CodeWeek » Yahoo

Blast you, Farmville

Admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:03:07 +0000

“Blast you, Farmville. The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game.” Times And now this not so game has entered the real world. Oh don’t worry; it is not the scorching heat which you will have to suffer. Because Farmville has decided to enter the real world through MSN and Yahoo where more and more Sheppards await.

When Facebook was blocked, the first thing that came to many minds, “Oh! What about my crops, they will die”. O yes you guessed it right we are referring to Farms which have made everyone out their one thing they never despised in Pakistan, which is “virtual Sheppard”.
This bizarre digital addiction currently caters to millions of addicts around the world with a thousand of hours which go of waste. “It’s more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops.” Times

But how to they keep their players engaged? Why do the players keep coming back to the games? The main reason is what developers call “game mechanics”. These are the incentives which are provided to the players on winning. They may be points, coins, badges or even a chance to move on to the next level.

“Basically game mechanics are a way to get consumers addicted to things,” said Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners, which has backed many social mobile game companies. “They keep people engaged to keep doing things, as opposed to what goes viral quick: You click, you watch and then never see it again.” These incentives motivate the players into playing the game and others like it. This is called “game-ification of life,” where points, coins, and badges become an important part of life.

Now Farmville is moving very fast in entering the advertising world. Where many advertisers have noticed the increasing popularity of the game across the globe. The first branded crop in Farmville is just around the corner and is ready to catch up.
Well you don’t have to worry about your fields because as you are also scared of the ban so is Farmville. They sure can’t let their Sheppard stroll away from them into the darkness leaving the farms unattended. So here we are where Farmville decided to join us in the real world.

Announcing Your Arrival On Search Engines

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:00:12 +0000

Contributed by Faisal Shehzad

With the increasing importance of web presence many ways have been developed to promote a web site. I‘ll discuss on search engine because it’s the most effective and easiest way.

Announcing your arrival on search engines:

The tabs below go directly to the add URL pages of major search engines:

Azoos
AOL Search
AltaVista
Google
Lycos
Inktomi
MSN Search
Yahoo

1. Use META tags.

Most search engine will look inside META tags in your web page. Here is the example of how to use tags.

These META tags should be put in . In “description”, put the brief description of your page. In “keywords”, list the keywords that you think your visitors will find your site by typing those keywords. You can separate each keywords or description by using comma (,) as shown above.

2. Page Title

Infoseek will use your title as the priority in their search process. Name your title carefully. Try and thinki about which keywords your visitors will type to find your page. Yahoo also uses such page titles and the descriptions which you submit during search.

3. Contents of your page.

Some search engines such as Excite will not read META tag but it will look at the content of your site. If you use image map, please make sure that you also have words as alternatives.

4. Don’t repeat the same keywords more than 5 times in META tag.

Lycos, will ban your page (by placing it down the list or not listing it) if they find that you are repeating words to improve the ranking.

5. Make sure that there are keywords in 3 places.

Yeah! Make sure that there are keywords in 3 places: META tags, page title, and contents of your page.

Search Engine Secret:

Only some people are aware about the time a search engine takes to submit and process.

Search Engine:	Processing Time:	Use	How it works:
AltaVista	1-3 days	Yes	AltaVista will look for page titles and description in to match search keywords. About a month after your submission, it will revisit your site to find other pages to be added.
Excite	4-6 weeks	No	Excite will look at the words in your pages. Make sure that your pages contain keywords that visitors will use to search for your page. Excite follows links on your pages to find other pages on your site which need to be added. It will also follow frames links and may index the pages inside your frames.
HotBot	3-5 weeks	Yes	Pages which have keywords in will be rated higher than pages that do not have . It will analyse both META tags and page titles, so make sure keywords are in both places. Some common words such as “the,” “Web,” “A,” or even “HTML,” are ignored. If your page has a specific word, it will be ranked higher.
Infoseek	immediately	Yes	Infoseek will look for page titles that match keywords (typed by visitors). If you think most of your visitors will type “CGI” as a keyword, so title your page with this word. You can frequently update your record on more than 1 time in 24 hour.
Lycos	4-6 weeks	Yes	Lycos will index the popular words in your page, so make sure that contents of your page contains keywords. It also looks in , the keywords have to be there. Similar to Excite, it will index frames pages.
WebCrawler	4-6 weeks	Yes	WebCrawler lists page titles, so it’s a good idea to name your titles relevant to keywords. WebCrawler will not spider all your site. Submit each page separately.
Yahoo	4-6 weeks	No	Yahoo will keep your site in its categories. You may be listed in one or more categories depending on your contents. Searching process will match your page title with description you give them. You may need to submit your site several times before getting listed.

