iamdez » Social

Twitter Tutorial: What is OAuth And What It Means To You

dez — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:41:30 +0000

As of August 31, 2010 the way that applications access Twitter via your account will be restricted to only one way. Applications can currently access your account if you provide them with your username and password (also known as basic authentication) or if you give them permission to via OAuth. After August 31 the only way an application will be allowed access to your account will be via OAuth.

According to OAuth‘s website the protocol is like a valet key.

Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.

If you are a Twitter user and use applications to either check your tweet stream on your phone/desktop or on another place on the web (think Tweetdeck or Hootsuite) or any of the multitudes of analytics tools available for Twitter you’ve probably come across a screen that looks somewhat like this (click to see the bigger version):

If you’re already logged into Twitter when you get to this screen you won’t be given an option to login; instead your information will be displayed. For those of you more familiar with Facebook think Facebook Connect.

The short and simple portion of OAuth is that you are not giving your Twitter username and password over to an application developer. Instead you are giving that application permission to access your account through means of a shared key which Twitter identifies as your key for that application. The application is required to have an established relationship with Twitter by means of signing up for an application.

Also required during an application’s sign-up process is whether that application is read only or read & write. If the application is read only then they will only be able to read your information. Read & write means they can do both.

The benefits of OAuth are the security of knowing you don’t need to give someone else your password. Also, you can change your password at any time and you’ll still have access to your already authorized applications. Twitter can also easily revoke the application’s access key to better enable security if an application starts being acting like spam or not in the userbase’s best interest

In that same authorization window user’s are asked if they will allow an application to access or access and update their accounts.

In a lot of ways the advantages of OAuth stop there for applications that have been allowed to access and update accounts. A user still needs to be sure that they trust the app to update their account timely and correctly. An application that updates the account without the user’s express permission even though the user has allowed the application access to the account is still considered to be in violation of Twitter’s Application Developer Terms of Service.

Here is a list of things that an application cannot do and therefore you cannot accidentally do through an application using OAuth:

Change your username
Change your password
Change your email address
Change your mobile settings
- Number attached to account
- Settings for mobile send times
- Settings for following a user’s updates via text message
- Change direct message to mobile settings

This will keep your account generally secure from being changed, but you are still responsible for the content that is sent by the app. This can include:

Status updates
Direct messages
List creation
Following someone
Unfollowing someone
Blocking someone
Reporting someone as spam
List creation
List deletion
List following
Adding user’s to a list

There are more, but you get the idea. In short, the ability of an application approved through OAuth is restricted, but still has the potential to be dangerous. You should only use applications that you trust or that you understand. Look for an applications documentation section or if the app is a small one send an email or @reply to the developer and ask them about their application.

Keep your password secure after August 31st. You will not be required to give it to an application for purposes of accessing your account. HOWEVER there are applications that still require a login, but the use of the same password that you use for Twitter isn’t required.

Preparing For Your and Your Kid’s Future Online

dez — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:08:15 +0000

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, suggested during an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

The interview isn’t fully about online privacy, but it’s relevant to the future of the search engine and all of our online lives.

A few days later I saw a post from Jessica Gottlieb titled “The Problem With Mom Blogging When Your Kids Are Older.” In the post she gives a generalized example of what I imagine to be a pretty usual conversation that happens between mothers and their near-adolescent daughters. The gist of the post was regarding the need to let her children tell their own story and not do it for them. Even going as far as intentionally misspelling her kids’ names so that the mention of them growing up cannot be found easily with searches in the future. I’ll share a few quotes from her post:

“The stories don’t belong to me any more.”

“I can’t tell you everything, because this is her story, not mine.”

This brings up a very relevant topic in the increase of everyone’s activity on the social web. How do you use the web as a social activity, network, and professional tool and still maintain your reputation with your friends and employer?

There are a lot of complaints out there about people being someone completely different online than they are offline. Often the person projecting a different personality online is identifiable either through an avatar or their real name.

