US government sites have witnessed a similar attack during the last month, however, holding an individual or a group responsible is not easy because of the nature of DoS of DDoS attacks.

Twitter has always had issues with scaling the service purely because of the pace it is growing with and such attacks underlines the importance to have better infrastructure for services like Twitter who are experiencing phenomenal growth.

Twitter is not the only service that is attacked, Facebook also reported slowdown of its services due to the attack but has managed to defend itself to keep its services from going down completely.

While some say “Who cares” if these services functional or not, 45 Million Twitter users worldwide are certainly waiting for it to be back in action.

So if someone is jumping of the roof or shooting fake videos to enjoy Twitter limelight, wait up! Now is not a good time.

If you’ve logged into your Facebook account recently you might have seen a message like the one above. Facebook just announced its plans to offer Usernames to the users. Profile URL’s on Facebook have been very mechanical and non-user friendly so far but that’s about to change.

Users can now choose a username for themselves and access profiles by typing usernames in the address bar. This feature has been in the pipeline for a LONG time now but with the popularity of the usernames like the ones at Twitter (e.g. @tnerd) Facebook just couldn’t avoid it.

The option of registering these usernames will be available starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13 and they are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The following image shows what the profile URLs look like right now and what will they look like once you get a username.

To stop the immediate abuse of this service, Facebook is rightly restricting this option for the users who registered for a user profile after today at 3 p.m. and Facebook Pages created after 31st of May.

You can get your usernames on the following page www.facebook.com/username/ which is currently running a countdown.

So, be the first one to get your name and secure your identity on one of the most popular social networking sites!

If you see a message in your Facebook inbox which says “Visit atomclub.be” or “Look at dynasale.be” make sure you delete the message without visiting the site mentioned in it.

Few domains that are known to be used in the attack so far are.. www.151.im, www.121.im, www.123.im, areps.at , kirgo.at, atomclub.be,  dynasale.be, etc..

Facebook is trying to clear the mess up by deleting messages with any of the above mentioned or any suspicious domains. As the compromised accounts are being used to spread this attack across the network, Facebook is also resetting passwords of the accounts that are compromised.

Users can easily follow the steps in the email received from Facebook to reset their passwords and gain access to their accounts.

As expected the attack is not spreading virus at the moment it’s just phishing for login information and probably personal details mentioned on your profile.

So next time you see a message on your facebook profile asking you to visit some weird URL, be careful, make sure you do not use your Facebook login credentials anywhere else but on Facebook.com

Though I am not a prolific Facebook user or a big Facebook fan I don’t really think Twitter can beat Facebook at what it’s doing, here is why… (follow @tnerd on Twitter)

To understand why Twitter cannot beat Facebook, one has to understand the target audience of Facebook and what Facebook offers that Twitter (does not) cannot.

Facebook is a whole package which offers Photo/Video sharing, Scraps, Pokes, Gifts, etc.. to keep in touch with friends, offers a decent level of privacy over your content and a lot of other tidbits of information on the your Facebook home page which encourages exchange of information with your contacts and keeps the communication going.

On the other hand Twitter does not offer any of these. Its “What are you doing?” messages could be a lot prettier than Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” snippets but that ends there.

The way I look at it Facebook is a social networking platform where as Twitter is more of a Social Media tool than a Social Network platform.

Being different and offering varied services will work for Twitter and Facebook, it gives them enough room to grow in their respective targeted audience.

To understand which service will have an edge over the other in the long run its important to know what is Internet made of. Let’s look at what most of the people on the internet are looking for.

Alexa top 100 sites give a good picture of what people on the internet are most interested in and what services appeal to them the most.

I picked up the top 100 from Alexa and categorized just over 75% of the sites into different categories and rest 25% fall into News and Informational sites.

43% of the sites fall into the Top 3 categories, namely, Audio/Video Share, Porn and Portals. Social Networking falls into 5th place with 11% share.

Looking at the nature of the top 3 categories majority of the users are most likely to pick Facebook over Twitter as Facebook offers much more in terms of socializing and virtual communication interface which is more personalized.

Most people in top three categories are looking for much more than just reading someones updates, they are looking forward to make new contacts, not just contacts but also know the person on a higher level and not limit their conversation to “What are you doing” or “What’s on your mind”.

