BeTwittered is a simple and comfortable gadget that you can add to your site, such as your iGoogle homepage.

Since BeTwittered is just a bridge between you and Twitter, it has to first log you into your account. Here is where things go horribly, horribly wrong.

1. BeTwittered does not use SSL to secure requests to its servers

All authentication information is transmitted to BeTwittered servers in plain text and is easily sniffable by an attacker, both on your own network and outside of it. You can read more about SSL encryption here.

Since BeTwittered passes your Twitter username and password unencrypted as GET parameters, it may as well be serving them to potential attackers on a silver platter (note that passing this data in a POST request would change nothing, security-wise).

Here is an example request:

http://betwittered.com/api/?_=1265242511260&req=verify_credentials&username=foo&password=bar

Ugh…

2. BeTwittered stores your username and password in unencrypted cookies

Because BeTwittered tries to keep you logged into Twitter, it caches the username and password, unencrypted, inside browser cookies.

This means that an attacker needs to simply look at your cookies to steal this information. This can be done using these methods, among others:

• using an XSS vulnerability
• sniffing the network traffic
• walking up to your computer

3. Because BeTwittered passes your authentication information to its servers, it's already insecure

If someone gets access to BeTwittered servers, it's safe to assume at that time that all accounts are potentially compromised.

Smaller sites generally cannot dedicate appropriate resources to securing their servers, which can make breaching them easier for hackers. Even Twitter itself was hacked numerous times.

The Alternative Solution

oAuth

If the endpoint application supports oAuth (Twitter has for months), do us all a favor and use it. Please.

oAuth allows delegating authentication to Twitter itself and only giving the application easily revokable limited access.

If BeTwittered were using oAuth, the user would be redirected to Twitter, where he or she would login. Then, the user would be sent back to BeTwittered, but now bearing special tokens. Any requests to Twitter would then be accompanied by these tokens, which would be validated by Twitter every time they're used – all of this without ever passing your password around.

You can find a nice overview of the oAuth architecture here.

Otherwise

If the endpoint application doesn't support oAuth, then

• use SSL encryption (https)
• store the authentication information on the server side instead of the client side in a cookie. Instead, use the cookie to store some sort of an internal ID pointing to this server-side data. Alternatively, encrypt the username and password via a secure salted two-way hash and only then store the encrypted version in a cookie
• make sure to stay on top of securing your servers (and give your sysadmin a raise). It's a time-consuming commitment, please take it seriously

Conclusion

What other secure authentication technique or tips do you know about? Feel free to share in the comments.

Oh, and this goes without saying – stop using BeTwittered, at least until they implement a more secure login option. I've alerted the creators about the issue and also started these threads on HN and Reddit.

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Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers.

Here is what clicking on the Retweet button used to do after you installed the Twitter script:

Twitter's Own Retweet

After Twitter rolled out their own Retweet, it simply took over the Retweet button that Troy's script added and everyone was happy. Right?

Wrong. Many users, including myself, were left craving the old functionality back.

The Newest Version Of Troy's Twitter Script

About an hour ago, Troy announced version 10.9 of his script which brings back the old functionality in the form of the "Comment" button. Here it is pictured below:

which yet again gives me the opportunity to edit the retweet:

Now we can have the best of both worlds – the new Comment button lets you retweet and edit while the Retweet button remains the same Twitter's own one-click Retweet.

Download Troy's Twitter Script

Again, here are the simple installation instructions to get Troy's Twitter script:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Credit

As before, all credit goes to the awesome Troy.

Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

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Are his other tweets just as original as "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"?

Not so much… After looking at TheSoftwareJedi's (that's our Dana) timeline out of curiosity, I saw the following gem which definitely takes The Most Useless Tweet To Date award in my book. Here it is:

Yup, it's real and it was not rhetorical or followed up by some witty response. Nope. This was it.

Well, the answer is right there, Dana, below the tweet. Also on your hand, in your car, house, and pretty much everywhere else. Oh, and since you posted from Twittelator, which is an iPhone client, my guess is your phone knew it too.

/Sigh

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Introduction

Let’s face it – the majority of the population doesn’t understand twitter. They don’t get its true value – all they see is an obnoxious social network full of exhibitionists tweeting about millions of mundane things of every minute of their lives.

