Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalogue of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Google Friend Connect is being made available to a limited number of site owners as it approaches general availability. If you are interested in participating, fill out this short form.

Did you think SPAM was a new phenomenon? Think again!

The first 400

The first spammer submitted 400 messages on 4th May 1978 to DEC-users - an early version of what we today call a PC (Personal Computer). The message was sent using ARPANET, the Internet’s ancestor.

Numbers are slightly up…

Since then SPAM has skyrocketed. Recent studies suggest that between 80 to 85 percent of all emails are SPAM. That would equal approximately 100 billion emails a day!

Most of it is caught by more or less intelligent SPAM filters. But for some reason we are still receiving special offers on Viagra, Cialis and letters from our “new” solicitor in Nigeria.

Today the World Wide Web’s (WWW) celebrates its 15th anniversary. 30th April 1993 the web’s code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed. From only a few websites in the early days the web has seen a remarkable growth. Given its size It’s hard to imagine that it has only been around for such a short time.

According to the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the world wide web is “still in its infancy”. More insight thoughts are available in an interview with Berners-Lie by BBC News posted earlier today (well worth a read).

Security updates in FF 2.0.0.13 introduced stability problems in the JavaScript engine. This is known to have caused sporadic crashes during JavaScript garbage collection. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and you can only presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

The latest version, Firefox 2.0.0.14 (released yesterday), eliminates the instability problems. In case your auto-update hasn’t done so all ready I strongly suggest you update Firefox immediately.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words.

To participate you need to remove all CSS from your website, stripping it entirely of its design. However, I only noticed this today (too late for once) so I’ll be in for next year, for sure!

To read more about this initiative, and have a look at how a lot of your fellow bloggers look in the “nude, then you should visit naked.dustindiaz.com