I’m not talking about gaming networks or forum trolls. I’m also not talking about information privacy. I’m talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn users and blog authors and the content they create and add to the web. I’m talking about preparing for your future of search.

What are future employers going to see about you or your kids when they go to Google and search for you or them? Let’s not get into the legality of any of this or the morality of it. That search is going to happen and it’s not restricted or controlled by you or who you allow to run it. What will it display?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t just for companies anymore.

A lot of people whose lives often take place in the digital space already know that they need to keep an eye on the what/where/when/who of who mentions them online. Most of these people likely (or should) have Google Alerts setup for their full name, another for their online name. This is an important first step in monitoring your online presence. However, this only notifies you of anything new that matches what you’re searching for.

The Geek Girls have a great Five-Minute Guide to Google Alerts. If you haven’t setup alerts for yourself yet you should read their post.

Background Check?

While it’s a legal gray area to do a background check via social networks or Google it still happens. I’ve seen different percentages reported as far as how many HR managers are checking Google for background information. Which means that more than zero may be using information they find about you online. However, if they can find it online, so can you. You just need to know how and what to search.

Kate-Madonna Hindes is an expert in helping people not only make their resumes better but in helping them network themselves online, usually for the purposes of job seeking. I asked her about some of the biggest things online job seekers should watch out for.

As job seekers join social networks, it’s important to remember the mantra, “once on the web, always on the web.” By acting as their own recruiter, candidates can source information about themselves and see what is showing up under their names or other identifiable information. If information is private, it should not be disclosed to the web in any form.

Being Prepared

Having your alerts and watching what you post about yourself but still being active online can still lead to times when things are posted about you that you don’t necessarily like or that are even accurate. The other possible issue is that something you said is either wrong, strikes a bad nerve, or is taken out of context. If you have control of the content you could delete it, but that’s like trying to hide something. Also, since it was already out there and you already feel the reason to remove it there is reason to believe that someone else saved it as a screenshot or the file.

I asked Jennifer Kane of Kane Consulting how she helps her clients and herself deal with fallouts like this.

The most important thing that we tell our clients, and ourselves, is to be transparent…

Yes, there is a permanence to what you say on the social web and those words and images can come back to haunt you. Increasingly, though they’re coming back to haunt everyone.

When words you say, the things you do and the ideas you think are immediately captured, syndicated and analyzed, lying and reinvention become vastly more difficult. Your best option then is to choose to reveal less, be more transparent and honest about the things you do reveal, apologize immediately if your words come back to haunt you and keep moving forward.

The present is becoming the past so quickly that humility and time will be your best assets for managing your reputation in the future.

Rinse, wash, try not to repeat.

This is all great if you’re working with yourself. The same self that didn’t grow up with Google as a verb or www always around. Today’s kids are always connected and they are going to be the ones creating the awesome stuff in the future when Facebook and Twitter are “that thing my mom uses”. The lessons you teach them now with their life in general could very well help them deal with their own privacy. Jessica had this to add when I asked her how she’s teaching her kids about online safety, decency, and respect for themselves.

When you teach your kids manners it’s simple to incorporate online manners as well. At every age there are different lessons. We teach them privacy fairly early on, as that is a safety issue. Moving forward we teach them the intricacies of privacy, like setting up a fake birthday on your fake email with your fake name that you use for things like online gaming or shopping with gift cards.

The nightmare AND the glory of that web is that we are losing our privacy. My kids love to text, they are far more likely to text than they are to talk, and every parent should embrace this. We gave our daughter a cell phone and explained to her that (like her email) we would very likely read every message going in and out. It is important for every child (and for every adult) to understand that once you have written something down, in any forum, you are responsible for those words. Our children need to know that their words have the ability to elevate or to destroy.

As our children move to more public social networking, our rules, and our guidance will necessarily change and grow with them.

How do you handle your online reputation? What Google Alerts do you have setup for yourself? Have you ever had to deal with fallout from a bad experience online?

What we do online stays online. As we grow into the social web we need to find ways to maintain our reputation online.