Except, twitter is much, much more than that. In addition to all the wankers talking about themselves 24/7, of course. Twitter is what you make it to be. You can follow boring, uninteresting people with interests in growing cactuses (cacti?) and collecting fur balls. But you can also follow people sharing piles of interesting and useful information (see bullet points below). Just do me one favor and repeat after me: twitter is not only for publishing your detailed crapping schedule. Get over it, step over your prejudice, delay arriving to conclusions until after trying it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I was one of those people before and resisted joining twitter for many months, even years. I didn’t understand it either and didn’t want to voluntarily sign up for just another source of distraction. Here are my findings after joining twitter 2 months ago.

Real Reasons To Use Twitter

1. Most up-to-the-second updated search engine on things going on now

This is invaluable. Plane crash? Digg,com down? Searching twitter would yield instantaneous results because somebody somewhere is tweeting about it. And I’m not talking about biased and edited media – just real people.

Here is the perfect example of something that happened while I was writing this article. I was sleeping happily when some shaking woke me up. I couldn't figure out if I had just dreamt about an earthquake or one just actually happened. There was no more shaking, so I stumbled to my computer and did a quick twitter search for “earthquake”. Within seconds I knew it was indeed an earthquake, and within minutes what the magnitude was. Do you see value in this? I do.

2. Following important people in your field

Whatever your field is – web development, brain surgery, economics – anything, you will find colleagues whose ideas are interesting to you. You can also just follow plain geniuses, like Matt Cutts of Google or Om Malik of GigaOM. Believe me, a smart and interesting person makes sure to be interesting and smart on twitter as well, otherwise their audience drops off. Either way – you are in control. X and Y too boring for you? Stop following them and start following Z.

3. Keeping up with the latest news and updates

You can use twitter as pseudo-RSS by following, say, @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News), new posts on FML @fxxxmylife, or jQuery updates at @jquery. As events occur, you get instant notifications in your twitter feed.

4. You can talk to companies directly, in a public, open way

For example, I’ve gotten personal replies from Comcast (@comcastcares) and Hulu (@hulu) within minutes of tweeting to them. Because the tweets are public rather than private the way emails would be, there is more pressure to respond to everyone and do it faster. Got a problem? Chances are twitter can help. I also noticed that everyone is inherently polite on twitter – there are no dumb flame wars.

5. In my experience, you will actually get a lot fewer “taking a dump” messages on twitter than on Facebook

… especially with Facebook’s new design. Let me tell you a little secret about your friends – they are not all geniuses and their comment rate seems to be inversely proportional to their brilliance. So before you say that twitter is useless, think about your Facebook account.

6. I’m not one to care much for following celebrities or famous people

… however I still think it’s fascinating that more and more celebrities and prominent people get on twitter, seemingly bridging the difference gap between themselves and regular folks. For example, Ashton Kutcher @aplusk constantly tweets and takes pictures with his phone (mostly of his wife Demi Moore, who is also an avid twitterer @mrskutcher). The fact that you can tweet @ Ashton and he’ll undoubtedly read your message and maybe even respond is kind of cool if you think about it. What kind of a fan club gives you such proximity to your favorite celebrity? What kind of fanclub is better than twitter for celebrities themselves?

Twitter is what you want it to be. Twitter is what you make of it.

140 Characters

Twitter’s 140 message limit, is it a curse or a blessing? My opinion is that it was an absolutely crucial element in site’s appeal and remarkable growth – an average person wants to skim through headlines and read in detail only what seems interesting. Too much information = information overload, even if it’s only a few more characters. I don’t think twitter would have picked up, had it not had this harsh character limit.

What do you think? Did you even have enough attention span to read the above 3 sentences?

Want To Make Twitter More Fun?

Check out my cleverly named Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More article.

Use Digsby, Tweetdeck, and other apps to take twitter with you to your desktop. See Top 10 Reasons Why Digsby ROCKS for more info on Digsby.

Check out this greasemonkey script that augments your google search results with Twitter ones:

Twitter Prediction?

Will my twitter predictions come true by the end of 2009? Read them here (hint: they already have, see below).

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You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

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Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the one with a single open/close button. Or, even worse, the remote code is programmed into one of those garage opener buttons built into the car. A car burglar comes along, breaks the window, and trashes my car. Wow, an added bonus – a free entrance into the house!