Mailing lists:

Yahoo maintains a huge resource of mailing lists.

Newsgroup:

Deja News service is a great way to search Usenet newsgroups for particular topics.
www.announce is a forum where people post new site announcement.
There are also some more than hundreds news sites which are doing the same work.

Web Page Directories:

There are many directories growing every day around the world. Consider Yahoo. They maintain a huge resource.

Commercial service:

We no longer maintain the list of commercial submission services. If you’re interested in commercial service, please visit our sponsor, AAA Internet Promotion, to help keeping this site alive:)

AAA Internet Promotions offers a variety of web site promotions. The program is very interesting. You can ask for a regular directories listing service or even ask them to write PR letters sending to newspapers and magazines
to promote your site.

You can also find the lists of commercial submission services at Yahoo and web reference.

Miscellaneous:

Give your site an award.
There are many site, which can award your site as the best, and if you submit your site to them then there are many chances to be on top.

Free submissions:

Gelon.net – Use this JavaScript to register you page in popular search engines.
Submit Express – Free website URL submission to more 40 top search engines and directories
Bizpromo.com – You can fill out one form and submit your site to all of major search engines at one time!

This work requires time and research. But if an individual is devoted then a site can be on top of many search engines.

First look @ Yahoo Meme!

Admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:00:17 +0000

Contributed by Asim Zeeshan

Twitter is the popular micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read short 140 character messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are also known as followers. Twitter is not just the popular micro-blogging service among its users but their competitors envy it too. In the recent past, we have seen Facebook copying some of the privacy settings from Twitter and enabling the SMS-access to its services, just like twitter.

Now Yahoo has introduced a beta service called Meme! Although in a limited invitation-only launch. the service seems promising.

It has a smart and simple look with a great user interface. This is the same reason why Twitter is such a bug success; they kept things very simple and accessible. Why Yahoo wanted a clone of twitter? You may ask. The answer is, it’s NOT. Although the Idea has been stolen from twitter but unlike twitter it supports Images, Videos, Audios and Text posts.

Let’s have a look inside Meme!

The dashboard (the first page that you see after you login) is pretty simple and easy to understand. The updates from your subscribers (or the people you FOLLOW, same concept as Twitter) are shown here. The latest ones are on top. With each update you see author’s display picture, date and time when this post was posted (just like twitter) but then there are more options that Twitter does not have. You will notice that there are two buttons on the right hand side, one for REPOST (same as Re-tweet in Twitter) to again post the same image, video, audio or text and share it with your subscribers. These is also a REPOST COUNTER, it informs how many times this post has been REPOSTED. Pretty simple!

The toolbar is self explanatory too. Click on the kind of post you are going to give to your subscribers.

Post a Text Message. It has a 2000 character limit (pretty huge) if you are posting a text update.

Post a photo message

Post a video update

Comparing Meme with Twitter

Meme has successfully translated the success of Twitter and the power of a blog to create a new service that has the ease of sharing content and maintaining a blog at the same time. We are yet to see how it’s welcomed in the online community after its public launch.

Restrictions / Policies

Meme has restrictions unlike Twitter to restrict its usage for Cloned, SEO, Marketing, Pirated and Automatically generated content accounts.