SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

If you’ve been watching Twitter over the last 24 hours, chances are you’ve seen at least one post from Twifficiency.    

The service analyses your followers, who you follow and your tweet history to generate a “Twifficiency score”.

As you can see from the following Google Trend – the growth of Twifficiency traffic has exploded over the last 24 hours:

Now that so many people have fallen for the novelty, people are starting to have second thoughts about the service – is it secure, could it be a scam, have I compromised my twitter account?

Where Did Twifficiency Come From?

Well firstly, here’s a bit of background on Twifficiency.    It was developed by a (now rather shocked) 17yr old web developer from Dundee in Scotland.   James Cunningham (@jamescun) describes himself as :

“17 year old Coder, designer, gamer and wannabe-entrepreneur. Fascination with random facts. Doesn’t always make sense to anyone other than myself.”

Is it secure?

Looks like it – yes!   According to James, Twifficiency is based around the open source oAuth which means that he has no access to your Twitter password.

If you’ve used Twifficiency and want to remove the connection to your account, use the following page on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/settings/connections 

It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of James and Twifficiency since becoming so popular on Twitter!

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tags: twitter

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Bing, Google, SEO, SEOMoz