Needless to say, this is bad already. How many of you lock the door between the house and the garage? What if you forget to do that as well? Is there a spare house key laying around in the garage? You may say “but I’ll hear the garage door open” but does it actually make you feel better? You will be present with an intruder in your house, which will scare the living shit out of you non-governator types.

So here’s my question to you, Internet, is there a garage door remote I can buy that has a programmable keypad, so that a password is needed for the button to work? In fact, it would be almost the same as the one that mounts next to the garage door. And can it not cost $100?

Twitter Security

This part is not about computer security, as you may have thought at first, although I did recently discuss it in the Clickjacking article. I also know that I’m not the first one to bring this issue up but I think it’s worth discussing some more. Consider this scenario:

You’re a cheerful, outgoing snowboarding enthusiast with 3000 twitter (plurk, facebook, or another social network but twitter is the most relevant example) followers. Or maybe you have 3 followers. There’s a 99.9% chance that your profile and updates are public (if you have 3000 followers with a private profile, you must be some sort of a chump. And yes, I did just make the stats up, want fight about it?).

So, on Friday night, you send the following tweet: “Gone snowboarding for the whole weekend. But not before getting piss trashed Friday night at the casino. Wooooo”.

Since anybody can watch your tweets absolutely anonymously and it’s extremely easy to dig up an address knowing very little about a person, what you just said was “If you are a burglar looking for the next opportunity, just drop everything and come on by Friday night. I will be far-far away but my house (located at 123 Main St) will be available for your robbing pleasures. You only have 2 days before anyone is home, so feel free to crash on the couch and eat my food. Don’t forget to feed the cat. Kthx.”

Is this a likely scenario? Not really, unless twitter raises the tweet length to more than 140 characters, but otherwise you see where I’m going with this. Don’t be stupid – avoid advertising exact details of your whereabouts, vacation plans, etc. There are plenty of uses for Twitter without giving up most of your privacy. Ask yourself: would you post a note with your whereabouts on your door every time you leave the house for a while?

How Do Trains And Buses Know Where They Are?

If you live in a relatively large city, you have seen relatively accurate bus and train arrival predictions and, in some cases, almost exact locations of each vehicle. For example, here in San Francisco we have MUNI stations with live maps of trains’ whereabouts and bus stops with bus predictions on small electronic displays.

What is the technology behind it? It cannot be just GPS, because trains go underground where there is no reception. If it’s a combination of externally mounted sensors, are they also placed outside, once the train gets out into the street? Or is it some sort of a 2-way GPS (a conventional GPS device is just a receiver) underground that switches to sensors above ground? I don’t know but I want to.

Train/Bus Drivers And Bathrooms

While I’m on the public transportation subject, here’s what I want to know: if you are a train/bus/trolleybus driver, what do you do if you NEED to go somewhere when you are half way down your route? All of us had such moments at least once, and sometimes you just HAVE TO drop the bomb, sink some submarines, drop the kids off at the pool, release the chocolate hostage, plant some potatoes, give birth to a VB programmer, down the proctoscope, bake some brownies, you know what I mean (if you don’t, you’re a senile muppet, what are you doing on the Internet?).

They can’t just leave the train in the middle of the street, can they? Have you ever seen one run out in the middle of the street? I’m really curious here.

All Of Dilbert

Is there a Dilbert collection somewhere that has every Dilbert comic in an easily browseable manner, ideally with ratings I can sort by? 100 Dilberts per page would be ideal. Ah, looks like the new Dilbert.com finally made it a reality: all Dilbert comics sorted by votes, 49 per page.

Where Can I Buy A Circus Tent?

Who sells them? The ones where elephants and clowns could fit. It could also double as a portable office.

Who Gets To Eat The Most Delicious Burger In Burger Commercials?

And where do I sign up? I’m serious.

● ● ●

Yeah, so that’s pretty much what’s on my mind right now. What’s on yours?

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Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function (credit: Wikipedia).

Clickjacking is hard to combat. From a technical standpoint, the attack is executed using a combination of CSS and iFrames, which are both harmless web technologies, and relies mostly on tricking users by means of social engineering. Additionally, the only server side technique against clickjacking known to me is “frame breaking”, which would cause a legitemate site to break out of any iFrames it may be embedded in. This is not always the desired behavior and is generally frowned upon.

