Daily Dose of social media: Enterprises still driving Yugos with IE 6

What browser wars? The enterprise still loves IE 6 — “This news may come as a shocker to the tech-savvy folks in the house, but 60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser, according to Forrester Research. Meanwhile, your IT department spends a decent amount of time erecting barriers to prevent browser upgrades. Bottom line: companies need a browser policy, or they will risk productivity losses.”

When I worked at Stars and Stripes, most computers still had IE 6 on them. Why? I can’t say (and Stripes was the norm, not the exception).

IE 6 is extremely insecure (and Stripes had official DoD computers), it’s very slow at rendering pages, it doesn’t support modern features like tabs, etc, etc. IE 6 makes workers less productive, and it comprises security. I could not be an efficient editor of BeatBlogging.Org (possibly not even editor) if I ran IE 6. No way.

I need a modern browser that supports current Web apps. The kinds of innovative Web apps that make employees more productive.

Even if enterprises lag behind in browser upgrades, leading consumer-facing Web sites take advantage of browser capabilities that enhance rendering speed, better support rich Internet applications (RIAs), and offer new privacy and security capabilities. From an information worker perspective, these benefits are only part of the picture.

Features like tabs, add-ons, quick copying, improved search and navigation, and better post-crash recovery provide tangible productivity benefits for most information workers. Address bars that double as search save time, and available add-ons feature a wide range of functionality such as better remembering of passwords and saving pages to view later without creating permanent bookmarks.

Twitter’s integrated search now live for all users — We reported on this awhile ago, but it’s finally live for all users (MsBeat was livid when she wasn’t one of the lucky users who got to test drive the new site early).

The new Twitter user interface is a big improvement over the old one because Twitter finally integrated Twitter.com with search.twitter.com. The new search.twitter.com integration is a huge bonus for journalists, and the ability to save searches is big too. Twitter.com just got a lot better.

How Facebook Serves Up Its 15 Billion Photos — Just a little food for thought:

The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.

People really, really like photos. Somehow news organizations lost sight of this.

Daily Dose of social media: Chrome can’t be pwned, nor owned

Google Chrome, Mobile Browsers Survive Security Challenge — After one day at the Pwn2Own challenge, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari all fell victim to malicious exploits. For those who don’t know, Pwn2Own is a yearly hacking contest to test the security of Web browsers. Google’s Chrome was the only one of the four to survive the challenge:

The lone survivor in this year’s contest is the newcomer: Google Chrome.

Chrome was affected by one of the flaws that brought down the rest of browsers, but thanks to the tightly-sandboxed way that Chrome runs, no one was able to actually exploit the flaw, which is good news for users facing every more sophisticated attacks.

With most browsers offering roughly the same range of features and comparable speeds (you knew browsers where running out of ways to stand out when they start advertising JavaScript benchmarks), security is fast becoming an important benchmark for many users. But it’s also a very touch one to measure.

Journalists are increasingly working on the Web, and many of you work almost exclusively on the Web. Proper security from malicious Web attacks can prevent you from losing your work or having your data comprised. Chrome has two things that should really appeal to people relying on a Web browser for work: security and stability.

It’s all worth noting, despite a higher prize for compromising a mobile browser at Pwn2Own, no one was able to successful run an exploit on one. That phone in your pocket might be your safest browsing experience.

iPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent — Despite being out less than two years, the iPhone has the majority of smartphone Web traffic in the U.S. iPhone users use the Web all the time and download lots of apps. News organizations need to start developing products that work well on mobile, especially the iPhone and other smartphones with rich Web experiences. Before the iPhone came around, mobile browsing wasn’t fun, but now it’s a big part of many people’s lives:

The gains shown by the iPhone and Android show what is possible when phones are built with fully capable browsers and support a rich array of Web apps.

Google’s Android platform is already up to five percent of smartphone Web traffic in the U.S. Android has a rich Web experience like the iPhone, and as more people gets phones like these, more will be utilizing their Web capabilities. With Palm’s Pre due out later this year, this is destined to be the year of the consumer smartphone.

Blackberries largely appeal to business users who use their phones for e-mail and for calendars. But consumer-oriented smartphones are beginning to take over and news orgs have to get on this platform early. So, if your news org gives out Blackberries for business purposes, don’t let that cloud your judgment of what is possible.

It won’t be too long before having a smartphone with a rich Web experience is the norm, not the exception.

And yes, people are getting rich selling apps on the iPhone App Store.

Happy Birthday Twitter! — Yes, Twitter recently turned 3 years old. For the first few years, Twtter was very niche, but now it’s exploding. Try it out.

Daily Dose of social media: SEO FTW!

20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress — SEO is massively important on the Web. Many of you run sites and blogs with WordPress. Therefor, you need to read this post. The first plugin on the list, All in One SEO Pack, is a must for any WordPress user. This one blog post could help change the fate of your blog. Read it:

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications — Okay, so not every one of these “essential” tools and applications is really relevant to journalists and content producers, but there are some real gems here:

• Tweetlater is a nice little app to schedule tweets in the future. This is great for group Twitter accounts where multiple employees are responsible for providing content. It’s also a nice way to ensure you spread out your tweets. It also allows you to keep your account active while you are away.
• Tweetbeep allows you to keep track of when people mention you, your company or other keywords that you want to track. This is great for journalists who want to be alerted every time certain words are mentioned on Twitter. This is also great for news orgs that want to track what people are saying about them. Yes, Tweetdeck can do the same things, albeit, without the alerts.
• StrawPoll asks different questions for polls each day, which is an interesting way to see what people think on Twitter. For journalists,  however, it’s much more helpful to be able to create their own polls. That’s where StrawPoll really shines.

Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft — Internet Explorer has finally become a decent browser. I know most people still use it, but IE7 and IE6 are categorically inferior browsers to Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, etc, etc.

For journalists, the most welcome new feature in IE8 sandboxing. This feature means that individual tabs crash, not the browser itself. This is an extremely useful feature for those of us who have a lot of tabs open at once.

Chrome also features sandboxing, and I expect most browsers will get this feature in the coming years. Essentially, sandboxing makes Web browsers much more similar to modern operating systems, in that they will crash a lot less. Yes, individual applications/tabs will still crash, but that’s a lot better than having your whole computer/Web browser crash.

Sandboxing will make IE users more productive because less time and knowledge will be lost to crashes. IE8 still has some major issues:

IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There’s no default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.

Check out this CNET video to learn more about it: