The folks over at Automattic just released the stable 2.8 version of popular blogging platform WordPress. This site, along with a large percentage of blogs out there, runs on the WordPress platform and I can’t say enough about all the features and SEO-friendly options that it has built-in to the base version (not to mention all the free plugins and themes available on their site).

Over 790 bugs were fixed from the previous 2.7.1 version not to mention they claim it’s supposed to be a lot faster (that has yet to be seen). Some of the new features can be found under the Appearance section of the backend, from a re-designed widgets section to the addition of convenient “Activate, Preview and Delete” quick-links underneath each theme. If you’re trying to decide between a few themes or just like to keep a lot available, this will undoubtably save you a lot of time.

Some highlights of the updated features are:

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

So if you haven’t logged into the back-end of your own WordPress blog lately, now’s the time to do it and use their automatic upgrade feature! That or you can find the download page (as well as instructions for how to install or upgrade) here. You can also view the complete list of updates and bug fixes on their development site.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT this Saturday, June 13th, you can finally get an easy-to-share username for your Facebook account! Facebook explains the process that will start once their countdown page – www.Facebook.com/username/ reaches zero in a recent blog post on their site.

No longer will you have to copy and paste your profile link (which just consists of a string of numbers representing your user id) when sharing your online profile with others, now you can give your Facebook account it’s own vanity URL. Not only great for sharing but it has it’s own obvious SEO benefits which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a large amount of “username-squatting” come Saturday! Below you can see an example of what the search results for that username would pull up on Google.com.

With Facebook.com being a high authority site in the search engines, this has the potential to benefit your brand and/or campaign if used correctly. In the meantime get ready to see a whole gaggle of variations on www.Facebook.com/people/Lose-Weight-With-Our-Diet-Pills/234234324 addresses pulling up in the SERPS.

A new twitter worm is running rampant through the microblogging community infecting those who are easily enticed with the idea of gaining more followers. It’s actually very simple, all it does it tweet out to the infected hosts followers, “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com.” Anyone who visits the site will be prompted to enter their twitter login credentials in order to “access the twittercut tool” however upon submitting the info it then just goes and mass-tweets to all of your followers and the cycle continues. Playing of the desperation many seem to have when it comes to becoming ‘popular’ on the network, A twitter search pulled up thousands of folks who fell victim to this trap.
If you see one of your friends twittering “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com”, you might want to tell them to change their password ASAP before it’s changed for them.

So the source of twittercut apparently is a Twitter user named JordanEmbry. It’s also the same name used on the whois records for the twittercut.com domain. Twitter has already disabled his account but using the Google cache you can still see the profile + recent tweets. You’d have to be a moron to use your real info on a scam like this, so I can’t imagine this is really the culprit.

He’s hosting it on free-webhost 110MB.com, so I just sent them a message letting them know about the TOS/Abuse Violation… hopefully they’ll take the site down soon.

It has just been reported that Yahoo has finally shut down age-old free web hosting service Geocities for good this time. Acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for a whopping $2.87 billion, it was a service that many used to get their first website. Ohh how I will always remember those animated flame border .gifs and the flashing text featured all over the page…and who could forget the scrolling news going across the top of the screen…it was the coolest.

You were a legend, you will be missed.

(cue moment of silence)