Generic Example

In laymen’s terms, clickjacking means that it is quite possible for websites to trick you into, for example, clicking a button to show a cute kitty while in reality prompting a deletion of all your hotmail email. A malicious site uses an iFrame (which essentially allows embedding sites within other sites) with hotmail loaded inside and hidden using CSS (which is a web language for styling HTML elements). A button named “Show Me The Next Awwww Kitty” is then placed by the malicious site and positioned below the iFrame layer (manipulated by CSS, yet again). However, because the iFrame is hidden, it looks like the “Aww” button is all you’re clicking. Wrong!

Latest Example: Twitter

This morning a new, though harmless, epidemic hit twitter. Hundreds and thousands of messages saying “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6” started showing up. Clicking the link shows a simple page with 1 button:

Clicking (which I of course did) uses clickjacking to repost the message to your own twitter account. Take a look yourself: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=don%27t+click.

All of these are a result of an experiment by some French guys to mess around with twitter and show the effects of clickjacking. Thank you for that, French guys. Creating awareness via the most social platform on the web is the best thing they could do for us.

Fight Clickjacking

James Padolsey recently wrote an excellent blog post about clickjacking and mentioned Twitter specifically. Because clickjacking relies mostly on social hacking (i.e. tricking people into clicking malicious links and buttons), Twitter is nothing but a perfect platform. James gives some nice background info and code examples. He correctly highlights, as I did earlier, that clickjacking is not a software bug – it’s a malicious technique exploiting harmless technologies.

So how does one fight clickjacking?

At this point the most reliable way is to use Firefox and the NoScript extension. NoScript provides a simple, yet amazingly effective feature, called ClearClick. From their site:

“…it's enabled by default, protecting NoScript users from Clickjacking everywhere: it even remains active if you switch NoScript in the less safe Allow scripts globally mode. How does it work? Clickjacking hides or displaces or partially covers something you wouldn't want to click, if you could see it in its original context. ClearClick does the opposite: whenever you click a plugin object or a framed page, it takes a screenshot of it alone and opaque (i.e. an image of it with no transparencies and no overlaying objects), then compares it with a screenshot of the parent page as you can see it. If the two images differ, a clickjacking attack is probably happening and NoScript raises a "ClearClick warning", showing you the contextualized and "clear" object you were about to click, so you can evaluate by yourself if that was really something you wanted to do.”

Did ClearClick work in the earlier twitter attack? Sure did! After I clicked the “Don’t click” button Noscript promptly popped up a warning showing the hidden iFrame (since the original malicious page has been removed, I found another similar page from the same author for screenshot purposes).

So, even if you don’t want to enable NoScript globally, install it anyway, just for ClearClick.

That about covers what I had to say about clickjacking. Stay safe, folks!

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Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, it’s a new fad. It’s like you’re not cool anymore if you don’t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldn’t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone else’s ideas – it doesn’t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and they’re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

• predictions I pulled out of my ass, like “the market will bounce in August 2009” because some random douche said so.
• a collection of stolen ideas. I have reserved a separate post for that purpose.
• a raptor on hoverboard.

Things That Need To Happen

1. Socially Editable Maps

With the advent of the GPS technology in the last couple of years and GPS prices falling (my originally $800 Garmin Nuvi 660 now costs about $200), the biggest frustration I have now is the accuracy of information. In the world of Google Maps and Wikipedia, why is it that I have to wait a whole year for map updates that are obsolete by the time they come out? The Bay Bridge repairs change the roads on an almost monthly basis, for example.

I want to know about road changes as soon as they occur.

The next big thing will be a company, either existing, like Google, or a startup, that will introduce the social aspect into the mapping technology. It will do for maps and GPS what Wikipedia did for text, using the same approach. The details are of course to be worked out.

After this concept becomes successful, GPS companies, will need to support such updates over the air, with a push of a button. This ties in closely with prediction #2 and #4.

2. Open Source GPS Goes Mainstream

Google, the father of Android, needs to get behind this one as well. In fact, an open source GPS device would really be a subset of Android’s functionality, in a dedicated device, so it shouldn’t be that hard. In the far future, it will be built into automobile dashboards but I don’t foresee that happening in the near future.

