Thomas Koeppen Blog » 2008 » June

Is safety and privacy in messaging networks required?

Thomas — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:17:18 +0000

A CNET survey in June 2008 found that half of the instant messaging services provide full encryption:

We found that only half of the services provide complete encryption: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, IBMâ€™s Lotus Sametime, and Skype do. To their credit, not one service says it keeps logs of the content of usersâ€™ communications (a certain lure for federal investigators or snoopy divorce attorneys). For connection logs, Microsoft alone said it keeps none at allâ€”though Google and Skype said their logs were deleted after a short time.

Interesting is, that in AOL’s third instant messaging survey nothing is mentioned about security from user perspective.

Top IM Uses Include:

To chat with family or friends: 87 percent
To share photos: 38 percent
To send celebratory wishes, such as Happy Birthday: 37 percent
To set up weekend or evening activities: 34 percent
To gossip: 31 percent
To share files: 29 percent
To flirt: 27 percent
To make and talk to new friends I meet in chat rooms: 27 percent
To keep in touch with family or friends oversees: 26 percent
To communicate with others at work: 25 percent

Interest in Future Features:

Live streaming television: 26 percent
Music on demand: 25 percent
Video on demand: 21 percent
PC to Phone VOIP calling: 20 percent

Security and privacy should be a major user requirement to help secure private and work communication.

Experienced users use for example plugins like pidgin-otr (off-the-record messaging) to secure their instant messages.

woopra for live web analytics

Thomas — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:26:06 +0000

I’m just testing a new web analytics approach: Woopra

What is Woopra?

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!

Woopra is an amazing tool to see live stats of your blog or small webpage, you can see live visitors, click streams. Woopra show you in an easy way, where your visitors come from.

The integration with Worpress was easy: just downloaded their wordpress plugin (one file), waited 24 hours that Woopra approved by website to track (they do that manually), configured my Website ID in Woopra’s Plugin and started to track – quite easy.

Woopra offers an interesting approach with a java client application to get well designed analytics dashboard to get details of your current visitors.

This client application is much faster than for examples the web based application of IndexTools (Indextools was bought by Yahoo in April 2008).

I’m not sure, how Woopra scale with large Enterprise-grade web applications with Millions clicks a day, as Indextools does.
I think for small-sized webpages and blogs Woopra seems to be the easiest and best choice.

I didn’t found any customizable options at Woopra to track for example client-specific data like billingIds, orderIds etc.

Just now Woopra is in beta stadium, they offer a bug report forum, good for companies who offer software. I would recommend to use bug tracker like JIRA to search and find reported bugs easier.

One disadvantage i found is the CPU consuming java client, they need to analyze and refactor it.
Under Ubuntu 8.04 and Java 1.6.0_06 it took nearly 100% CPU with very small blog and few data updates. I don’t know what this client needs to calculate and has so much CPU usage!?

I will monitor their next beta and next development steps of Woopra.
For this beta stadium: good work from you guys at Woopra!

amazon.com down – does twitter replace blogs with news?

Thomas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:07:08 +0000

amazon.com is down more than 30 minutes.

it is amazing how fast to get current web news from twitter.
a simple search on tweetscan
shows the Robert Svihla aka eurotransient first reported amazon.com down at 13:24 PST (17:24 GMT).

Digg reported the downtime about 17:25 GMT (10 minutes later).

At Amazon.com or any blogs found not background information.
Now more than 30 minutes later amazon.com is still unavailable.
Would be great if amazon guys would give us an update on twitter.

Amazon is down now more than a hour, any startup loses customer satisfaction at downtimes, but amazon loses big revenue.

Update:

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch
CNET: Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday (6 Jun 2008)
Reuters: Amazon Website Hit By Technical Failure, Shares Fall (6 Jun 2008)
PC World: Amazon’s U.S. Site Is Down (6 Jun 2008)

MIM – mobile instant message tremendous growth in 2009

Thomas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:51:01 +0000

According to a recent study of TNS Technology the mobile instant message is set to cannibalise SMS (texting) and eventually email from PC.
The TNS Global Telecoms Insight (GTI) study has found that once mobile users adopt MIM (mobile instant message) it overtakes other messaging tools.

Study results:
* 8% of all mobile users globally use MIM, with the highest number of users in Hong Kong (23%)
* now 11 out of every 100 messages sent by mobile devices or fixed PC globally are instant messages
* among the people who use MIM, it is the most used feature on their phone: 61% use it daily, compared to only 55% who use SMS and only 12% use email on their phone daily

Also in China and some developing countries, MIM adoption is leapfrogging other communication means.

Mobile Instant Messaging a threat for SMS?
These findings challenge the strategies of the mobile operators in European countries that have heavily benefited from SMS usage. Do they try and keep consumers focused on SMS to maintain their revenue base, or offer consumers more choice in messaging? With increasing internet functionality on new mobile phones, and MIMâ€™s strong mass market appeal, operators may have no choice but to promote this feature more widely.

Asians love things mobile

Thomas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:33:33 +0000

Tomi Ahonen dissecting on his communities_dominate.blogs.com the latest “Asia-Pacific wide survey of 16,000 consumers in 29 countries by TNS Global”, May 2008.

	Percent	No. of People	Notes
SMS	88%	1.23B	More than the total number of email (or IM Instant Messaging) on the internet worldwide
Games	71%	994M	close to 1B
Camera	61%	854M	98% of those who have a cameraphone, use the camera
MMS	47%	672M	These numbers are encouraging. whether or not MMS will finally take off?
Music	43%	602M	Only 150M iPods in the world.
Internet	34%	476M	Lots of room for growth.
TV/Video	20%	280M	Approximate population of U.S.

Lots of good news there on what the mobile future might look like for Europe and America.

web based instant messaging

Thomas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:16:09 +0000

Meebo provides support for multiple IM protocols.
Meebo has always been an attractive alternative for the traditional instant messaging clients.
It can be accessed straight from the browser, without the need of installing anything. On the other hand, downloadable applications usually connect to a single network and, even if there are programs that come with multiple networks support, such as Pidgin, consumers choose to use Meebo because it requires only a tiny piece of configuration.

So, it’s obvious that Meebo is quite a useful solution, especially for instant messaging fans out there, and the recent stats provided by Hitwise come to confirm this. According to Heather Hopkins, VP Researcher of Hitwise UK, Meebo registered a considerable boost in popularity over the last year and its traffic doubled, being increased with no less than 110 percent.

Meebo ranked 13th among websites in the Social Networking and Forums category and 122 among All Categories of websites based on share of US Internet visits. The average session duration for the site was just over 9 minutes.

According to the stats provided by Hitwise, MSN’s Web Messenger is the second most popular web-based instant messaging client, although it lost quite an important percentage of its visitors.

The web-based instant messaging market seems to become more important for both companies and users, as top firms such as Microsoft and Yahoo are getting more involved in it while consumers prefer to use such a product instead of downloading and installing an operating system depended proprietary client application like pidgin.