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It was at the forefront of the social-networking revolution and it is now ten years since Friends Reunited launched in Britain, helping millions of Brits join up with old school friends. Old flames, nosey-parkers or just reminiscent class-mates signed up in droves and the sight captured the UK public’s imagination in the UK long before MySpace and Facebook took the concept several steps further.

Friends Reunited was the brainchild of husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst – a true example of the potential of the internet in changing people’s lives. At its height over 20 million registered users were signed up to the site and the ‘back-bedroom’ creation was sold for £175 million to ITV in 2005. However, as popularity dwindled with the free-to-use competition overtaking it in terms of features, ITV sold the site to Brightsolid – a subsidiary of publisher DC Thomson – earlier this year for just £25 million. Yet the site still attracts around 1.3m unique visitors a month.

Stable-mates Friends Reunited Dating and Genes Reunited suggest that the concept of Friends Reunited is still strongly linked to ‘proper friends and family’ and not just acquaintances or online followers that Facebook and the like are often criticised for.

What the next ten years holds in store for the site we wouldn’t like to guess but in the short to medium term at least we would expect a high proportion of ‘new’ internet users citing Friends Reunited as one of their favourites. It remains simple and effective and easy to use whatever your level of internet understanding, something that is likely to stand it in good stead for the next decade.

Do you still use friends reunited? Do you think it still has a role to play in social networking?

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We found an interesting post on the Virgin Media Business Blog about the way Britain’s High Street Banks are using Twitter to stay in touch with customers – or rather how they are not.

Given their recent track record in terms of customer confidence and the fact that a free service like Twitter allows businesses to interact quickly and efficiently with customers you may have expected the Banks to be leading discussions and the use of Twitter as a business to customer tool – yet they are far behind.

The research carried out by Virgin Media Business shows that despite the big high street banks being mentioned on Twitter almost 200 times a day, only one of them appears to be trying to embrace the technology. Lloyds TSB, has a nice branded page and appears quick to use Twitter to reply to questions – usually via links to relevant pages on its website – although it doesn’t appear to be promoting the service on its website.

However, following up on the revelations from the Virgin Media Business report we found Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Santander and NatWest seem only to have a mish-mash of presences promoting their good causes, corporate press releases and job openings – none of them having a central main account and are certainly not using Twitter to help advance customer service. Indeed, the lack of a corporate presence for one of those appears to be driving one 21 year-old American nicknamed Natwest to distraction.

Perhaps the security concerns of talking about money in a public forum like Twitter and possible compliance  issues may be holding some of the banks back but it seems that one of their number has found an effective solution and as more and more people look towards their lives being internet driven perhaps that just might help them steal a march on their rivals.

Do you think the Banks should be doing more? As a customer do you use Twitter as a first point of call for queries?

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Possibly as part of its cost reductions, but certainly part of a push towards usability, the British government has open sourced some of its own custom-built software.

It will make it easier for developers to create applications that access its backend systems thanks to a released of  a CKAN module for the Drupal content management system (CMS). The module is being made freely available for anyone to “review, use or modify”.

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We seem to have more passwords than close friends nowadays and the combinations of numbers and letters are already difficult to remember but now experts at the Georgia Tech Research Institute are suggesting anything less than 12 characters could be quickly cracked.

The issue is the additional computing now on offer, in particular the processing power of the chips now becoming the norm on graphics cards.

The researchers have discovered that the number-crunching power of modern graphics cards could offer a new way of cracking passwords, with their power on par with multi-million dollar supercomputers built just a decade ago.

The research found seven character passwords ‘hopelessly inadequate’ and with processing power increasing year on year, a combination of upper-case, lower-case, numerals and symbols in a 12 character password offered better protection.

Do you think passwords are becoming an unsafe security measure?

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If your business shows some eastern promise we’ve got more domains to expand your horizons. We’ve extended our choice of domain names again giving you a world of possibilities.

We know you like to have choice for your domain names so we’ve headed east again for our latest offerings to set your site apart.

If the Middle East is where you are heading, whatever your politics we have a choice for you. Dubai, or not to buy is no longer a problematic question as we now offer the .ae domains at a highly competitive price. The Middle East’s boom nation of recent years is set to be a popular domain so snap yours up quickly.

The Israeli .co.il offers exceptional value for those with connections to the Jewish state. If you are thinking of trading with Israel’s successful business community you’ve got to ‘Haifa’ this domain. We expect the demand for .co.il to be of biblical proportions so make sure you register yours now.

Closer to home, we’re sharing a great offer with .nl domains. We’ve gone Dutch to help offer you a perfect price to start marketing your Netherlands-related merchandise or Holland-based services . The residents of the low-lying nation built on lots of land reclaimed from the sea, will be looking to reclaim their online land too, so grab your .nl quickly before they clog them up.

And don’t forget we still offer a world of choice in terms of domain names.

Check the availability of your domain here.

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It’s probably one of the most irritating parts of your day. The time when just after switching on your PC it shouts back ‘Updates available’. Increased connectivity and improved approaches to security means that almost every piece of software installed on your system can now monitor for updates and let you know when they are available. You can set many of these to update automatically, but even then, if a re-boot is required ‘for the settings to take effect’ it can be frustrating and rather distracting to productivity.

