Tech Week in Review – 7/10/09

Google Apps Finally Out of  Beta

Google has probably been the longest running joke regarding apps being in beta forever, but budding geek comedians will now have to find someone else to pick on because Google has dropped the beta label from it’s Google Apps set of applications. These include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. Don’t worry, though. If for some odd reason you miss the  ”Beta” being on your Gmail logo, you can enable in your Labs Settings. This is just one step that Google is taking to make it’s apps more attractive to enterprise customers.

4chan Attacks Twitter

Proving how easy it is to game Twitter’s trending topics, 4chan users created a bunch of fake Twitter accounts and began tweeting about #gorillapenis. A bunch of accounts were suspended in the scuffle, including some that had nothing to do with it. The Twitter admins were able to manually kill the offending topic. As Twitter continues to gain popularity, I really don’t see how they’re going to prevent this type of thing from happening in the future, probably on a much larger scale.

Your SSN Has Been Compromised

Ok, not really, but it might be easy to guess according to this NYT article. Social security numbers are not randomized and are actually based on basic information about you. Where you were born, what year, and pretty much standard things you might harmlessly include on a social networking site. This is just another example of a 3rd party being able to take the massive amounts of random data we throw around online and fit the pieces together to learn things we didn’t intend for them to. If you were born after 1988, you’re social is especially vulnerable. There are plans to randomize Social Security Numbers in the future.

Grandparents Take Over Facebook

According to eWeek, Facebook has seen a 500% increase in users 55 and older. The study was done by iStrategyLabs, who used demographics and statistics from Facebook’s social ads platform. Less than 1 million users aged 55 and older used Facebook in January 2009, but more than 5.8 million Facebook users fell in the 55+ age range by July 4th. Not only did the number of older people on Facebook increase, but it seems this new influx of grown folks scared away high school and college users.  They dropped 16.5 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively. There is speculation that the young folks don’t want the older folks seeing their drunken photos. Also worth mentioning is an increase of 142% in Atlanta, GA. Can’t take credit for that one, but I would sure like to know what happened there.