I look forward to your feedback.

Twitter Tutorial: @Replies and @Mentions

dez — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:12:11 +0000

I recently contacted a good friend of mine about the way she was promoting posts from other people (sometimes even mine). Here’s the structure of the tweet she would send out: “@name has a great new post about purple elephants ”.

Without knowing it she was restricting the number of people that saw the post because of the structure of her tweet. She’s an extremely smart person, is a geek, yet didn’t know about the following feature.

I was amazed that she didn’t know how it worked but after thinking about it I wasn’t surprised since Twitter is touted as easy to use but there are some hidden features that affect usage that take some digging (or someone teaching you) to find out about.

@Replies

Back in May of 2009 Twitter made an update the functionality of the @reply. An @reply is a tweet that has a person’s Twitter name at the front of the tweet (just like the structure I displayed above). Users had actually invented the use of the mentioning structure to denote the mention of another user in the system so that people would know they were talking about another Twitter user. Twitter added the feature that linked a user’s name when it was behind the @ sign.

The following is taken from the Twitter support article “What are @replies and mentions?”

People will only see replies in their Home timeline if they are following both the sender and recipient of the update.
People will see mentions in their timeline even if they don’t follow the person mentioned – as long as they follow the sender, they’ll see the mention in their timeline (It’s treated like a regular Tweet.)
People with protected accounts cannot send replies to people who aren’t following them, and mentions won’t be seen by non-followers either.
If someone sends you a reply and you are not following the user, the reply will not appear on your Home timeline. Instead, the reply will appear in your Mentions timeline.
Replies will always have “in reply to” listed next to their timestamp. If a Tweet doesn’t have this, it’s a mention.

Assuming you don’t have a protected account here is the breakdown of the @reply structure:

	Following Both Tweeter and @Replied	Following Tweeter Only	Following @replied only
In your stream	X
Not in your stream		X	X

@Mentions

Mentions are a little bit simpler to understand. Technically @replies are @mentions that just happened to be placed at the beginning of a tweet. Both will show up in your replies area. The only difference is that the people who are following just them can also see the tweet that mentions you instead of just the people that follow both of you.

Back to the original issue. I contacted her asking her if she knew that putting my @name at the beginning of her tweet meant that only the people that followed both of us would see it and while I appreciated the gesture I wanted to make sure that she knew the limits that her format imposed.

Twifficiency

dez — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:49:22 +0000

A 17-year old from Scotland has created a tool called “Twifficiency“. James Cunningham (@jamescun) most likely didn’t expect his application to hit the worldwide trending topics, but it did.

The tool gives you a % of efficiency based off of the number of people you follow, your follower number, how often you tweet, and how many tweets you read.

I’m not sure how he gets the “How many tweets you read” metric because Twitter doesn’t have a way to mark tweets as read/unread so it would be interesting to know how he’s coming up with that number, but other than that he has created an extremely simple and viral tool that people are actually using.

On his personal account he said:

FFS. Twifficiency is NOT a scam, it is not Phishing, it is not a password stealer. It doesn’t even log what your score is…

This is probably the reason that his site has not gone down yet. He’s not storing anything. And for his app name to be a trending topic is most likely generating a serious amount of traffic. He’s got an Adsense link ad on the top right of both the home page and calculate page which is going to generate a decent amount of income for the time being.

It’s not the most detailed app in the world but it’s pretty easy to use. If you don’t mind the auto-tweet that it sends out (and seriously, there are worse things in the world).

BTW, my Twifficiency score is 38%.

Need Blogs to Subscribe To: Make It Yours

dez — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:43:17 +0000

Since I’ve been reformatting my subscriptions to be of a more personal nature I have started finding other blogs based off blogroll links from the sites that I’m already subscribed to. But I want more. Now that I’m caught up on my reading and have been all weekend I want some more. I want to find stuff to comment on.

Suggest yourself* or suggest someone else. Location is no matter, I’ll even pass on a language requirement and use Google Translate if needed.

