The largest earthquake that DC had till today was a 3.6 richter scale.

US Geological Survey confirmed the earthquake was centered in central Virginia at 1:53PM Monday August 23, 2011

Now, whats that got to do with the Tech World? We found out about the quake in Virginia through Twitter about 10 seconds before it reached New York City. Now what do you think?

Gmail Chat Window

I spent few hours on this without any clue. I tried Gmail’s troubleshooter but without any luck. Clearing cache/cookies, restart, different browser..nothing worked.

The error message was misleading in the sense that this was not a problem of the internet connection and has nothing to do with the company’s network. The problem turned out to be with my system date/time. It was not current!

Updating the system date/time solved the issue. Check this Google Support Page for more info.

While an increase in Page Rank does not necessarily have a significant effect on the traffic to your site or your ranking for search queries, and that the effect of PR has been continuously decreasing on SEO; it definitely feels better to see a longer green bar in the Google toolbar.

Google Toolbar Page Rank

It has been quite a while since the last update, reportedly around April 2010. So it must have been quite a wait for a lot of people. We advise not to give too much attention to this single number and focus more on on-page SEO, quality content and quality back-links. That said, we hope everybody received a higher Page Rank on this update.

And what a perfect timing for a new Verizon Iphone4. While we are minutes away from the Verizon event at New York’s Lincoln Center. Here is what everybody’s expecting.
A
(1) CDMA, (2) white, (3) non-call dropping, (4) Unlimited Data Plan, (5) Verizon
IPhone.

Tune in.

UPDATE:
Iphone4 is featured on Verizon’s homepage.
Apple has a blog post with the release.
-Not the white version
-No LTE network.
-CDMA, that does not allow you to browse the internet while on a call
-Available for Verizon customers for pre-order from Feb 3 and available for everybody else from Feb 10.
-Same pricing as AT&T $199.99 for 16gb model, $299.99 for 32gb
-No Steve Jobs at the event.
-It has a CDMA-specific antenna design, different from the AT&T version to avoid the reception problems

If you are an AT&T Iphone customer, and want to see what your switching costs would be, use this calculator.

Gmail already has ads at the top of its Inbox and on its right side. The one-liner ad on the top is in a blue background with arrows to sweep through related ads. I personally find these particular ads cool if not very helpful and don’t think they look spammy like regular ads. CNET tried out a fun experiment with Gmail’s ads to study their behavior.

The ones on the right normally display as ‘More about…’ or a bunch of ‘Sponsored Links’. But they are not sore to the eyes. They may not be very pleasant to many but I feel like I’m okay with them, maybe because they’ve been there for a while and I am pretty used to it.

But this new ad on the bottom looks very distracting. Maybe its the coloring or positioning and I am not a UI expert, but it definitely looks spammy and very unlike-Google. I hope this test does not bear fruit and it never gets to the mainstream. Imagine if they start putting these ads between messages on an email thread, or between the Reply, Reply All, Forward buttons to make users unknowingly click on them.

This is so not chiming along with Google’s policies of serving better Gmail Ads either and needs to be stopped. Otherwise, this is going to be the first of many things to come that will start turning loyal users away from Gmail.

Update: Seroundtable experienced these new ads on December 13. So it looks like, its been going on for a while.

We encourage you to install this extension on Google Chrome and support this noble cause.

Download Google Chrome here, if you don’t already have it.

If you already do, install the extension here.

Chrome for a Cause

DecorMyEyes, an online retailer for branded eyeglasses, deliberately went after its disgruntled customers provoking them to spread their horror stories around the web on sites like Get Satisfaction. These reviews, as the Times reported, helped the company with all the back-links that falsely promoted it on Google’s search results.

Amit Singhal from Google mentioned in his post describing the algorithmic solution that its not the links from the reviews that provided it with the link juice; it was the links from the ‘authority’ sites like the New York Times and Bloomberg themselves that covered its stories. Byrne Hobart at Search Engine Land explains very nicely why you cannot reap benefits off of terrible reviews on Google. With this, Google’s prompt solution to this problem has become even more sketchy.