Combined with prediction #1, this will be a killer device. I really believe that free, open source software is the wave of the future, the natural direction of where software development is heading. Look at Linux in the past few years. Look at Android now. Release one and I’m be #1 in line for one. Those who know me IRL know that I can’t go anywhere without a GPS anymore. I once forgot a GPS at home and ended up in Chili.

3. Photo and Video Cameras Will Go Wireless, Anywhere You Go

Photo and video cameras will be able to post pictures and videos to your home computer, sites like Flickr and YouTube, or email themselves directly to your friends… as soon as you record them, over cellular and Wifi networks.

Cell phones with cameras? Think cameras with cell phones. Some Wifi enabled cameras already came out, like this Canon SD430 (DP review here), and this freshly announced at CES 2009 Sony G3, and now it’s time to go cellular.

The next prediction is a generalization of this concept.

4. Wireless Connectivity Everywhere, In Every Device, Anywhere You Go

Cell phone carriers will sign an increasing amount of deals with companies that want to build devices which connect to the Internet or private networks anywhere you go: GPSes, cameras, digital picture frames, cars, fridges.

The future is completely wireless. People are sick and tired of cords, clutter, and Rick Astley – I know that for a fact and digg says so.

5. Android Will Become Hugely Successful

Alright, I’m dead tired of all the posts about how Google’s Android is going to flop in 2009. I sincerely feel that people with that point of view have never experienced Google and open source, played with Android itself, or realized what exactly an open source phone OS means to developers, manufacturers, and consumers.

Android will become a platform of choice in the next couple of years as everyone starts to realize its limitless possibilities, the OS matures, thousands of new apps get written for it, and new Android phones flood the market. The only Android phone released so far, HTC’s G1, has already received praise from consumers, as well as my friends (even the females ones are excited. And yes, I have female friends).

Motorola announced a few months ago that its new phones are going to run Android and Windows Mobile exclusively. If a company with an R&D department as big as Moto’s stands behind something, you bet your ass they’ve done they’re homework. And what’s not to like? They can now:

• take something that’s supported by the biggest Internet company in the world and the community, for free.
• stop worrying about writing and maintaining their own OS – BAM, tons of money saved.
• concentrate R&D on the hardware.
• if need be, freely develop the features they want that Android doesn’t support yet and contribute them back. Everyone wins, except maybe Symbian developers that don’t have a job anymore.

Android is going to be a revolution. Apple and Android fighting it out will be the best thing that happened to us since the invention of sushi.

6. Open Source HDTVs

The open source revolution will continue and start penetrating the HDTV market.

Personally, I think set top boxes are a waste of effort, time, and money but give me an HDTV that can run Youtube, Vimeo, LastFM, Pandora, and any other site through some sort of a plugin or browser, with a build in Media Center that connects to my computers and goes Wifi, that uses open source, upgradeable software (most likely Linux based), and I will buy it in a heartbeat.

Yes, what I’m saying is if my TV and HTPC did something dirty, I would totally dig their offspring, and so would millions of other people who don’t want/need/care/understand HTPC. TV in general holds a special place in my heart, and make it an even better experience, people.

7. Twitter’s Popularity Will Explode

Now for some social media. Twitter will continue dominating the microblogging arena, similar to YouTube dominating the video space. The site will grow extremely fast, much faster than now.

Competitors, like plurk, will probably secure certain small niches but nobody will be close to touch twitter.

Twitter’s significance in the business world for will be revolutionary. It will become second nature for every company to have one or many twitter accounts as means of connecting to consumers on a personal level. Think an opportunity for mini press releases, many of them, daily, not boring ones, the ones people are actually going to read.

8. Social Media Jobs Will Be In Increasing Demand

SEO, social marketing, and viral campaigns are very cost effective ways of brand promotion, and every company will want to jump on board.

As more and more of them realize this, they will start needing more people with marketing skills of John Chow, Chris Brogan, Nicky Cakes (this dude is hilarious), Jeremy Schoemaker, and the like.

9. YouTube Will Continue To Dominate

This one is easy:

• Biggest user base.
• HD. My favorite greasemonkey plugin YousableTubeFix exposes hi/lo FLVs, MP4, and HD MP4 options. Better quality equals better user experience.
• Chromeless player. YouTube is the only company I know of that has a Javascript controlled chromeless player, which can be embedded in any other flash player. Combined with already existing millions of embeds all over the Internet, YouTube’s popularity isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
• Google backed. Anything is possible when you Google owns you. Competition releases a good feature? YouTube has the resources to one-up it in no time. Need for more servers? YouTube will just buy a few thousand more with the $1.65Bln Google gave it. Traffic explosion? No problem – YouTube has been mooching off the Google CDN for months now.