Turn the above image into a non-issue.

*AKA… this is my invitation to you to market yourself. Just leave a link to your site in the comment, but either way I want to know you’re out there.

Social Sharing FTW!

dez — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:04:29 +0000

I used to be a bit obsessed over being the first of my online social graph to discover and share a video. I’m not sure how I got sucked in on it, but maybe it was the recognition or getting the RT’s or the comments on my Facebook post. I’ve become rather bored lately with trying to find the latest funny thing on the interwebs.

Bill Roehl (@garciasn) and I were having a conversation today about our feed subscriptions and what we’ve been unsubscribing from. I mentioned that I’ve now unsubscribed from all but one Cheezeburger Network site. They just aren’t fun for me anymore. I used to have 16 subscriptions in my “Fun” feed folder. I’m down to seven.

But why aren’t they fun?

Here’s a short list:

Repetitive
Strings of not so funny posts
Cross-posting
Too many videos

This brought Bill to say “Social Sharing FTW”. He has a good point. I (and I assume others) depend on their social stream to show them content that they otherwise would not have known about. Without realizing it I had unsubscribed from many of the big news sites out there in favor of discovering them through my Twitter stream or by visiting the sites when I wanted to read something.

I’ve been subscribing to the thought of not treating my feed reader as I do my email inbox, but it’s difficult to ignore a folder that has over 1,000 unread posts in the period of a week. Even harder to ignore is when you have 5-6 folders with that many unreads in them. I’ll never get around to reading all of it, and I hardly get around to reading any of it.

I do however pound through posts of a more personal nature in my “Personal” folder. The content in these posts vary between strategy, learning, personal experiences, and some sales. The reason they are in the folder is because they are written by one person and usually someone that I already have a relationship with (online and offline). These are also the posts that don’t necessarily make it onto Twitter and Facebook by the person that wrote them.

What do you find yourself reading or ignoring?

Photo Credit: masochismtango

Writing On My Own Blog

dez — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:52:39 +0000

I’m going to start taking John Gruber’s approach to commenting on blogs. He’s semi-famous for turning off comments on his blog and taking the approach of “write on your own blog”. It’s not a bad idea. This is why trackbacks exist.

Don’t worry, I won’t be tweeting everything I comment on, but it’s easier for me to find articles that I’ve commented on if the comments exist in a realm where I have control. I don’t comment in a lot of places, but the ones I do have some specific reasons for me being interested in them.

I’ve pretty much quit commenting on the huge blogs (Mashable, Techcrunch) because I don’t really add value. If a story is interesting enough from one of them I’ll talk about it and link to it, but otherwise.

The goals in this approach:

Archiving what I’ve found interesting for future reference
Giving some exposure to the blog I’m commenting on
More content for my site
Comment on more posts

Also, the comments are my thoughts, and content that I’m creating in the first place. I put a lot of thought into the comments I write and they never consist of “Great post! I’ll keep reading”. My comments are my own thoughts and that’s kind of what a blog is for.

Besides that it will give some more insight into who Dez is. Often times I don’t get around to publishing my opinions on things that are happening. I’m not going to turn off commenting on my blog like John did, but it’d be cool if you tracked back as well.

Image Credit: Maia C

When Is Your Audience Listening? Does It Even Matter?

dez — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:21:28 +0000

Are you a door to door salesman or do people come to you for your message?

There are two options to consider when you’re building your audience:

Chase your audience (door to door salesman)
Have your audience come to you (events)

I’ve spent the last nine months growing and cultivating an online audience for a local chain of restaurants. When I first logged into their Twitter account I started to follow people in the area that followed other restaurants, followed me, or were followed by me. A few weeks later I started following people that I found through specific genre related keywords.

This approach worked to begin with. However what resulted was that this account was following close to 300 people and was being followed by just under 100. I was chasing my audience individually to get them to notice me. It was a manual, singular, inefficient, and wholy NEEDED approach when I first took over the account.

