links for 2009-08-14

This post will show exactly how one start-up improved their homepage conversion rate (visitor to sign-up flow) more than 20%, then 16% again, with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer.

Last week’s denial-of-service attack that knocked Twitter offline was aimed at one man — a blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia called Cyxymu. Nonetheless, it caused the entire Twitter universe to blink out of existence for hours. This struck some detractors of the service as hilarious (how do “these people” complain about Twitter being down if Twitter is down?). But the truth of the matter is that Twitter is an increasingly important lubricant for greasing the wheels of the web.