It is with fear and trembling that we noticed many people have compromised their privacy online so much so that exposing their most private information was not a worry to most people.  Every detail of their lives were recorded online, inclusive of their lifestyle pattern and behaviour.  Hackers online, or perhaps stalker from everywhere are able to trace a person accurately just by googling one’s information.

Did you hear that these days people are frequently mouthing new phrases such as, “ok, I’m gonna check out so-and-so online”, or “let me google this person and find out what kind of man he is!”

See how rich information are freely available online!

And not only that, there are websites that actually keep a record of what transpired from Adam’s!  www.archive.org is one such example.  Nothing escapes this “WayBackMachine” and before you know it, all the past information were kept and stored nicely in their server.

Recently we read a case where a young teenage girl in Florida had her birthday party swamped with 62,000 strangers from the Internet because of a public announcement she made inviting people to attend her birthday party.  Can you imagine the havoc it created when what was meant for perhaps a gathering of 62 people turned out to be a mob of 62.000 people?

It was a traumatic experience for her, and more so for her parents.

Now, with 3G phones and 4G phones being made available to the public at such affordable fees, how much more compromised would privacy become?

These days with our GPS-equipped phones, we can also trace the exact locality of a person, so where is the privacy for us all today?

This issue has been widely discussed all over there is really nothing much for us to talk about anymore, other than it has deteriorated further and new cases are surfacing everyday.

We could only advice our readers to be extremely thrifty with the information they share online.  Otherwise, you never know how bleek and scary the future may be.

Facebook and Twitter are two leading examples of what a small idea can do, and their growth is continue to grow exponentially.  There is just no sign of stopping or quitting!

Some people enjoy updating the world with the time they wake up and what they have for breakfast/lunch or dinner.  As though there were many people who were truly interested in them.  Some of these people truly wasted the full potential of twitter and wasted their tweets with weird updates!

Businesses which truly bank on the potential of Twitter really have that advantage to go a very long way.  However, when one start twitting, the process may be very confusing as it takes a lot of effort just to “beg” someone to follow you successfully.  These days there are tools that can assist you to add potential followers – all at a click of a button!  If these tools are fully utilised, then the power and potential is endless!  Our experiment with Twitter at first was very frustrating.  We have managed to recruit only 7 followers or so in a period of 1 week!  And out of this 7, there were also 1 or 2 who unfollowed us cuz of lack of updates!  With some assistance, we managed to recruit 200 followers in a period of 2 weeks!  That is amazing!

During the 2 weeks of Twitter campaign, our web traffic increased by the hundreds!  And this is only the beginning.  We do look forward to how Twitter can help propel our business forward.

Learning Twitter and Facebook is not a waste of time if you know how.  However, if you do things the manual way, yes it is the perfect way to waste your precious time away!  But things just don’t have to work that way.  Let it grow and it will help you grow in your business.  The internet is truly a borderless world.  The way businesses are conducted is very different from the past.  You just got to have Twitter and Facebook.  They cannot be neglected anymore.

Over here in Asia, there are many website owners who do not know the power and influence of Twitter and Facebook.   If you do need help to setup a Twitter page or a Facebook page, just feel free to contact us at www.webflexx.com

Follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/webflexx

While those of you who use Frontpage as your web editing tool, the automated generated title tag was “Internet Explorer”.  I think most of us have been giving away free publicity to Microsoft unnecessary.  No wonder Bill Gates is the second richest man in the world!

A good and well SEO-ed index page would contain some important keywords in the title tag.  And obviously, SEO aside, your potential web visitors would only click on your link if your title tag attracts them enough.

Check out the first top ten pages at the search engines, none of them used “Internet Explorer” or “Untitled Document” as their title tag.

Now, that’s what I call a web self-suicidal attempt!

For assistance on improving your title tag, contact us.  We are good at developing websites! True, but ask our clients.

Webflexx facebook is still very preliminary, but we have been actively advertising on Facebook.  We started on Twitter not too long ago and came up with a lot of interesting observations.  The amount of information is so vast that sometimes, I am beginning to wonder how does certain quarters pace up with these overloaded information.

We know more but the more we know the more I know I know much less than I thought I would knew!

My browser is telling me that Twitter is my most visited site in the past 7 days.  Yeah I am addicted to reading the latest news online and get into the minds of some of these web intellectuals as well as some of our Malaysian politicians.