I realized that I couldn’t continue to knock on everyone’s “now following you” door. Or trying to send @replies in response to someone’s update. I hate hearing that I’m a bot (because I won’t do auto-tweets/dms). I hate being ignored when I’m trying to have a conversation. I needed a way to get people to come to me, engage with me, and participate in my thing.

What did I do to fix this? I made a regularly scheduled, weekly event. On both Twitter and Facebook the same event happens on the same day of the week, at the same time, for the same reason. It could easily be daily, but when you’re giving away a coupon for a free entree item for a small business you don’t want to break the bank. So I timed it for their slow time during the week.

What has happened in the last three months that I’ve been doing this?

Facebook has almost 600 “likes” and continues growing. On a weekly basis I get nearly 20% response (and it keeps growing) to the weekly contest. Twitter is approaching a 10% response since I also started adding in a separate RT contest on top of the regular contest.

The number of followers on Twitter for this account grows every week now because of people that are participating and by new people that want to participate. Traffic in the stores is up across their locations for their slow days. I only give away 20 coupons online/week, but the increase company wide is greater than 20 people (and usage is about 50% of what I give away).

I no longer have to spam follow people and have enormously higher following to follower ratios. The conversations are becoming daily, unique, and hardly even related to eating. There’s an actual mayorship war going on in one of the locations because I said there was (seriously, the two people didn’t really think so before I mentioned them both in an update as being in competition for mayorship). Speaking of Foursquare, if you’re a business that has people checking into your location and you don’t have a special; you should. I have a checkin and mayor special and I get mentions about it on a regular basis. It also gives those dry times some content when I don’t have a coupon.

Best of all, it’s no longer me growing my audience. My audience is doing it for me.

Stop chasing your audience and give them a reason to come to you.

“Internet Is Completely Over” — Prince

dez — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:48:32 +0000

During an interview with the Mirror Prince said:

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.”

“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

I’m going to have to agree with him. I mean, everything is coming down in 2012 anyway, right? In that case if you are still interested in reading my mail-log please send me your physical mailing address or a fax number so that you can still receive my updates which I’ll be handwriting and making sure I dot my i’s with hearts and use fancy cursive for italics, block letters for bold, and my links will instead be appendixes which will be printed off from other “mail-logs”.

Also, I’m going to stop doing any sort of math, since my head will fill “with numbers and that can’t be good for you”.

On a good note… feel free to talk all you want about Prince online, since I doubt he’s got a Google Alert setup.

Some other reading for you:

Mitch Kapor (@mkapor): “Prince says Internet is over. Internet says Prince is over. You choose.”
John Newton (@johnnewton): “The Network formerly known as the Internet…”

Perfect Porridge: Prince: The internet is completely over
Mashable: Prince: “The Internet Is Over”
Huffington Post: Prince: The ‘Internet Is Completely Over’
Popeater: Prince Hates iTunes, Says ‘Internet Is Completely Over’

Canned Unicorn Meat Is Pretty Close To Pork

dez — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:28:28 +0000

Not even magical creatures are safe from registered trademarks. ThinkGeek got a cease and desist letter over their use of the term “The new white meat” for the April Fools’ Day parody product “Canned Unicorn Meat“. The lawyers representing the National Pork Board thought the phrase was too close to the registered “The Other White Meat”.

The President/CEO of Geeknet responded with a press release stating:

“It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn,” said Scott Kauffman, President and CEO of Geeknet. “In fact, ThinkGeek’s canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity.”

ThinkGeek only posted the first page of the letter but claims that it stretches to twelve pages. I wonder what the magical gnomes think of the waste of tree.

Obviously adding sparkles doesn’t frighten the lawyers away.

ThinkGeek is now offering a $10 coupon on a $40 order in the checkout by entering PORKBOARD.

Photo Credit: archiemcphee

Rethinking Friendship Online

dez — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 03:24:01 +0000

Jason Douglas did an experiment on Tuesday (his birthday). He removed his birthday from public view on Facebook a few months ago to see how many people would post on his wall “Happy Birthday”.

