Software Testing Blog

These days, it’s hard not to know about Lady Gaga (and if you don’t know her, here’s her latest music video to get you started).  She’s become one of the hottest pop acts in the world, all by combining music, fashion, and a little bit of “Andy” (either Warhol or Kaufman – take your pick).  So what does this have to do with software?  Well get this: an astonishing 89% of the people who create an account on LadyGaga.com choose to do so using third party authentication from Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace.

Just think about that for a second.  That means that nearly 9 out of 10 people creating special purpose web accounts are doing so using their social networking platforms (skipping all those annoying new account questions like password, age, location, and favorite pet in the process).

This is huge, and it represents a big shift in the way people are going to interact with your website in the future.  If 89% of users are doing this on a mass market website like LadyGaga.com, then I guarantee they’re going to be doing it on other sites as well.  So what does this mean?

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Sometimes new technologies can inflame old problems.  For example, consider location based social networks.  Many sites like Twitter and Foursquare make it easy to post both what you’re doing and your current location.  This is a great concept, and as technologies go there are huge possibilities for combining location information with social networking.  But there’s just one catch: if you’re out and Tweeting about it, then you’re probably not at home.  And that makes your home a perfect target for robbery.

To help people become more aware about the ramifications of announcing that their plasma TV is unguarded, a new site has appeared called Please Rob Me.  Using the magic of social search, they track various networks and then list the posts from people who are clearly not at home.  Of course, this has caused quite a stir online as many have wondered whether or not something like this is legal, ethical, or even right?

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It’s no surprise to our community that social networks have the potential to pose big security threats this year. During the “Battle of the Social Networks,” uTesters found a combined 718 bugs in Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn; and an additional 300+ bugs were discovered in the top five Twitter desktop apps during the Q2 bug battle.

To add more fuel to the fire, today the company Sophos, which surveyed 500+ organizations, came out with a new report stating that in the past year:

• 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites
• 36% of users claim they’ve been sent malware via social networking sites
• 72% of survey respondents think social networks are a danger for their companies (see Mashable article)

What’s the solution? Tina Fey, in her show “30 Rock,” recently spoofed social networks with her creation of “YouFace” (combo of Facebook & MySpace). Terms such as “finger-tagged,” “weirdsie,” and “pho-lo” (for photo and hello) had many ROFL. See video clip after the bump!

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When your app gets hacked because of a bug in your code, that’s pretty bad.  But when your app gets hacked because of a bug in an underlying protocol that’s a building block of the Internet, then you’re looking at a really serious problem.

Such is the case with Twitter, which last week was shown to be vulnerable to a bug in the SSL standard.  SSL is the protocol that encrypts data going back and forth on the web, keeping our credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, and everything else safe and secure.  The trouble is, it’s broken and has been since the mid-1990s.

Right now, the IETF (the standards setting body for the Internet and the closest thing to an Internet Illuminati) has started drafting an update for SSL, but such things take time.  In the mean time, sites like Twitter are suffering the consequences.

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Just a quick note to share some good news from inside the halls of uTest.  On Friday night, our marketing team attended the awards event of the SNCR at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, MA.  This event included blue-chip brands like HP, Intel and Stanford University, as well as innovators like HubSpot.

The SNCR holds this event to recognize companies that are exploring new and innovative avenues of communications and marketing.  We were fortunate enough to be among those companies and agencies who were honored for our use of new media to build and engage our community.

It’s great to be counted among those who are pushing the limits of social networking, blogs, forums and other forms of media, but we’re just getting started.  We’ve already established a vibrant presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but we’re always on the lookout for new ideas.

So with that, I’m inviting you to drop us a comment or shoot us a note with your thoughts about how we could make our social media more useful, informative or entertaining.

While scanning Wired.com this weekend, I came across an article that’s scary enough to fit right in with Halloween.  Most security

studies address issues in operating systems, browsers or other core systems.  This one, however, addressed the uber-popular Twitter and the URL shorteners that are widely used because of its 140 character constraints (eg: bit.ly, tinyurl, tr.im).

And while Twitter and URL shortening services aren’t dangerous in and of themselves, they present a wonderful tool for blackhats.  In this case, Wired published the findings of a study from computer security firm, Kaspersky.

