TigerText, a new iPhone texting application, has the option of adding a “self-destruct” timer to the messages. That is, once the time’s up, the message gets deleted from everywhere - the sender’s phone, the receiver’s phone, and also the messaging server. As per the company, these deleted texts are not “legally discoverable” anymore.

The timer can be set anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days. There are also other options of deleting all texts in a conversation, or the “auto self-destruct” - that is, deleting it as soon as the recipient opens it.

TigerText founder Jeffrey Evans says that “TigerText will completely change the way people think about electronic communication. For the first time, you have complete control over what happens to your texts after you hit the send button. It brings safety and peace of mind to anyone who sends messages that are intended to remain private.”

Fairly priced at subscription rates of $1.49 for every 250 messages per month and $2.49 for unlimited messages, TigerText also offers a free-to-try option of 250 messages for the first 15 days. All you have to do is sign up for an account once you download the application and confirm your phone number to start using TigerText.

For TigerText to work, the application should be available on the sender and receiver’s phone. The messages themselves are never stored on the phones. They are kept on the server, and the purging of expired messages happens every minute of the day, as per the vendor. Currently this app is available only for iPhones, while Android and Blackberry versions are already in the works.

How is it different from what you have now?

Well, if you search for something in Google, you would find a lot of websites and pages describing or related to the keyword phrase you put in. Plus, it also lets you know what your friends and family have to say about it. For example, if you’re looking to buy a laptop, you will find a lot of shopping sites holding up their products in a normal google search. But social search can also get you opinions from the pages of your friends or relatives if they have posted about some of the best deals they have found elsewhere.

You can see more on the video given below:

Note: The new feature will be available for all “Signed in” users in “English” - so if you don’t see the social search yet even if you’re signed in, it’s just being rolled out; so you might have to wait a few days till it’s available everywhere.

While most of us know how to edit the robots.txt file and use it to prevent certain pages on the site from being indexed, what we don’t realize is that they still show up in search engines. How? Because there is a difference between “being indexed” and “being listed.”

When Google or any search engine “indexes” a page, it means that the content of the site is downloaded by the search engine and added to it’s index (something like the “index” of a book here, with a pointer to a particular page number). While this would eventually lead to listing of the page in searches, your page might still be “listed” in searches even though it is not “indexed.”

The video below from Matt Cutts explains this further:

Why do you want your pages to be de-listed or not indexed?

Well, one thing is to prevent duplicate content from being indexed - such as the printer-friendly versions which you might maintain for large articles. There could also be pages which are available in PDF or Word document formats whose content can also be indexed by search engines nowadays. Also, if there are custom error pages that you use in case your visitor runs into an error on the site, you don’t want that to be indexed. There would also be other reasons which varies from person to person, site to site or reason to reason.

How to achieve this?

One way to do this is to LET the search engine index the page, but tell them NOT to list the page. This can be done using the “noindex” meta tag value to it, such as below:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”/>

There is an easier way to do this - unless you’re fine with adding the above to each and every page (or you can add it to your blog’s header page - which you have to be very careful with as it can hide your entire site from searches). You can use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header variable in the .htaccess file in a folder to de-list it entirely. If mod_headers is enabled for your site (which you can check with your host), you can use the following line of code in your .htaccess file for the particular folder:

Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”

More ways of doing this can be found from a good post from Antezeta here.

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The post covers:

1) Search Engine Blogs - providing latest news about search engines

2) SEO Blogs - Providing good SEO tips

3) SEO Company Blogs - Some of the good quality blogs from SEO companies

4) Link Building Blogs - Blogs which provide link building information

5) Online Marketing Blogs - Online marketing and SMM tips.

6) Search Engine Directories - Lists of new search engines.

7) SEO & SEM Directories - SEO/SEM companies, consultants and resources.

8 ) SEO Tools - Useful SEO tools like keyword research, link popularity, etc.

9) SEO Forums - Forums that discuss mainly about SEO tips.

10) Web directories - Web directories for Search engine submission.

Keep the link bookmarked. It’s a great resource for future use and to stay ahead in the game.

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You all know how important getting good backlinks is to a website. And you would be surprised how people get them done. Some of them are the old fashioned way of direct linking through comments, while the others are incredibly cunning and black-hat.

Here is something to ponder and play with if you are still looking for ideas on linking (source: Googlecache).

1. Google.com: get in the directory
2. Adobe.com: followed forum links
3. Blogspot.com: If you cant figure out how to get a link on blogspot, give up now.
4. Yahoo.com: join the directory
5. Youtube.com: Create your own channel
6. Wikipedia.org: Add it, it will be nofollowed, but still worth it.
7. W3.org : Newsletter Auto-Linking
8. Facebook.com: Facebook Apps (check out the retailer icons)
9. Wordpress.org: Write a Good Plugin (Author Homepage)
10. Myspace.com: If you can’t figure out how to get a link on myspace, you need to give up on SEO.
11. Microsoft.com: Service requests
12. Twitter.com: SOL, Everything is nofollowed. IMHO, a useless link.
13. Amazon.com : Amapedia FTW
14. Macromedia.com: Get Mentioned, hard link to get
15. Wordpress.com: Create a Blog, If you can’t figure out how to get a link on wordpress.com, you need to give up on SEO.
16. Flickr.com: Add and Edit a CommentCreate a comment with a link in it like this… <a rel=”follow” href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>text</a>. Flickr will add a nofollow after the HREF, but the rel=”follow” will already have been parsed. Sneaky, eh?
17. StatCounter.com: Member profile Contact Info
18. Miibeian.gov.cn : Good luck
19. Msn.com: Movies Search Results
20. Apple.com: Auto Linking in Mailman Archives
21. BBC.co.uk : Get Written About. Yeah, this one is tough.
22. AOL.com: Propeller cross-domain. Now that is clever!
23. MapQuest.com : Map Listings
24. Sourceforge.net: Forum Profile Pages
25. NYtimes.com: It never ceases to amaze me what spammers can find.
26. Feedburner.com: Feed Links Count.
27. CNN.com: Create a Fan Nation Blog
28. Free.fr: Create a Site
29. Tripod.com: If you don’t know how to get a link from tripod, you need to give up on SEO.
30. Live.com: Create a blog on Windows Live Spaces
31. Go.com: Create a Sports Nation Fan Blog
32. Addthis.com: Only nofollows from forum links.
33. Typepad.com: Create a Blog
34. PHPbb.com: Signature Links
35. Digg.com: Go Popular. Write fantastic content and get on the homepage of Digg to get PR flowing links.
36. technorati.com: Site Reactions Pages and others
37. del.icio.us (now delicious.com): Get mentioned on the blog
38. php.net: Become a Mirror
39. imdb.com: make a movie or documentary
40. about.com: followed links in the forums
41. ebay.com: user pages have followed links
42. rambler.ru: forum links followed
43. blogger.com: Get into the “Blogs I follow”
44. fc2.com: Blog
45. joomla.org: followed links in the forum
46. google.de: Directory
47. creativecommons.org: Try installing ccHost and mentioning your installation
48. Mysql.com: Forge Comments

If you want more, SEOMoz has provided a list of Top 500 Linked Domains all over the Internet according to Linkscape’s index.

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Boogie Board, from Improv Electronics, is an LCD writing tablet that you can write on to without using any power. Only the erasing part consumes a bit of power, and that’s quite good for a writing tablet that can support 50,000 erases on a watch battery. The tablet can also recognize varying amounts of pressure so that it can differentiate between thick and thin lines while writing. The device uses what is called a “Reflex LCD”, a pressure-sensitive flexible plastic, which does not require any power to retain what’s written on it. The device is thin, compact and light-weight, with a writing space as much as half a sheet of letter size paper. And what’s more, you can also use different tools to get different textures - such as the stylus, a paint brush, a pen cap, or even a fingernail.

There is one catch - you can’t connect it to a computer or any other device to save what you’ve written or drawn. You can use it for writing short notes, hard copy it later and then erase it. But if you use it in place of paper, the vendor claims that the savings are significant.

Where and who can/will use it?

Now that it can’t connect to a computer, think outside.

You can attach it on to your refrigerator or to a wall to leave quick notes or messages. You can attach it to your car visor or dash to jot down reminders or quick thoughts on the go. It also makes an idea writing surface for people with vocal injuries, speech impairments or other disabilities which makes it difficult to write with a normal pen and paper. There are countless other uses that you can come across.

If you are someone who uses a lot of paper at work or play just to jot down notes and can’t keep track of all those paper notes, this might be worth a try.

On Friday, Timothy J Creamer, an astronaut from NASA sent the first ever Tweet from outer space. This was made possible after a software upgrade that NASA made enabling astronauts to connect wirelessly to the web - something that NASA calls “the ultimate wireless connection”.

Screenshot of TJ Creamer's space-famous Tweet

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The most commonly used passwords as identified by the report are:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

Nearly 50% of the users used common dictionary words, slang words, or trivial words such as adjacent keys in the keyboard (for eg: “qwerty”). Using simple passwords as these make the users easily susceptible to brute-force attacks with relatively small dictionary files.

As explained by Imperva’s CTO Amichai Schulman, “Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes.”

Many of the top notch companies impose rules upon their employees to use longer and complex passwords and to change them periodically by using password policies in the domains. But this is not, many a times, provided by many online email or community sites where there is always a chance of sensitive information being updated. Also, in many cases, employees use the same password that they use online for their email accounts, social networking logins, etc. in their workplace so that they can easily remember them - but thus unintentionally compromising the security of their office networks.

A similar analysis (from Wired.com) examined about 10,000 exposed passwords from Hotmail, Live.com and MSN in last October, and found that 123456 was the most commonly used password, appearing about 64 times in the whole lot.

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iFixit provides a full “inside-out” view of the $530 phone disassembling it using a Philips screw driver. What’s more, they even made a slideshow out of it. Check out more here.

From Remote controls, joysticks and the mouse, it’s time to get to the real deal in reality.

Imagine this - you’re watching an old rerun, and then suddenly you remember that it’s time for your favorite show in a channel about 30 or 40 channels away from the current one. You frantically search for the remote control, but you don’t find it anywhere. What would you do?

Just move your hand, and the TV would understand that the channel has to be changed.

Since the first mouse was wired to the PC, electronics that understand hand gestures is going to be one of the next most significant changes in the industry. Microsoft, Hitachi and other major PC makers are already geared up to begin selling devices that can control electronics such as TV and computer screens with simple hand gestures.

Watch the video below for a demo from GestureTek who specializes in gesture device software.

Microsoft’s upcoming XBox offering called Project Natal will take this technology mainstream later this year. Project Natal is a revolutionary way of gaming, where you won’t need a separate controller such as a joystick. Here’s a bit more about it. Following this would Hitachi release it’s new generation television where people can operate and switch channels and other functions such as volume by simple hand gestures, without using any remote control of any sort. Computer devices such as Laptops and Desktops will follow the same route.

The challenge that the gesture device industry had to face was to identify the types of hand gestures which would be interpreted as a command to do a task. For example, the channels should not switch just because the viewer bent forward to pick up a glass or maybe scratched his nose. GestureTek had spent a long time (about 20 years) and already has some good amount of success in this, by using 2D cameras. But the current breakthrough includes 3D vision including the extra dimension to recognize movement and depth.

Photo - Courtesy: Flickr (shared under CC)