When domain owners list names for sale, one of the last places they think to list names is Facebook. But domainer Mike Mann made a smart move when he decided to list his generic .co domains on his Facebook page. He sold Flying.co for $3,500.

Some of the other domains Mann has listed include news.co and bank.co. My guess is his strategy is so successful because he is friends with a large number of domainers. I would not list domains on Facebook or Twitter unless I had an extensive network of domain contacts.

Photo | Flickr

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According to PC World, social networking site Facebook now has half a billion users. To put in perspective, only China and India have more people than Facebook has users.

Statistics posted by the news site reveal that 35.4% of North Americans and 17% of Europeans log onto Facebook every month. In Oceania, this figure is a whopping 40.3%. Dividing the company’s estimated net value of $25 billion by its user base reveals that each account holder adds roughly $50 USD of value to the site.

Photo | Flickr

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To help keep up with ever-increasing traffic, Twitter is set to open up a new custom-built data center in Utah later this year. Considering 300,000 new Twitter users log on every day, the site desperately needs to expand its capacity.

The data center is being built especially for Twitter’s needs. The site currently leases data center space for third-parties. The new configuration will give the company more control and better performance. Jean-Paul Cozzatti of Twitter stated:

Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications.

Other social networking sites like Facebook are also in the process of expanding.

Source | Tech Crunch
Photo | Flickr

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Twitter announced yesterday that World Cup Final on July 11 marked the highest period of activity in the site’s history. During the last fifteen minutes of the match, Twitter users sent out more than 2,000 Tweets per second. This number jumped to 3,051 when Spain scored its winning goal.

The Tweets came from 172 countries and were posted in 27 different languages. Twitter received so much traffic that it experienced temporary outages.

Photo | Flickr

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According to uptime service monitor Pingdom, social networking site Twitter had a June uptime figure of 99.17%. Although this sounds high, it is actually low by industry standards, especially for a large site like Twitter with so many resources at its disposal.

The 0.83% downtime figure equates to 5 hours and 43 minutes of lost Tweeting. Network configuration issues as well as spikes of traffic due to the World Cup and NBA Finals caused the downtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter fanatics will not be able to get the lost time back. Maybe the site will have better uptime this month?

Photo | Flickr

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After protests over images of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad were posted on a Facebook page, the Pakistani government had banned access to the social networking site. The ban has since been lifted on the material, deemed offensive to Muslims, having been removed. The incident sparks questions, though, over just how the Westernised internet intends to manage its interaction with non-Western users and pages.

Yesterday, we reported that the UAE has a new IDN in .emarat, which is a wonderful thing for non-Latin script users of the internet. However, relations between Westernised usage of the internet and that of emerging non-Western usage are still fraught over issues such as content management, security and censorship.

We previously reported on how IDNs could contribute to weaknesses in internet security, and how IDNs could also serve censorship, in the form of Russian concerns over Cyrillic scripted websites and information filtering.

The Facebook vs Pakistan is a less technical, but interesting example, of how internet access and content often promotes the shortcomings of the internet in dealing with cultural differences; and the difficulties for governments in balancing freedom of internet use and their own agendas. For more on the decision to ban Facebook in Pakistan, see Miranda Husain’s Newsweek article.

Source | AP

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ActionAid is running a blogging and tweeting educational campaign for the third world, teaching people in poor communities how to use social media to tell their stories through .org sites. The project is called TOTO and is an ActionAid Australia initiative which puts bloggers in poor communities for one to two weeks to teach the locals the how-tos of social media.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s just another nice idea for people wanting to make a contribution to the third world in projects whose benefits to these poor communities are difficult to measure. In any case, the idea behind the initiative is as follows:

Poverty is too often hidden from view, but through Project TOTO, ActionAid is helping to shine a light on issues of injustice and human rights violations on the world stage.

Continue reading: The internet and the third world: NGO blogging and tweeting from Bangladesh

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Figures recently released indicate that Facebook is the number one social networking site in the world, outstripping competitors and flying in the face of privacy concerns surrounding the social networking phenomenon. According to Google figures, Facebook now enjoys visits from more than 35 percent of the internet population, amounting to about 540 million people each month.

Incredibly, 570 billion pages a month are viewed on Facebook.com, which is more than eight times the page views of Yahoo.com, in second place on the social networking ladder. The figures are contrary to concern from many quarters about privacy on Facebook and even more overt attempts to get the site to implement tighter privacy controls.

Facebook maintains it’s revamping many of its privacy settings to limit third party access and the information that can be viewed by everyone, it continues to come under pressure to adopt opt-in models of information sharing which it claims are contrary to the social networking philosophy.

Whatever developments Facebook undertakes in the future, it continues to be the world’s biggest social networking site and doesn’t look like declining. We can only imagine that the Quit Facebook Day protest of May 31st won’t even dent the usage statistics of that month.

Source | SFGate and MacWorld

Photo | Flickr

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Facebook has filed a dispute with the WIPO over the domain Facebook.me, which is currently owned by UAE citizen Amjad Abbas. This is just one of many ccTLDs the site has gone after lately.

Interestingly, the name’s current owner has it redirecting to Facebook.com. Why he would do is unclear to me. It just emphasizes the fact that he is infringing on the company’s trademark. Maybe Abbas thought Facebook wouldn’t pursue a case against him if he redirected the name to the social networking site?

Either way, the registrant will very likely lose this dispute.

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If you hope to compete with Facebook, LinkedIn, or even MySpace, stop reading now. I am not promising anything like that, but in some cases, you might want to make a small social network for a particular student group, organization, niche market, city or town, or people with particular cultural interests.

There are two methods for developing a social networking site. One is to outsource it completely and use a hosted solution, such as Ning. With it, you can you can literally have your own site up in minutes, but you will not have your own domain name for it (only a subdomain) and will not have absolute power and control.

The second method involves either creating your own or using a script. There are paid solutions, such as SocialEngine ($250) or free and open source solutions, such as Elgg. Both use PHP are fully customizable to your specifications and can easily be integrated with your current site. Best of all, you will have your own domain and full control.

Photo Source: Flickr

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