'Net Features : 81709

State of Applications from Wakoopa

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:06:00 GMT

Software discovery social network Wakoopa published "The State of Apps: Software, Games and Web - Q2 2009" trend report today.

We’ve pulled out a few of the more important findings (leaving out much of the “gaming” data) revealed in "The State of Apps - Q2 2009" report including:

- Twitter continues to experience steady growth and was used by 25% of the Wakoopa community. Twitter usage peaks around 9 PM daily and is one of the most actively used apps at that time.
- Facebook narrowly beat out YouTube as the most popular social media site among Wakoopa users. Other popular social media sites included Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm and LinkedIn.
- The biggest overall gainer on the Web was Habbo, a social networking website aimed at teenagers. The second largest gainer was social media community Orkut, designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.
- Firefox was the most popular browser with 55% of all Wakoopa members in Q2 2009. Google Chrome is the second most used browser worldwide among Wakoopa users, except in Asia where Internet Explorer is the top browser of choice. More then 90% of all Linux users utilize Firefox as their primary browser.

"The continued rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter coupled with the diversification of the browser market led to our decision to publish this report on a quarterly basis," states Robert Gaal, CEO and co-founder of Wakoopa. "Our goal is to highlight some of the overall trends and changes we see developing on the application landscape, and in the process provide insight into the habits of Wakoopa's community of software enthusiasts and early technology adopters."

The statistics in the report were generated during the second quarter of 2009 by more than 110K software enthusiasts and early technology adopters who are active, registered users of Wakoopa.com.

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Web Hacking and Malware

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:55:00 GMT

Breach Security announced a steep rise in attacks against social networking sites, according to the Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) 2009 Bi-Annual Report.

Social networking sites, accounting for 19 percent of hacking incidents, were the most targeted vertical market in the first half of 2009. Key findings from the WHID 2009 Bi-Annual Report include:

• Drivers for Web Hacking — Defacement, which combines both planting of malware and standard overt changes, remains the most common outcome of web attacks (28%), while leakage of sensitive information is a close second (26%, up from 19% in 2008). Disinformation is a distant third (19%), mostly due to the hacking of celebrity online identities.

• Most Prevalent Attack Vectors — SQL Injection remains the number one attack vector, accounting for nearly one-fifth of all security breaches (19%). Attack vectors exploiting Web 2.0 features such as user-contributed content were also commonly employed: authentication abuse was the second most active attack vector (11%), and Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) rose to number five with 5% of the reported attacks.

• Vertical Markets Under Attack — Social networking sites emerged as the most targeted vertical market with 19% of the incidents, a dramatic increase from prior years when this sector was not represented, and displacing government/law enforcement from the number one spot in 2008.

“The dramatic rise in attacks against social networking sites this year can primarily be attributed to attacks on popular new technologies like Twitter, where cross-site scripting and CSRF worms were unleashed,” said Ryan Barnett, director of application security research for Breach Security. “Looking back at 2008, a notable election year, government-related organizations were the top-ranked attack victims and have now dropped to number three. The WHID report demonstrates that hackers can be fickle, following popular culture and trends to achieve the most visible effect for their efforts, which means that companies must be vigilant in implementing web application systems and monitoring application activity.”

The WHID project compiles and analyzes application-related security incidents, focusing exclusively on publicly reported web application security attacks that have an identified outcome. The WHID 2009 Bi-Annual report analyzed global security incidents that occurred from January 1 through July 31, 2009, a 30 percent increase in overall web attacks compared to 1H 2008.

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Xignite and Wolfram|Alpha Partner for Financial Web Services

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:44:00 GMT

Xignite, a cloud service provider of financial Web services for corporate applications, has announced that it will be working with computation knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha.

Information delivered by Xignite will be aggregated and analyzed by Wolfram|Alpha before it is returned to the user in the form of charts and graphs for comparative study.

Integrating Xignite enables Wolfram|Alpha to provide financial information for queries as simple as “biggest automotive company,” or as complex as “what is General Electric’s dividend per share in euros.” The integration also enables Wolfram|Alpha to return results in locally-adjusted currencies, based on real-time rates and location awareness.

"Wolfram|Alpha's goal is to be the single source for definitive answers to factual queries, and we rely on acquiring and processing data in a vast number of areas," said Peter Overmann, executive director of research and development at Wolfram Research, Inc. "In a climate where there's tremendous demand for financial tools and information, we've set out to create the best possible financial portal where all analyses and visualizations are calculated in real time, as users put in their questions. Xignite has met all of our expectations in terms of the scope, quality, and performance of its data services, and we look forward to working with the company as we expand Wolfram|Alpha."

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Pluck & Twitter; A Social Bridging Initiative

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:10:00 GMT

The Pluck social media platform (from distributed social media pioneer Demand Media) announced the availability of Twitter functionality.

Pluck and Twitter combined will offer users the ability to share conversations from their community on the popular micro-blogging site. This “Social Bridging” initiative is the latest in a collection of capabilities from Pluck which enables enterprise customer communities to establish “2-way connections with 3rd party social networking destinations”.

Pluck supports Twitter in a number of ways including the ability to invite friends, display recent tweets and for users to tweet their activity.

“We strive to give our members a place where they can engage in a discussion on anything from politics to fashion. Our members love that their voices on our site are echoed to their friends on Facebook,” said Kevin Skaggs, executive producer of SFGate. “Our goal is to create on-site social experiences that seamlessly connect with the rest of the social Web - enabling our readers to interact whenever and however with others who share their same interests. With this new level of integration, we are able to address the skyrocketing popularity of Twitter and our members can tell their followers what they are up to on our site.”

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ESP Jangomail's SMTP Integration with Gmail

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:07:00 GMT

JangoMail announced a new SMTP relay integration with Gmail.

The new integration lets users utilize JangoMail servers to send email messages with their own custom domain -- eliminating the "on behalf of" message that recipients would typically see. This new integration comes on the heels of Gmail's recent upgrade allowing users to select their own SMTP service to send emails. Addressing a major pain point for Gmail users, this upgrade ensures recipients will no longer see both a sender's domain "from address" and Gmail "sender address" in the email header.

“We are pleased with Gmail’s recent upgrade,” explained Ajay Goel, President of JangoMail. “We can now offer our customers who are comfortable with Gmail’s composition tools to take full advantage of the JangoMail SMTP service, which allows extensive reporting functionality not offered by Gmail.”

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