Well, it looks like the popular social networking site, Facebook, found a new friend and partner in FriendFeed. Facebook, recently acquired the three year old startup FriendFeed, in part, for their information aggregation technology.

The FriendFeed API was just released from the beta version just a few days ago, could that have sealed the deal? The amount Facebook paid for FriendFeed hasn't been disclosed, but executives from both companies seem very pleased with the deal. The two companies will operate separately for the time being, but are expected to merge in the future. FriendFeed's staff of around a dozen, will work at the Facebook facility in Palo Alto, CA.

Here is a portion of the statement released by FriendFeed on their blog Monday, "The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We've always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook's passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online." Will this purchase help Facebook win back some of it's fans from Twitter? What's your opinion? Leave a comment.

Well, I think everyone knows Twitter got hammered by the hackers again Thursday. If you are a Twitter user like me, you knew something was wrong when you couldn't log on. My first thought was that their servers were overwhelmed by the explosive growth they've been experiencing lately.

As it turns out, it was a DDoS "Direct Denial of Service" attack. It appears the outage was short lived but very disruptive. It comes at a time when Twitter is setting new records for attracting unique visitors to the popular messaging site. In June they reached over 40 million unique visitors, now that's a lot of traffic.

Twitter was not the only social networking site affected by the attack. It seems Facebook also showed some major slowing during the same time period. LiveJournal, a popular blogging site, also reported an attack lasting about an hour at about the same time. Coincidence? Google doesn't think so. Google has responded to the attack by assisting in the investigation of the outage.

The security systems Google has in place, prevented a more serious impact to Google related websites. Will they share their security expertise with the tweeting upstarts? I think so, Google has a huge investment in the overall security of the internet. Security experts have been concerned that simultaneous multi-site attacks may become more commonplace in the future. It's time to take a stand against it right now! The good news is, Twitter is back up and has resumed fielding our 140-character messages. What's your opinion? leave a comment.

That's the first thing that crossed my mind this morning when the popular comment service provider, Disqus went offline. For those of you who aren't familiar with Disqus, pronounced "discuss", they provide a service for extending the comments and discussions on your website. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application, and it's free to the general public. So, if you use WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Movable Type, or a host of other blogware, plug em in. I have found that it makes the commenting on this website much more interactive.

I've been with them for quite some time and since nothing like this had occured in the past, I was immediately concerned. I was pleased when I finally reached their site and found that it was a false alarm that caused the outage. I'm sure the companies reaction was much different than mine. It appears the automated security software used by their hosting provider to prevent hack attacks, made a mistake and took the site down when it perceived a (DDoS) Direct Denial of Service attack. It turned out to be a false alarm. The site was only down for around 30 minutes but I'm sure it seemed like hours to the folks at Disqus.

In a message posted on the Disqus website, it stated "The main lesson for us here is that, regardless of the reason, mishaps are mishaps, and an important machine shouldn’t cause an outage in the service. We understand that. This is actually happening at a time when we are making large moves around redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. This basically means that we are making sure something like this, while it could happen again, won’t impact the reliability and performance of the service." And so we have a happy ending. What's your opinion, leave a comment and you can see how Disqus works.

For the website builders and designers, there seems to be a standing question, which open source CMS (Content Management System) is best? I have been trying to answer that question myself for a very long time.

Google just released their popular Google Latitude for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Google Latitude is currently available as a feature of Google Maps for mobile or as an iGoogle gadget for your PC.