Brokekid.net

Did you know?

Google has a new resource page for internet statistics.

This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place. These have been collected from a number of third party vendors covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.

Two examples:

“Over 90% of online merchants are planning to add rich media and social networking functions in 2009 -Internet Retailing”

“Runners have collectively logged over 93 million miles on nikeplus.com – BusinessWeek.”

The collection is broken into five main categories: Technology, Macro Economic Trends, Media Landscape, Media Consumption, and Consumer Trends.

For more info, head here – http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/

Facebook Widgets

Facebook has recently launched a widget site, featuring five widgets for you to use on your website. What are they?

Personal Profile:

1. Profile Badge
2. Photo Badge

Website or Business:

1. Fan Box
2. Live Stream Box
3. Page Badge

Browser Privacy

Your browsing behavior and visited site history isn’t as secure as you think it is.

There are over 20 tests to extract various kinds of information from the browser’s history; the most obvious application is to check for visits to the most popular websites and blogs, which we grouped into categories (banks, pr0n sites, dating sites, social networks, etc.)

Want to see what websites can tell about you? Check out this site – http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com.

The app is an example of using browser history detection to determine personal preferences of Web browser users and is located at http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com. The history detection hack has been known for quite a while; it works by using the CSS :visited pseudoclass to style visited links differently from unvisited ones, in order to figure out which ones are present in the browser’s history and does not require JavaScript.

Monkey Experiment

This is very interesting and from what the website says, is based on an actual experiment. I’m reposting it verbatim so you don’t miss anything.

Put eight monkeys in a room. In the middle of the room is a ladder, leading to a bunch of bananas hanging from a hook on the ceiling.

Each time a monkey tries to climb the ladder, all the monkeys are sprayed with ice water, which makes them miserable. Soon enough, whenever a monkey attempts to climb the ladder, all of the other monkeys, not wanting to be sprayed, set upon him and beat him up. Soon, none of the eight monkeys ever attempts to climb the ladder.

One of the original monkeys is then removed, and a new monkey is put in the room. Seeing the bananas and the ladder, he wonders why none of the other monkeys are doing the obvious. But undaunted, he immediately begins to climb the ladder.

All the other monkeys fall upon him and beat him silly. He has no idea why.

However, he no longer attempts to climb the ladder.

A second original monkey is removed and replaced. The newcomer again attempts to climb the ladder, but all the other monkeys hammer the crap out of him.

This includes the previous new monkey, who, grateful that he’s not on the receiving end this time, participates in the beating because all the other monkeys are doing it. However, he has no idea why he’s attacking the new monkey.

One by one, all the original monkeys are replaced. Eight new monkeys are now in the room. None of them have ever been sprayed by ice water. None of them attempt to climb the ladder. All of them will enthusiastically beat up any new monkey who tries, without having any idea why.

And that is how most companies’ policies get established.

Did you know?

Google recently added a number of new features to Google Forms. What are they?

Grid question type

Bi-directional language support

Improved results summary charts

Sign-in to view form

Pre-populate a form with parameters

Did you know?

Gmail has added four new themes to their collection. To access the themes, head over to the themes Themes tab under Settings. Themes work for both personal and business email accounts.

You can download the mix here.

Facebook Adding Location Data

With heavyweights like Google and Twitter adding location to their data services, Facebook is said to be launching location services at the upcoming Nokia World. Facebook is teaming up with Nokia to launch “an Ovi Map (Nokia’s map property) will reside…inside of Facebook and show where you are. It can also update your Facebook status with your location, and a link to it on one of these maps.”

Currently FireEagle and Whrrl have location services inside of Facebook but the Nokia application will presumably be tied to Nokia phone services, offering immediate access to millions of users.

You Don’t Have to Be Logged Into Facebook to Use Chat

There are a number of ways to use Facebook Chat without actually logging directly into Facebook. What are they?

Gabtastik
Meebo
ChitChat
Digsby
Adium
Pidgin

For a breakdown on how to use each of these, check out this post by labnol.org.

More Augmented Reality Applications

Mashable lists the top six most recent augmented reality applications.

TwittARound – [it] takes the iPhone’s camera and overlays live video of the world around you with tweets. Move around and you can see who is tweeting and how far away

Layar – it allows developers to create their own augmented reality by adding layers on top of the live video on your phone…Yelp, Wikipedia, Google search, Twitter, and more can be seen through the eyes of Layar.

Nearest Tube – this app will help you find the nearest subway station

TAT Augmented ID – this app uses the Flickr facial recognition technology of Polar Rose to identify a person’s face and pull up info like their online profile and contact info.

SREngine for iPhone – it recognizes objects…you could use this type of thing to identify rocks, houses, monuments.

Wikitude AR Travel Guide – hold up your phone and it will bring up Wikipedia information on the site you’re looking at.

Check out the videos for each application at Mashable.com

Did you know? According to Google, here’s what happened yesterday:

[Monday] morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades…However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes placed on the request routers – servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response.

At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!" This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.

As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

The engineers were quickly alerted and moved to bring additional request routers online. Google is working to make sure this type of incident doesn’t happen again, for example, by making sure there are more than enough request routers to handle demand and that when they start to become overloaded, they don’t just stop handling traffic be degrade gracefully.