In his own words this is how the experiment ended up:

Suddenly, it was 10:35, and I had zero twitter friends wishing a happy birthday, and only one new happy birthday wish on Facebook. However, I did have four business emails wishing me happy birthday. For those keeping score: Email 4, People on social media: 2.

This confirmed what I had thought. Without a reminder, very few people would know about my birthday. Everything changed when my girlfriend, Amanda, sent a happy birthday tweet and Facebook status update. Experiment: dead. Before her status update on Facebook: 6 birthday wishes. After: 30. Before her tweet: zero. After: 40+.

Flickr Photo: Creative Cakes by KeeKee

I have to admit. I’m horrible at remembering birthdays (or dates in general). Usually it’s only my family and close friends that I keep track of on my calendar. I have definitely been guilty in the past of doing the now normal Facebook wall post to each of my friends when Facebook tells me it is their birthday.

So in the new age of information sharing, what are we missing? I call my mom and dad on their birthdays (usually Mom calls me really early in the morning coaxing me into remembering). Family is mostly included, but I forget one now and then. If it wasn’t for my dad or mom calling me to remind me of an upcoming birthday I’m sure I’d miss more.

That’s not the point though. Right now I’m following 537 people on Twitter and have 280 friends on Facebook. Not counting family members and close friends on Facebook I don’t think I know anyone’s birthday off the top of my head. I’m not bothered by that.

Yes, it’d be nice to know, but now in the Facebook era I know when my friend’s are having birthdays without anyone letting me know. Facebook is my social calendar for events and birthdays (since I don’t post to it anymore).

Social Media is about being… well… more social. I suggest stopping the normal expected Facebook wall post and being a little more creative. Yes, it’s going to be a challenge for me as well.

What do you do besides post on a friend’s Facebook wall when it’s their birthday? How do you prefer to be congratulated of Your Day?

Thanks Jason for the thoughts, and Happy Birthday once again. (that’s one way to do it)

Craiglist Stupidity

dez — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:30:27 +0000

Courtesy of hisks

I subscribe via RSS to the craiglist computer gigs Minneapolis/Saint Paul feed. I do this for my side job stuff. Every once in a while I come across an ad that just irritates me for what the person is wanting for a small amount of money.

I’ll usually shrug these ads off and continue my searching. Every once in a while, however, I’ll come across a posting where the hiring party is obviously just being difficult.

Take this ad for example:

A tech savvy web marketer is needed to increase traffic and sales for an e-commerce website, [redacted]. You will work as an independent contractor and be paid $150 per month (non-negotiable). You must be able to:
-Develop keywords and meta tags to give website a top-ranked position on popular search engines
-Create one-way links to other relevant websites
-Place ads on the internet and social networking sites
-Build and maintain a presence on social networking sites
-Make any other marketing suggestions to administrator to increase product sales

Must have technical experience with e-commerce websites and have the technical knowledge to effectively implement the projects listed above. Must also possess good written communication skills. Please PASTE your resume in an email to [redacted]. RESUME ATTACHMENTS WILL NOT BE OPENED!

I’m just about to send the following email out with a link to this post:

$150/month?

This is what marketing associates do at firms for their career (for 20x as much per month or more)

A word of advice though: You should probably pay someone more per month to represent you online. You’re handing the keys to your business and reputation over to someone who’s probably not experienced enough to do more than tweet and update a facebook fan page status (instead of actually cultivating a good, communicative community to interact in).

I get many times more than what you’re paying to just build, maintain, and cultivate a social presence for ONE company. And I’m cheap (most firms charge greater than $1,000/month for social services management, depending on company size). Tack on web marketing, keyword generation, and ad placement services and you’re typically looking at over $1,750/month in fees related to web presence.

As far as not opening resume attachments; I spent a lot of time making sure my resume looked good and presented well in the format that I built it in. It’d be best if you respect the time people spend to market themselves if you plan on having them do marketing for you as well.

