I had the strangest experience on Facebook recently. I logged into my own account and entered the name of a friend into the search bar. Upon hitting enter, I suddenly found myself looking at status updates from people I didn’t know.
My original reaction was ….”who the heck are these people?” Then I realized I was logged in as someone else! I wasn’t logged in as the friend I was looking for either… it was a complete stranger!
I have absolutely no idea as to how I suddenly entered this person’s account, but I did. I was able to view EVERYTHING – their privacy settings, contact information, and more.
What did I do? I logged out immediately and sent an email to Facebook via a copyright infringment form – since it was the only contact form I could find.
What could have happened? If I were the non-ethical type, I could have done some damage in this person’s account.
The lesson. Not all Facebook account hacks are done maliciously. If you find that your account has been compromised, it may have been an accident.
If you’ve seen a sudden drop in keyword rankings for long-tail keyword searches, then your site possibly could be affected by the latest Google algorithm change – “Mayday”.
According to a recent You Tube video, Matt Cutts explains the change happened between 4/28 – 5/3 – hence, the name “Mayday” (which was coined by the webmasters on Webmaster World).
Cutts goes on to say that this change is “deliberate” and “permanent”. He also explains that the change affects long tail searches rather than broader searches. Google made the change specifically as a quality issue. Their goal is to serve the highest quality sites that best match long tail search queries.
Goolge makes close to 400 algorithm changes a year, so don’t get nervous and think that suddenly your website traffic will drop. Not everyone is affected by the latest change. If you own a very large site with many individual pages that are only found via many clicks from the home page, you may see a difference in your long tail rankings.
So, what do you do if you’re site is affected? Take a good look at your content and ask yourself is the content really relevant to the long tail keyword? You may also need to do some create re-shuffling of your website pages if you see a dramatic drop in traffic.

Facebook and Privacy are a combination of words that have been handcuffed together and receiving a lot of attention lately. In a post we wrote earlier this week, we discussed the announcement that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made on Wednesday afternoon that satisfied many Facebook users: Facebook simplified its privacy controls.
The old setup confused and irritated many people. The privacy settings page contained a lot of text and more than 100 different control settings to choose from. The array of customizable controls essentially complicated the privacy settings and Facebook users found it difficult to figure out what information they were sharing.
We want you to know all about the new and improved privacy control features Facebook is rolling out. The blog, All Facebook, put together a summary guide of the 10 Things You Need To Know About Today’s Facebook Privacy Changes.
The full article contains all the good details- below we provided you with a quick look of the list of the 10 things we think you should know about:
Take a look at the new Facebook privacy control page. Let us know what you think about the simplified features.

Attention Facebook Users: Facebook is simplifying its privacy controls. Facebook has been growing and making many changes to the site over the past few years. Recently, Facebook tried to give users’ more control over their privacy settings- but all of the customization options were just too confusing.
In response to many complaints and criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company would “simplify” privacy controls starting with a re-designed privacy settings page.
So what does this mean for Facebook Users? On the official Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerberg posted, “Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.”
We will keep you updated by posting new information up on our blog about the new Facebook privacy features, so check back soon.
Mike McDonald of Web Pro News spoke with Vanessa Fox, founder of Nine by Blue, and Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist at SMX West in Santa Clara. Both spoke about how real-time search and social search affects marketers.
What does this all mean for marketers?
What happened this week in Social Media?
Facebook Location Feature Leaked
LinkedIn Celebrates it’s 7th Birthday
Foursquare Adds “Like” Button to Venue Pages
Twitter to Release “Embedded Tweets”
Microsoft Spindex Puts New Spin on Social Networking
Digg.com Cuts 10% of It’s Workforce
Have other stories to share? Let us know.
I was speaking with a client the other day about social media marketing and the benefits of getting involved. The client is new to the whole “social media thing” and had a great point of view. From his perspective, lots of companies either use social networking sites (like Facebook and Twitter) for shameless self promotion. Or, they only post nonsense, like what they had for dinner or how much they are enjoying the weather.
Seeing that he was very skeptical of the benefits, the topic of social media do’s and don’ts quickly arose. From this conversation, and other similar conversations I’ve had about social media, I compiled a list of common social media pet peeves. Here are the top 5 Social Media Pet Peeves that will surely turn off potential Twitter followers or Facebook fans.
So there you have it – the top 5 social media pet peeves. Have more pet peeves? Feel free to list them in a comment.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
When: Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Where: 50 Market St., Portsmouth, NH (Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce)
Cost: $65/pp if signed-up before May 8th. After May 8th – $75/pp
Description: This workshop is great for those that have a Facebook Fan page for their business, but need the know-how to take it to the next level.