The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Spam spam spam
- Nov. 11 : Google adds voice and video chat to gmail
- Nov. 12 : Windows Live goes social
- Nov. 12 : YouTube's sponsored videos
- Nov. 13 : On-demand indexing for Google Site Search
Spam spam spam
Two spam-related stories last week: First their was a study by US researchers who hijacked a working spam network to do some
investigation on the return on spam. Over the course of one month the computer scientists from the University of California,
Berkeley and UC, San Diego infiltrated the Storm network
that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. Doing this, they managed to send out about 469 million junk e-mail
messages using a total of 75,869 hijacked machines. They also set up a fake pharmacy website where people could buy a herbal
remedy to boost their libido (in case you're interested: you couldn't actually order 
). The response
rate was however low: 1 sale out of every 12.500.000 spam messages sent, or less than 0.00001% opposed to the average of 2.15%
reported by legitimate direct mail organisations. But because of the immense volumes of emails, the orders coming in would still
add up to $2,731.88. Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that
the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 a
day or more than $2m per year. They concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meager
enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their
campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."
On another spam-related note, on November 4 two Internet providers cut off a large spammer's connectivity to the
Internet. The company (McColo) was suspected of offering hosting service to "international firms and syndicates that are
involved in
everything from the remote management of millions of compromised
computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer
goods, fake security products and child pornography via email" (src: Washington Post). The result: a huge drop in worldwide
spam, estimated as high as 66% (see also SpamCop statistics below).
Nov. 11 : Google adds voice and video chat to gmail
The Google Gmail team last week unveiled a brand new feature: voice and video chat from within gmail. All you need is a
microphone, a webcam and this plugin. From the Google blog :
"Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat
window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can
switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the
size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam,
but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside
your email and regular chat". Watch out Skype (and Meebo and Tokbox and ...)!
Nov. 12 : Windows Live goes social
Microsoft announced the new generation ('wave 3') of its Windows Live product suite. Apart from a couple of
updates (a.o. to Skydrive, Microsofts online storage solution), some new services are launched, all to make Windows Live more of
a social platform:
- Windows Live Photos : the Microsoft answer to Google's Picasa and Yahoo!'s Flickr. Live Photos allows you
to share your pictures with granular privacy
controls, and thanks to the "What's New" feed, the new Live Photos
service will also allow you to monitor the photos of your friends on
Windows Live.
- Windows Live People : a central address book. It integrates directly with Live Hotmail and allows you to invite your
contacts from third-party services like LinkedIn.
- Windows Live Groups : a place for groups to collaborate online, includes a shared calendar,
shared storage, a shared e-mail address, and shared instant messaging
- Windows Live Profiles : a central profile page that aggregates and displays your activity on Windows Live and third-
party services (such as Flickr, LiveJournal, Digg, Last.fm, iLike, Seesmic, and SlideShare). The Windows Live Profile is
positioned as a hub for all your existing social networks, rather than an alternative.
With this new wave Microsoft aims at giving users a better way to manage their digital lives. And it must be said that the put
together an impressive set of tools to accomplish just that. The new services are rolled out over the next few weeks in the US
and will be available to the rest of the world by early 2009. For more info, see the Windows Live Reviewers Guide.
Nov. 12 : YouTube's sponsored videos
YouTube launched a new advertising program that enables all video creators -from the everyday
user to the big players- to reach people who are interested in their content. All it takes is to upload your video, create your
ad text, enter your keywords and define your maximum budget. And you will only pay when someone clicks to view your video.
Nov. 13 : On-demand indexing for Google Site Search
If you're using Google's Site Search as a search engine
on your website, it might be good to know that now you can tell Google when to visit your website for indexing. This way you are
sure the correct results will show when someone performs a search on your website (we're talking a couple of hours, a day at
the max). Pretty handy for that campaign site that was only ready just-in-time 
.
