Did Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google Sites and Google’s Blogger all get attacked yesterday to silence one man? According to the testimony of a Facebook executive, they did.

A blogger in the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu was the victim, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. The claims cement earlier reports that social networking sites have been dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis, leading to the first simultaneous attack on the largest social media sites. Kelly told CNet::

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Google is quoted as saying:

“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

As part of the attack, spam was sent to LiveJournal users that appeared to come from cyxymu.

Source

It was seen that twitter has been down yesterday , along with Facebook and LiveJournal due to the long DDoS attacks on their servers. Facebook some how did manage to get back up and provided users with their fast loading web pages even after the attack.

Twitter and LiveJournal went down hard, Facebook stayed mostly online but was clearly under strain

Now, nearly 24 hours later, Facebook and LiveJournal appear to be performing normally. But Twitter is down completely and has been for the last few hours. All third party services have been completely unusable for the last 20 hours or so (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Power Twitter, etc..), bringing down the entire Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter.com site itself hasn’t been reliable either.

Check our twitter status blog : http://status.twitter.com

Google on Wednesday took another step in its Web video strategy by announcing its intention to buy On2 Technologies, a creator of high-quality video compression technology.

Google engineering director Jeremy Doig said in a statement issued Wednesday morning that he could not talk specific product plans, but that Google was in favor of improved Web video.

“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform,” Doig wrote. “To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”

On2 claims that more than 2 billion units of its On2 Video VPx codecs, which include On2 VP6 for Adobe Flash Player and JavaFX, On2 VP7, and On2 VP8, have been installed. Customers include Adobe, AOL, Skype, Nokia, XM Satellite Radio, Sony, Yamaha, TI, LSI Logic, Analog Devices, VideoEgg, Brightcove, and Cox.

“In the meantime, we expect nothing to change for our customers and partners,” John Luther, director of marketing at On2, in a blog post. “We’ll continue to do our best to provide the great technology and service that our customers expect, and we look forward to signing on the next generation of customers to On2 video. We remain as committed as ever to serving you.”

The company said it expects the deal to go through by the fourth quarter of this year. It’s still subject to review by stockholders and all the relevant government agencies.

Source

If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

More precisely, Nielsen has compiled data from its NetRatings panel of 250,000 US Internet users and discovered that there are fewer young people on Twitter than on the Internet as a whole: one quarter of US Internet users are under 25, Nielsen says, but only 16% of Twitter users lie in that age range. While Nielsen is only measuring people who visit Twitter.com (not desktop and mobile clients), the analytics firm additionally claims that over 90% of TweetDeckusers are over 25, making it unlikely that there are masses of uncounted young people on third-party Twitter apps.

Source