Here’s a tip for those who have just started.

Do not follow more than you could manage.  It may send you into a frenzy and you may end up being more confused than ever.

I went surfing at some government websites as well as some big corporations.  Most websites have yet to establish themselves with a Twitter or a Facebook presence.  Seriously, if you were to ask me if Facebook is ever going to slow down, I would respond with a resounding NO.  Not for the next few years at least.

From Facebook and Twitter, you can see how much Google is responding with the Buzz, and these days, Yahoo tried entering the market quietly though.  Yahoo’s respond to enter the buzz market is nothing to shout about.  It is plain boring and you can tell it’s done in a hurry.

Looks like we will all be twitting and facebooking for a long time to come!

I am very angry at the Streamyx provider for providing such sub-standard service.  I am angry at Streamyx for not bothering to upgrade their internet services to Malaysians generally.  I am angry they are still sitting on their laurels when the world is going the Wimax way!

And when they have problems, we get the blame!  Our clients are thinking that our servers are slow.  But our servers are not.  Truth is, the connection… that is, the line that connects our clients’ computer to the server, is badly affected because of the sub-standard service provided by Streamyx!

I am angry at them because our clients are denied the best services we can offer, simply because they are on Streamyx line.  Why must they get punished for Streamyx fault???

Sigh.  The worst thing is, Streamyx consultants at 100, have 0% on what is really happening.  this is not said out of anger, but go call.  chances are, you get a different answer at your second call!!

We have launched 2 campaigns on Facebook recently.  

In campaign 1, the ad was targeted at the general Malaysian Facebook users.  No specifics were specified.  The total impressions was a bit pathetic.  So, in campaign 2, the ad was narrowedly targeted to Malaysian males, aged 30-64.  Our website traffic soared within the first 24 hours!  The total impressions of our second ad also exceeded the first ad by about 8 times! 

But of course, my designer colleague put on a great thinking cap and came up with the tagline “webflexx got talents”, riding on the famous “Britains Got Talents” talent show right now.  I thought it was a brilliant taggy!  And true enough, this campagin2 really got us some very encouraging results.

So, what does this say?  We have yet to target the female facebook users, but once we have any results, you’ll be the first to know!

Google “good food” or “makan makan” online, see the myriads of arbitrary blogs on food alone!  I have travelled not too extensively but enough to know that indeed, Malaysia is a true eating haven!  And 100% Malaysians that I know of, do miss Malaysian food when they travel overseas.  I am no exception.  And as far as I know, the famous answer to “do you miss Malaysian food?” to any Malaysians overseas would be a big, affirmative, undebatable  ”OF COURSE!”

We used to wait for The Star on Sundays to see if there is any good food worth exploring long time ago.  I even wanted to start a blog on this long time ago, but held back because there were way too many of them already online!  Now, see what the internet can really do?  It spreads information like that uncontrollable consuming wildfire!

Recently, our client launched their properties at long last, The Strand Damansara.  We used to host them at www.thestrand-damansara.com and Encorp Berhad at www.encorpbhd.com.my so we do know a little bit here and there.  At Kota Damansara alone, see the number of restaurants at every corner as you walk along that few rows of shops!  And now, I am seeing something else, these eateries are spilling over to the opposite side of the road, to The Strand Damansara!   This showed that the food business in Malaysia will never dwindle, no matter what saith the economists or financial analysts!

And bloggers just love to blog about the food they eat and share with their friends their new-found discovery.  I love reading some of them, but I really differ my opinion from some of these popular food commentators online.  But no harm checking them out.  Here are some of my sources of good food blogs:-

http://masak-masak.blogspot.com

http://www.friedchillies.com – I think the list here is mainly for the “high class” type of restaurant.
http://www.kyspeaks.com – funny reading sometimes!

I have got some more, but I’ll leave it for another time.

In the mean time, do check out Mid Valley’s Oasis Food Court Hakka Lui Cha.  The best in Klang Valley.  Ikan bakar in that place is nice.  But I think Lui Cha is a healthier meal for me.  

In the mean time, please feel free to drop a line if you would like to recommend some good food and I will post it up as a separate entry.  We would love to have guest bloggers.

