online environment should have an eye on.

The developers team made of 4 US students had a difficult time raising the funds for building this project from scratch but in the end 6,500 people contributed with money and the numbers reached $200,000. Three computer scientists and one mathematician are part of this team. Needing the money to fund this project, the four colleagues headed to fundraising website Kickstarter where their goal was to raise $10,000, but in the end more people contributed with larger amounts of money ( Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reported that he also donated to this project) so that they ended up with 20 times more that they were thinking. Earlier this year, this open-source project was a very hot subject while Facebook simplified its privacy setting after receiving lot of criticism for being too complex and confusing.

The team wrote on their blog that after spending the summer building this open-source network it is now fully functionable and will be released on September 15th. This user interface will alow users to decide by themselves where their shared content to be distributed, like from co-workers to all-day chaps or business partners.

The 15 September release will mean that the developers team are making the programming code available for anyone to see an modify, but we should be waiting for Diaspora to be available to members which are in search for more privacy through social networks nowadays.

Beginners Guide to Selling Online – eCommerce Made Simple

Beginners Guide to Selling Online

The less than promising outlook for the economy coupled with the gloomy jobs outlook makes starting a small business one of the best ways to weather the gloomy economic outlook that seem to be one of the few things most top economist agree on. Echoing a similar line, the Universities minister David Willetts advice students leaving university to to cast off “old-fashioned” ideas about what constitutes a graduate job and instead consider starting a business.

Knowing you want to start a small business or being urged to start a small business by a government minister and the reality on the ground when you think of the whys and the wherefores of starting a small business is quite different. First you need to identify a gap in the market that you business can fill, you have to convince the banks (which at present are not lending that much to small businesses) to finance you business idea which in an uphill struggle at the prevailing economic climate. Given the impossible huddles you must jump through to establish a traditional small business, starting an online business is a much better and far easier alternative.

The Basics of Selling Online

One of the easiest and the cheapest ways to start a small business is by giving the traditional start up model a wide berth, you cut out the long winded business proposals and endless meeting with bank officials and the routine rejection application for start-up loan tends to get by starting an online business.
Ecommerce based business tends to be easy and much cheap to setup. This article is not an exhaustive guide to starting an ecommerce website but it lists the basics of starting an ecommerce website including everything you need to start making money online.

Starting an online business can be divided into three parts:

1. Choosing an ecommerce shopping cart
2. Choosing a payment processing company
3. Search engine marketing for your business

Choosing a shopping cart
There are hundreds of shopping cart ranging from the cheap and cheerful to deluxe shopping cart that will set you back several thousands, you can also have a bespoke shopping cart created for you, bespoke shopping carts do not come cheap. It will be assumed that capital is tight hence you want to get the best shopping cart possible for as little cash outlay as possible.
The first shopping cart that comes to mind are the free one but given that free shopping carts tends not to have technical support you can call on when you need help, and aspiring small business owner who is not a techie should steer well clear of free shopping cart.
One of the best shopping cart you can start you online shop with is Boss Cart.