I wish you well with your goals, but I hope that you’ll realize that you should either learn how to and then do the work yourself (which often ends up being more successful in social terms) or pay someone more fairly for the work and responsibility you’re requiring of them.

–dez
dez@iamdez.com
Dez Consulting
612-208-8339

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/cpg/1758118196.html

I’ve seen a lot of doosies on craigslist but the extreme low compensation for this job just flipped a switch.

Facebook Privatization: What Applications Can See About You

dez — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:17:48 +0000

Sometime around the end of August 2009 the American Civil Liberties Union released a Facebook application called “What Do Quizzes Really Know About You?“. The purpose of the application was to give the user a quiz regarding the privacy of their accounts. This was followed up with an offer to join a petition to get Facebook to provide full control to each piece of the information you provide to the site as well as allowing you to select what you share with an application you install.

The majority of user’s who choose to install an application do not realize the privacy they are giving up by doing so. When you do allow an application access to your account you are accepting the following statement: “Allowing access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.” That’s a quote.

Before December 9th, 2009, you were able to completely block out what applications could see about you if your friends added them to their profile. However after that you were no longer able to fully opt-out of sharing information with applications that your friends installed. Here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like. (Source of screenshot) Click on the image for a full size view.

Since December 9th, this is what the privatization page has looked like:

That means that applications that your friends use can access your stuff. And Facebook allowed them to access MORE of it by limiting what you can hide.

How can you change your settings for what applications can see? First go here: Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites

I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t share. But my opinion is that there seems to be no purpose besides making Facebook more money by having any of these selected.

Besides having deleted all of my status updates for the past year and 5 months (previous to 01/01/2009 I can’t access my own status updates) I’ve removed all information on my profile that isn’t publicly available other places (like on this blog).

I’ll leave this quote with you from Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine “Confusing *a* public with *the* public”:

In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

——

This is second in a series of privatizing how-to’s for Facebook. Please see the rest here: Facebook Privacy

Where’d my Facebook Statuses Go?

dez — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:33:48 +0000

Oh yeah… never mind. I deleted them.

Why?

I’m halting use of the service for anything personal (excluding events). I removed all the ‘likes’ to pages that I wasn’t an administrator of. I’m in the process of removing all my images from the site (and copying them back to my harddrive if I don’t have them any more).

One thing that I found interesting was that there was NOTHING remaining on the site like status updates, links, or wall posts BEFORE 2009. It seems like as of midnight 01/01/2009 Facebook started, however I joined the site in 2006 so I know it was there at some point.

I wonder if I still ‘own’ that data since they don’t delete anything (they just mark the deleted column in the database to 1 instead of 0).

I know it’s been talked about before, but pictures don’t really go anywhere once you ‘delete them’.

Take this confused looking one of me: I deleted this hours ago, but it will probably be there for quite a while. I’m going to be checking it daily (hopefully) to find out when it is actually ‘gone’.

Back at it: Twitter App

dez — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:05:57 +0000

I had a sort of aha moment last night. It involves more work on my Twitter app. Although I’m restricted by the number of calls I can make per week, I can work around that by using a different logic to get the information I’m requesting from Twitter. This involves a rather large rewrite of some workhorse portions of my code, but I’m going to work in some backup so that I can deal with Twitter status returns of 200/empty for accounts that really aren’t (this was a major issue in making this all work before). Most likely I’ll depend more on the statuses_count if I come across a reported empty that most likely isn’t really empty.

Twitter’s own API says:

Requests for more than the limit will result in a reply with a status code of 200 and an empty result in the format requested.

However, they’re responding with the same empty response/200 status when I’m asking via a valid request and I get drop-kicked by the unicorn.

I’ve got a few more ideas on how to make the app even more appealing from an information side as well, but I’m not going to list that here for fear of scope-creeping myself out of existence… also, I’m going to wait on reporting more information for when I can get what I originally wanted to display actually working consistently and accurately.

I think I figured out scale less than a minute ago via webJustin Dessonville
iamdez