At the end of 2007, I predicted that in a year we will experience unprecedented HD quality online video. This prediction came true when Hulu and fueled by its success CBS, ABC, NBC, and pretty much every other TV network released their free online TV sites. YouTube launched HD a few months later.

So, my YouTube prediction for 2009 is it will sign deals with major TV and movie networks to finally start showing legal TV episodes and movies. It will become the biggest legal TV and movie hub on the Internet.

10. PostgreSQL Will Gain Popularity

Sun’s buyout of MySQL in 2008 surely sent some shockwaves around. However, I predict that the following factors will contribute to PostgreSQL gaining momentum:

• certain features of MySQL were moved to Enterprise only. Open source enthusiasts don’t appreciate an open source project going partially closed source, so they will be looking for alternative software, like PostgreSQL.
• having spent years with MySQL, I am incredibly frustrated with certain quirks that should have been worked out a long time ago. As software architects look for stable, mature, cost effective, and easy to maintain databases, they will find PostgreSQL increasingly attractive.

Don’t take my word for it. I highly suggest taking a look at this whitepaper comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL. here are some highlights:

• Online operations and reorganization. This is my biggest beef with MySQL. Almost any ALTER table command will prevent writes to the table while it’s being altered. This operation requires double the table size because an ALTER simply makes a copy of the table, a rename, and then drop of the old one. This takes FOREVERRRR. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, supports a lot more online operations that will not take down the table. MySQL promised to support online ALTER TABLE by 2009. Will they keep their word? I highly doubt it.
• PostgreSQL supports function based and partial indexes.
• PostgreSQL supports nested triggers.
• PostgreSQL supports user defined datatypes.
• PostgreSQL has an IP address datatype (woot!).
• MySQL’s default engine doesn’t support online backup and recovery (*cough*, MyISAM, *cough*). Don’t even get me started on MyISAM, which doesn’t support referential integrity, transactions, of any other ACID properties. Yes, I know, there's InnoDB. It’s a lot better. But it’s still not good enough.

If you have spent time interfacing with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, I’d like to hear from you. Everyone I talked to so far who had used both, preferred PostgreSQL.

For all the MySQL fanboys, I was and still am one of you, I use MySQL every day. I’m only trying to open your eyes so you can see the rest of the world.

In fact, I think the only reason MySQL is so much more popular than Postgresql nowadays is luck and marketing by MySQL AB (hey, it sure paid off, I’m not saying anything).

So, here’s to PostgreSQL having a bright future.

Bonus

As a bonus, here is a collection of links to other interesting predictions for 2009:

• http://www.pr-squared.com/2008/12/social_media_predictions_2009.html – a great list of social media predictions.
• http://battellemedia.com/archives/004772.php – 14 online predictions as well as analysis of past years’ predictions.
• http://news.cnet.com/5-predictions-for-2009/ – 5 CNET Digital Home predictions.
• http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/01/predictions-for-2009/ – Engadget’s predictions.
• http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/predictions-2009 – 38 predictions freedom and technology related predictions.
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2009_predictions_across_the_we.php – ReadWriteWeb’s predictions across the web.

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The main reason to use Digsby

1. Digsby saves all information, including IM names, groups, nicks, its own client settings, themes, etc (of course this excludes the password). If I'm logged in from two places, Digsby shows both away messages (at least in the widget). It just god damn works. Remember Trillian or Pidgin? You make 10 groups on your home PC, stick 50 people in each, then go to your laptop at work and nothing is the same as it is at home! Digsby to the rescue.

Notice how I'm logging into a Digsby account, which will be used to retrieve and sync all of my settings.

Other reasons (everyone on Digg loves top 10 lists, right?)