So hands up who has got an update alert and then ignored it? Perhaps for a few hours, perhaps for a day or even longer? Would you do the same with your Anti-virus software, if it urged you to install updates? It’s unlikely. Most of us don’t want to be exposed to risk of viruses or security risks, yet many of the update patches for the software we use every day are as essential for the security of your system and information as your anti-virus software.

This week Adobe patched six ‘critical’ vulnerabilities in Flash Player and this was already the third patch for Flash Player this year. If people are ignoring the chance to install those patches for the Adobe plug-in that’s installed on an estimated 99% of PCs then that is a lot of people and businesses at risk. Also this week Microsoft issued a record 14 security updates to patch 34 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office and Silverlight.

Adobe has already committed to a quarterly patching schedule for its own Reader and Acrobat software and it seems the big software companies are having to work overtime to keep up with potential foes who are committed to finding security flaws.

Do you install updates as and when they become available?

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In the USA Amazon’s electronic book device, the Kindle, has been around for a while and the fact that the US site recently announced it was selling more digital books than hardbacks suggests the concept has taken off well the other side of the Atlantic. Yet until now, the Kindle has only been available in the UK by shipping it over the water .

With the launch of Apple’s i-Pad and a swell of touchscreens to follow many have been predicting that it is too late for Kindle now to make an impact in the UK. But is it? Amazon have resisted calls to make the gadget touchscreen, are proud of its claim of ‘one month’ battery life and have always only ever marketed it as an e-reader.

Yet, the first UK Kindle’s being despatched this time next month might just lead a revolution. The Kindle is no longer an e-books-only device. The Kindle will launch in two formats at the start of September. The basic version boasts WiFi as a way of downloading e-books, while the premier version is smaller, faster and lighter and also boasts Free 3G wireless that works globally. It’s portability and global appeal makes it the perfect travel partner. There is also now an experimental web browser integrated and since the publication of the Kindle Development Kit (KDK) developers have also begin developing adds-ons. The first two Kindle-ready games have been launched this week.

Both the games are not too dissimilar to free smartphone applications and both word games, appealing to the market of likely Kindle owners. Both free, they are set to be pioneers in a new set of apps to be developed that Amazon is now promoting. Amazon is working with select devs on a limited basis and has not yet released the KDK to all, but expect that to change once the e-reader is on wider release.

So we can see the appeal for the widely-read traveller but having yet to see one in person will reserve judgment as to how successful it will be.

Are you contemplating buying a Kindle? Do you think the touchpads have killed it off before it can get started?

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With identity fraud a rising concern and the quest to keep personal information private at the forefront of most of out minds it may be time to audit what information about you is available out there on the internet.

Did you know that when you register a domain name, the registration details are available to anyone who searches a public database online? The WHOIS database is a great tool if you are looking to find out who owns a domain name or perhaps who they are hosting their site with and was designed with the internet’s openness of information in mind. Unfortunately there are always some unscrupulous souls out there willing to abuse it.

The details stored could include your name, address, email and phone number. Some spammers will mine this for email addresses. It can even be used by scammers looking to steal or transfer your domain name which is why we suggest you lock your domains where you can.

If you don’t want all and sundry looking at your personal data however, there is also another product that can offer some protection. WHOIS privacy is available on certain domains at a low-cost annual fee but protecting your informaion could be priceless. Instead of your direct contact details being available on the database generic information from our privacy service is displayed. So you should avoid a slice of spam but for important information such as renewals and technical issues any correspondence will be forwarded straight on to your proper details. So you won’t miss out on legitimate enquiries either.

WHOIS privacy can be purchased at £4.99 per domain per year and is available for the following types of domain: .com, .net, .org, .cc, .me, .tv, .info, .biz, .mobi, .tel. You can add it to existing domains from within your 123-reg control panel or you’ll be prompted during the order process to add it when you purchase a new domain.

Plus don’t forget, if you are registering a .uk domain as an individual you can get WHOIS privacy for free by just choosing the WHOIS opt-out option when you purchase your domain.

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If you said “SEO what?” then you are probably part of a quarter of marketeers that a new report suggests know little of nothing about search engine optimisation.

Agency dotSEO have released findings that suggest 28% of SMEs aren’t even using relevant keywords on their website.

In the report Naked SEO, a fifth of those surveyed admitted to knowing about SEO but not committing any marketing budget to it compared to only 14% who responded that SEO was strategically important to their business. Nearly a quarter admitted being unsure of the benefits of SEO while a further 14% said there were no benefits as far as they could tell.

The report also includes a new benchmark study into how 50 of the UK’s leading SMEs (as ranked by The Sunday Times) are optimising their websites for natural search. The study found that the majority are failing to take simple steps to improve search engine rankings, with only 28% using relevant keywords on their site.

The benchmark study shows 76% using heading tags in titles on their homepage and 64% using meta descriptions to give a good summary of the site but at the more technical end, the results were poor, with only 22% of page titles beginning with a keyword and only 44% having a clearly visible sitemap.

The full whitepaper contains the full results of the two research projects and mixes the findings with a series of best practice tips and examples.

Do you take SEO seriously? Do you understand what SEO is really about?

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