You can read the full article here, but the top-level findings are, in a word, scary.

As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets.

The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.

1 in 500 doesn’t sound so scary to you? Check out what that .2% really means after the jump.

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Thanks to you, uTest blog traffic has more than doubled since the beginning of ‘09.  And since our relaunch in mid-May, we’ve use this space to share breaking industry news, testing events and meetups, uTest company info, and original content from around the QA industry through our guest bloggers and “Testing the Limits” interviews.  That’s why we need your help to get the Software Testing Blog into the running for Mashable’s Open WebAwards in the “Best Corporate Blog” category.

So if you like the uTest blog, this is your chance to cast your vote and  support uTest and our community. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to http://mashable.com/owa/votes. (You must be signed into your Facebook or Twitter account.)
2. Then simply Nominate: http://blog.utest.com for Category: “Best Corporate Blog”
3. Voting is once per day, so please don’t be shy!

Thanks in advance for your help, and keep your fingers crossed for another big win for uTest and our community! Send us a note with any questions.

Every startup team has great and spirited debates about its products (or services).  We debate what works, what doesn’t, what makes it unique, and most importantly, what users want. We draw inspiration when new products launch and change the world.  Think Salesforce.com back in the day, the family of iPhones or, more recently, Facebook and Twitter.

And similarly, we witness product missteps that make us wince, rant or just shake our heads.   One such case emerged today with DiggBar (Digg’s URL shortening service) under the bright lights of a TechCrunch article titled, DiggBar Commits Career Suicide, Starts Redirecting To Digg Homepage.  In the words of  TC’s Jason Kincaid:

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And by trophies, we mean nearly $4000 in cash prizes.

Yes, the results of the Battle of the Desktop Twitter Apps are final. The week-long QA competition – in which more than 600 testers  searched for bugs in five of the most popular Twitter apps – was a  success. As expected, we received hundreds (320 to be exact) of interesting GUI, technical and functional bugs, so selecting a handful of winners was obviously no easy task.

In fact, it was so difficult that we decided to expand our winners list. Also, be sure to download our free special report (PDF), detailing the results of the post-battle usability survey.

As you’ll see from the results page, the Battle of the Desktop Twitter Apps saw several repeat winners, along with some fresh, new uTest talent. Here’s a top-line list of the winners:

• Top Tester: Bernard Lelchuck (Israel)
• Top Novice: Tyler Ritchie (USA)
• Top US Tester: Joseph Ours

Tyler and Bernard also finished 1st and 2nd in the “Best Bug” category. Other winners for “Best Bug” included:

• Claire Pelayo (Philippines)
• Bryan Fisk (New Zealand)
• Aymen Chehaider (India)

As far as the apps were concerned, the uTest community ranked Tweet Deck #1 in terms of usability, feature set and overall quality. Coming in second (also in every category) was Seesmic Desktop, followed by Twirl, Tweetr and Twitteroo.

The results have already been featured in a Mashable story yesterday, ase well as a bunch of other news outlets, and of course, hundreds of individual tweets.

Once again, congratulations to all of the Bug Battle winners, and thanks to all those from our community who participated. If you’re aleady looking forward to our next competition – and we know you are – be sure to send us your ideas. We can be reached at marketing@utest.com, and of course, on Twitter.

The bug hunting portion of our Q2 Bug Battle is now history. Although testers are no longer looking for bugs in the top 6 Twitter applications – like they were for the last seven days -  they can still win prize money for submitting valuable feedback.

So if you were one of the hundreds of testers who participated in our now famous bug hunting competition, be sure to visit the uTest Forums and complete the brief survey. If you’re looking for tips on leaving valuable feedback, you can find that in the forums as well. NOTE: You have until midnight (EST) on Saturday, June 6 to complete the survey.

We’ll be announcing the official results shortly, so be sure to check back in regularly for more details. We’ve got to keep quiet for now (top-secret stuff, you know) but from what we’ve seen so far, the results have been predictably twitterific – err – terrific.

Once more, great job to all those from our community who participated. We’re looking forward to reading your survey responses. Good luck!