Me, an IT consultant, downgraded to a 2G phone.  Why???  That was the question I was normally thrown at.  Not only that, one client even offered to buy me at least a colour phone and I declined.

The main reason was because I have been “on the go” for so long that I would like to retire from “on the go” and move on the slow lane for a while.  “On the go” had been holding me “bondage” for quite a while, mainly the emails!  I checked my emails all the time with my Nokia Navigator 6110 and everytime there was an important matter to attend to, I will drop all I can to get hold of a computer to get it done!  At first I felt good because I was able to provide good customer service to my clients.

But then, I realised that I was being held captive by my own phone.  If I do not check my emails, I would feel too anxious to continue doing whatever I was doing.  I think I had even deteriorated to the extent that I was an email-addict for a while.  I checked my email on the move, and I fiercely ensured my 3G connection was active all the time so that when there is an incoming email, my phone will vibrate!  When it wasn’t securely connected, I was in a fit.  My blood pressure almost explode, and I got agitated pretty easily.  That was a sign of an addict wasn’t it?

For 2 years, I was living life like that.

Then one fine day, my Nokia Navigator 6110 gave way.  I had to part with it for one week and left it with the “mobile surgeons”.  It was hospitalised for nearly 2 weeks.  During those times, do you know the kind of freedom?  It was indescribleable.  Well almost!

So, I decided that I would like to swap back to the simple things in life.  And has my life deteriorated ever since this phone downgrade?

Not at all.

Had my life quality improved somewhat then?  Definitely it has.

So, although technology is suppose to make our lives easier, in reality it does not make it anymore relaxing then it suppose to.  Technology is suppose to be our servant, but some of us have enslaved ourselves to what technology has got to offer.

I know some would disagree with me.  I would disagree with my own self of a few months ago.  But now, I am at peace with my decision to downgrade my phone.

If you have a similar experience and would like to share it, please feel free to leave a comment.

That is true.  Yesterday, Najib made a comment that nobody is a second class citizen in Malaysia.  Like it or not, there is a big segregation on classes.  I am not here to judge Najib’s comment, but I would like to point out the power of facebook.

I was at a kopitiam last night at Kota D’sara and I saw some other patrons were facebooking.  It did took the world by storm and I am a bit weary of the effects of facebook.  I can really see that facebook and twitter is taking the world by storm because people just love to express themselves.

Tony Pua expressed his doubts on Najib’s One Malaysia.  And immediately, Tony Pua’s status on his facebook garnered about 30 comments and 66 thumbs up.

My favourite politician, Dato Lim Kit Siang, blogs on http://blog.limkitsiang.com.  The minute you see him updating his blog, you can see that it garners hundreds of comments per article.  I enjoyed reading their articles so much!  They have wisdom man.  BN men will have problems catching up because the opposition is way ahead in drawing their online territory.  

www.warkahuntukpm.com.my was setup by Tun Abdullah Badawi about two weeks before the 8th March 2008 election.  If you take a look at it, other than changing the picture from Tun Abdullah Badawi to Najib, there is really not much of the update on the site.  I have sent a good comment to Badawi once, and he replied me in a jpg email.  Then when he raised petrol fees by RM1, I sent him a good nasty scolding on the website, but it was unreplied.

The same can’t be said of the opposition.  They replies!  Bad or good!  I have yet to comment anything on chedet.com.  Maybe I should try and let you know my thoughts on this.

So, Tony Pua just made an impact online.  Many people are asking the same question that he is asking.  

Any rebuttal Najib?

Recently, there are quite a number of other companies that came up with campaigns and promotions, riding on Obama’s popularity.  Google Obama and you get millions and millions of pages.    

So, question is, how can Obama leverage on the power of the Internet to improve his rating for content?  One of the methods that may be useful to him was perhaps to have a personal blog.  I did not follow his campaign that fiercely till nearer to his election time.  So I was not sure whether he has a personal blog.  But even if he does, I think his blog was maintained by one of his aides at his side.

Back to homeground, I know Malaysian politicians from both divide generally own personal blogs and party blogs.  These blogs have been instrumental in shapping up the political tsunami back on the fateful 8th March 2008.  

I guess, Obama would have played a smarter trump card with his personal blog than expected.  

I am being random today, but I have a few thoughts on this.  Let me do a little bit of homework and update you with my findings.