Bottom line.. in the current scenario Tech neutral users are most likely to choose Facebook as their mode of communication and social networking and users who are more tech savvy will go for Twitter that does not mean they will stop using Facebook. There will always be users who use both.

And don’t forget majority of the internet is made of Tech neutral users.

What do you think?

The newly introduced privacy options let you choose who sees what, you can control what information can be shared with the applications that are installed on your profile or even select what recent activities are visible on your profile or friends homepage or simply block one specific user from viewing your profile information.

Here is how you can secure your profile information further..

Once there, select any one of the options to modify your privacy settings…

On this screen you can individually select who sees what on your profile, pretty cool.

What’s interesting is that these options are introduced after the rollback of a controversial privacy policy on Facebook. After giving the users more control over their information I won’t be surprised if a new privacy policy is rolled out on the similar lines, but this time users have more control.

Click here to modify your privacy setting on Facebook and here to Install TNerd Facebook App

Facebook is all set to give away $1,000,000 as part of its fbFund. As part of the contest Facebook invited developers and entrepreneurs to participate in the contest by submitting an application and 5 winners will take away $225,000 each.

The contest in its first phase received about 600 applications which are narrowed down to 25 for the final phase. Now, in the final phase facebook opens the contest for voting to its users. Voting closes on 30th of November and the the top 5 voted applications will be announced in the week of 8th Dec.

It’s suggested that you watch a 30sec video and install the application before voting for any of the 25 applications.

Click here to start voting for your favorite applications and watch the following videos, these are our our favorite 5.

We tried our best to stick to 5 but ended-up with 9.

Daikon from Yuri Yamaguchi on Vimeo.

The online greeting that everyone can sign! from GroupCard on Vimeo.

Teach the People – The People Powered University from Jason Beckerman on Vimeo.

Weddingbook from Theo Buchinskas on Vimeo.

TrailBehind.com – Find Great Places to Hike from Andrew Johnson on Vimeo.

Wildfire Promotion Builder needs your fbFund vote! from Wildfire Interactive on Vimeo.

VOTE Check My Campus on Facebook from Evan Steinberg on Vimeo.

Social Arcade for Facebook from Richard Vanner on Vimeo.

Good Call Football from Theo Kipnis on Vimeo.

Compete just released July’s web statistics which show top sites based on the search criteria. Compete is a web analytics or a web tracking company. Which records online activities of over 2,000,000+ U.S. Internet users that have granted them access to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys.

We decided to take a look at the data to see where did online users spend most of their time in July 2008 and we found interesting trends. Some very crisp and clear and some which look good but mean something else or do they?

Biggest losers were MySpace, Yahoo and Live.com which noticed a drop of 24%, 11% and 8% respectively on "Total Time Spent" metrics. Top gainers were Facebook with 17% increase, Youtube with 9% and Pogo 6%.

Now here is something interesting.. Google witnessed an increase of 3% in total time spent on the site by users, while the number is colored Green which means its positive, I wonder if its really good for Google to see "Total Time Spent" by users go up. Google is a search engine and the soon the users navigate away from the site the better it is because it means that users actually found something they were looking for.

An increase in Total Time Spent on Google could actually mean that users spent some time on Google searching for the desired result. What do you think?

Here goes the list of top 10 sites in "Total Time Spent" metric for July 2008.

We (Nerds) released our first Facebook application which enables our readers to read articles on TNerd from within Facebook. All you have to do is install this application and it will start showing you latest articles from TNerd which can be shared with friends on Facebook.

This Application can also be shared with your friends on Facebook. I request our users to install the application and come back with great feedback. Also, share this application with your friends on Facebook and help TNerd grow.

As this application was launched very recently there are’nt many users of this application yet, but might catcup in the time to come. Though this application does nothing out of the box, its a good way of sharing links with friends.

While users may initially install this application because of its visual appeal, it will eventually prove to be a fad where the links and categories wont be updated often and end up removing the application from the profile.

What do you think? Will this application pick up pace on Facebook?

CokeTag Appearence on Facebook Profile Page:

CokeTag in its expanded form:

Google is certainly feeling the heat by now and they will certainly do something about it. Sheryl quitting for Facebook create more problems for Google as more and more Googlers might want to join Facebook now.