Choosing a payment gateway

Clearing a site of malware

In case your site got hacked and some malware code, virus, trojan or downloader, was inserted in your site here is a step by step tutorial on how you can clear it. First you need to identify the code that was inserted by the hacker. There are many things a hacker can and will add to your pages but most of the times you can easily spot them as they have nothing to do with your site and you know you did not add them there. Some of the most common malware codes are inserted between tags. Others are using PHP functions to generate to code itself and you can spot these by the very long rows of characters with no spaces in them. Others might have links to other sites from which they get the actual codes. These codes are added mostly to the top or bottom of your file and sometimes the hacker is deleting parts of your file to render it useless. Here is the guide how to get your site cleared of these codes: Change the password to your site to something harder to break. Using lower case and upper case letters, numbers and special characters might help in keeping hackers off your site. Also remember not to give your password to anybody you don’t fully trust. Log in to the FTP of your site and first check your index file, this is the first one hackers edit. Search for the malware code and if found remove it. Before saving you can check the date of the file as most probably other files with the same date will be hacked. Go into every folder you have on your site and check each file, specially if the date of the file matches the date of your hacked index file. Remember to check every file, it is not just the .html, .htm or .php files that are modified by hackers, java files can also contain malware codes. If your site was noticed as a malware site and it is blocked you will need to request a review from the Google Webmaster Tools. If you have not yet added your site to the webmaster tools you need to add it and request a review, but only after the site has been completely cleared of the malicious code. Google will check your site and if it is really cleared they will remove the blocking In order to keep your site safe you need to remember the following: Make your password secure. Use lower and uppercase letters, numbers and special characters Don’t give your password to anybody Don’t access your sites administration areas from unsecure locations, specially not using other computers than yours Use the security given by the server where you host your site. Make sure that the file permissions are correct. Don’t use the 777 permissions for files that are not specified that need that permission Choose your hosting well. A lot can depend on the security features the hosting company employs on their server. Check your site often to make sure that you can find out if your site was hacked as soon as possible Last and most important: Keep regular backups of your website. Some hosting companies make regular backups that can save you from a lot of work. The backups combined with the regular checking of your site will ensure that any hacking can be fixed in the shortest time with the least amount of work.

Social Networks Eclipse Search Engines in Popularity

Social Networks Eclipse Search in Popularity

For many years, search engines has been the most popular websites online. Most Internet users start their online journey with a search engine thereby making search the most popular Internet destination, until the middle of 2010 that is. For the first time, Internet traffic to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter exceeded traffic to search engines.

Earlier this week, Twitter mark the occasion of its users sending the 20 billionth tweet. The much talked about 20 billionth tweet was characteristic of what some of the critics of social networking site called pointless gibberish. Gibberish or 20th billionth tweet if you prefer to see that way which was sent at 1544 GMT last Saturday by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a Tokyo graphic designer for an advertising agency. GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world.

While twitter is the rising start of social networking, Facebook is the indisputable king at the moment, it attracts 55% of the social networking traffic in UK, making it three times the size of its nearest social networking rival; YouTube. Twitter is the 3rd most popular social networking force in UK. Given how fast Twitter is rising, it will not be a big surprise if it catches up with or even exceeded YouTube in the not too distant future. It took Twitter four years to reach 10 billion tweets, but five months after that, the number of tweet sent increase by 100%.

The combination of popularity of and phenomenal growth in in social networking has seen traffic to social networking site exceed search engine in May 2010 according to Experian Hitwise. A list of top 10 most popular websites in UK according to Alexa can be found below.

Top 10 UK Sites

1. Google UK
2. Facebook
3. Google Dot Com
4. YouTube
5. Yahoo
6. BBC Online
7. Windows Live
8. eBay UK
9. Wikipedia
10. Twitter

Register a .uk domain name and win an iPad

Registering a domain name these days is one of the easiest task when it comes to creating a new website, but what if you could also win a wonderful prize by only buying a co.uk domain name from VelnetWeb, a UK based web hosting company ?

Velnet is one of the fast growing web hosting company in UK, with a wide range of products from web hosting and domain name registration to web design and ecommerce stores creation. With the latest discounts offered ( -20% for the Velnet Business Plan hosting plan ), Velnet is striving to offer its clients more options for less money, without the lacks of any initial features.

VelnetWeb is recently holding a competition in conjuction with Nominet, the .uk domain name registry in the United Kingdom. The competition will run for a total of 8 weeks, starting on 2 of August and lasting until 27 September 2010. Every person that registers a .uk domain name in that period can win either a brand new Apple iPad or one of the daily give-away iTunes vouchers, each worth £25. There are 8 brand new iPads in the competition and lots of iTunes vouchers, so chances of grabbing one are quite high.

In order to take part of this competition, along with registering a .uk domain name on the .UK prize draw page, anyone that wants to participate to the draw should tick the “Prize Draw Signup” and will be automatically entered in the contest.

Each week, the winners will be picked automatically by Nominet and they will be contacted and announced on VelnetWeb website with details regarding how to get in possession of the prize.