First of all, ranking in terms of reviews (with or without using sentiment analysis) is itself flawed. What if I start paying people to write bad reviews for my competitor and good reviews for myself. This infiltrates the whole notion of free & fair competition on the organic search space and further dilutes the line between organic and paid search results. This technique not being the major factor, as mentioned by Singhal, however provides some relief.

Second, giving the users access to the review ratings on the results (for example, on hover, showing the ratings instead of the page-preview) may be a better option since the user can check the ratings and correctly discard the result despite its location on the search results.

DecorMyEyes definitely used black-hat techniques to gain good rankings. It is very tough or virtually impossible to develop a search engine that is totally unbiased and takes into account all these issues. But as Google says: “We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day”, there will always be people trying to manipulate the algorithm and use black-hat techniques to rank higher. What’s intriguing is, in this particular case, Ms. Rodriguez could not get any help from other stakeholders of the issue like the credit card companies, police or even the courts. Listings on Better Business Bureau carries no meaning these days since they look like a paid membership organization. So is there any way to shop online ‘safely’ ?

A custom 404 error page is supposed to replace the ugly ‘Not Found’ message that browsers show by default for non-existing or mistyped URLs. Such pages can go further than just the pretty notifications by providing options to route users to related pages or by offering search features so that they may find what they are looking for. But all this is for the human user. There is an additional requirement for search engines.

For Apache webservers, the following code redirects requests resulting in 404 errors to a custom 404 error page.

ErrorDocument 404 {path-to-the-custom-404-page}

Now, for search engines, if this is not setup correctly, the resulting page results in a ’200 OK’ status. What this effectively means to the search engines is, whatever URL the user supplied, is taken as a VALID page. The implications can be the search engines indexing that wrong URL. Search Engines indexing a lot of such wrong URLs for your site may have negative results. Instead of an error page, some people try to guess and redirect them directly to a related landing page. This can raise duplicate-content issues. Furthermore, if they are setup to redirect to the home page, it can get pretty ugly.

First thing, as a best practice, is to redirect them to a page which mentions that the URL does not exist and keeps them from bouncing off by providing related links, search features etc.

Second, you should make sure that the {path-to-the-custom-404-page} is not an absolute URL because this can sometimes result in a 200 OK status.

Third, you should make sure that your custom 404 page really returns a 404 status code. In PHP, you can achieve this by simply adding following lines to the top of your custom 404 page.

header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");

You can quickly check below to see if your custom error page is correctly returning a 404 status.

Some great tweets regarding this news:

BREAKING WORK TIP: Do not be the first one in your office to announce that Facebook is down

Facebook is down. Blame it on Obama.

Places on Facebook for Iphone

I have been a great fan and a regular user of Foursquare for about a year. Mayor of 9 places and about 20 badges so far. And I loved it. I still do. But things will change from today. Though Facebook Places is still not available here in New York City, I am sure it will be in no time. And there is no doubt that I will be one of the first ones using it.

What this means is, applications like Foursquare (and Gowalla and so on..) are going to be kicked out of business in no time. This is the ugly truth of the way businesses work around here. When you have 500 million users constantly visiting your site, there is nothing much a great innovator can do. They just become the good guys who give you nice concepts for you to grow your own business. Even being one of the most extensive users of Foursquare, I will start using Facebook Places pretty soon. Why would I have to open another application to check in (which in fact, only does check-ins), when I can have ‘Facebook’ do it?

While Foursquare was doing great, with rewarding and revenue generating features like partnering with companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods; all that may not be enough ground for it to stay in business now.

UPDATE: While it seemed as if Facebook Places was getting unveiled along with Foursquare and others as partners, it appears that they were not even given early access to the API. So much for good intentions from Facebook!