2. Digsby seems to have great fast developers really in touch with the community. Any time there is a problem, they push a message to all users that comes in a form of a Digsby announcement popup. They try to fix problems and usually do it fast. There are bugs here and there but they're nothing critical. If you tried Digsby a few months ago and didn't like it for some reason, I encourage you to give it another try – they really do develop fast. From revision numbers, it seems Digsby developers use SVN in the 15,000 revision number range (that sounds pretty active) – hooray! I can monitor how relatively active Digsby is by comparing this number from time to time. When was the last time Trillian released anything that wasn't a miniscule bug fix? Trillian Astra reminds me of Perl 6 (ha ha, programmer joke).

3. For the first time ever I feel comfortable combining the same people that have multiple IM accounts into one entity (and renaming them whatever I want). I don't really care what IM pops up on their side as long as it reaches the destination. I can also arrange the IM accounts for that person in the order of IM preference, so if AIM is on top and MSN is on the bottom, Digsby will show the AIM icon next to their name, and if they're not on AIM, then MSN. You get the point. I can always pick which account to send from and to at any point during the conversation.

Thaya, you're now popular (Sorry!). And a freak, with so many accounts. Do I give a crap which of his 7 accounts Thaya is logged into? That's right, I don't.

4. Digsby supports Facebook chat just as if it were AIM or MSN (except people sign on and off a lot more often and you can't delete them from the list). It also supports Facebook, twitter, and MySpace (ugh) mini-feed-like updates straight to my desktop. In fact, I get to actually see every Facebook update, which is not the case with the mini-feed (it filters way too much). Additionally, I can set my current status without logging into facebook.com.

5. The Digsby widget, yeah, check it out on the right. There's no need for you to be logged into anything to send me a message. And the cool part is that all visitors show up right in my list the moment they enter the site and disappear the moment they leave, so I know how many people are online at any given time. Feel free to try it out. I already had a few interesting discussions with visitors who are complete strangers and I'm loving it. You can even consider it a mini live tech support.

6. I LOVE how you can customize where and which icons show up in your IM list. Online status, IM network, and a mini buddy icon, left, right, any combination. Such a fine grained seemingly small feature but a very nice touch.

7. Reply box in IM popups. I just type my short answer in there if I don't want to bother popping the main chat window back up. Now if only there was a keyboard shortcut to activate that little box (who wants to mouse any more?)…

8. The first client where updating my Winamp status to all the networks actually works. Yes, others may have it too but so far everything I've tried was buggy. For example, Google talk updates once, and then forgets about it. Digsby never forgets.

9. Skin support with many customizations. http://digsbies.org/site/project/Skins is a good place to start.

10. New email notifications support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, IMAP, and POP3. The last 2 are of special interest.

Now my wishlist

Come on Digsby, you can do it!

• a Linux client. It's supposedly coming soon, but how soon? Windows is the only platform supported today.
• Edit: steve from digsby messaged me with this: MSN reconnect bug is fixed and will be pushed in the next update. Reconnect doesn't always work when I get my network back or come back from sleep mode. Just make it work, Digsby. Especially bad is MSN, it just never wants to reconnect (but hey, that was my main complain with Trillian for the past 3 years). I see this a lot:

• RSS feed integration, similar to how Facebook integration works. I want to read planetmysql.org posts as soon as they get there.
• transparency. What's up with that? I want everyone to at least squint trying to read my messages behind my back. Ideally, a window would solidify when it gets focus and go transparent again when it loses it (put it all into settings, though, let me control it).
• I can't italicize, bold, etc a word or a selection. It just does it to all the text I'm typing. That should be common sense.
• Added 06/15/08: off the record mode + encrypted conversations would be really sweet.
• sometimes the contact list changes don't sync fast enough, so if I close Digsby and reopen it, they won't be there. I'd like to see a live save status, something that turns green once everything is synced.
• minimize to tray. I can already close to tray, but I want to minimize to it too – hey, I'm used to it from AIM. Wanna fight about it? Fixed a long time ago.
• I'd like to have a setting to not show Digsby in the task bar, like Trillian. There’s a setting for this already that I missed, it’s under ‘Buddy List’, thanks steve from digsby.
• It's not always obvious inside the chat window when a friend goes offline, for instance for AIM. It's also not always obvious if you're IMing someone who is not available (there should be a warning back in response to an IM).
• it's not clear if a person who IMed me is in my contact list. I'd like to know that, as well as which group they belong to.
• the close button that suddenly shows up on each tab when I hover is very annoying and sometimes I close IM windows by mistake.

So take Digsby out for a spin, I guarantee you'll like at least something about it.

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