There's A Reason You're Feeling Distracted [INFOGRAPHIC]

Have you ever just wanted to check comments on your Facebook status "real quick" - and then wind up down the rabbit hole for like 3 hours? Well, you're not alone! This awesome look at Digital Distractions at the Museum of Modern Art sums it all up nicely:

SOURCE

Microblog: Twitter Ethics

It seems like Twitter is gaining in popularity. I was watching CNN the other day - and they actually showed a reporter posting tweets - on the air! What the ??

If I'm watching CNN - I don't want to see people Twittering... or checking their email... or writing a blog post... I want to watch people report the news. If I want to read the CNN tweets - then I'll go on my mobile device or computer and read the tweets.

Some people are just NUTS when it comes to what they tweet. Take the guy who did a "lifecast" of his wife giving birth - yeah... on Twitter! Or what about reporters who get inside access to special briefings from the White House or on an analyst call? If they Twitter the juicy details before the others can write up and file a story - is that "fair?"

How about Twossip (Twitter + Gossip)? Does saying something about a person and then broadcasting it to all your "followers" constitute slander - or are you just doing a "really wide-reaching IM"?

What about the people that use Twitter as a stream-of-conscientiousness tool? I hate those type of people - and they only usually last one day on my "follow" list. I really don't need to read 40 (or MORE!) posts from you a day. I do NOT need to "hear" every single thought that crosses your mind - nor do I want to.

On the other hand - some folks don't tweet enough in my opinion. There are some folks who tweet maybe 2-3 times per day (or sometimes less) - that I actually look forward to seeing a tweet from (Tech show host and radio guy Leo Laport and Servoy developer Greg Pierce to name a couple).

So if you DO Twitter - say something funny, outrageous, whimsical, controversial - it'll just be more fun for everyone. BTW: You can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bobcusick as well...

Microblog:: Twitter Spam

Deep breath.... deep breath... OK. For those of you that have a compelling need to Tweet more than 15 times per day - here's my personal advice: Step AWAY from the keyboard (or cell phone or whatever).

The whole point of Twitter, and Pownce and Tumbler and ______ (your social network here) is that you share something RELEVANT with your followers. It's NOT a free-for-all.

If you're posting more than 10 Tweets per day - then you're a Twitter Spammer (you know who you are). Stop it! No, really!

Rather than posting what you're reading - or the fact that you just posted and "can't believe it" - there's another medium for you - it's called a "blog." You can rant the whole day - and no one will care (trust me!).

But putting out 150 status "updates" a day is just too damn much. No one CARES! Instead, take a deep breath (get your HANDS OFF the keyboard - no one cares that you took a deep breath) and form some funny or interesting thing to say, and then (and ONLY then) post it to your followers.

We're (I mean I'm) tired of all the spam. If you post and see your own face (only!) on the the entire first page of your XYZ feed - just say NO. NO to posting inane details of what you're doing. NO to inane details of a trip or who you're @ hanging with. NO BODY CARES.

NOW, I'm going to Tweet this post....

In Social Media We Trust

My entry into the social media realm has been very interesting - to say the least. I've stayed mainly with the mainstream services: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce (shutting down Dec 15th), Jabber, etc.

I've even been able to amass some "friends" on each of the services. I've been pretty careful about who I will add as a connection in each of them - but I was reading an article by Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld the other day that really gave me pause.

He was talking about the fact that it's possible for scammers, theives and other miscreants to "hijack" the identities of people you may really know - and pose as them - in order to gain your confidence for an a scam attack at some point in the future.

He points out some really interesting points: in the social media world we will trust another person who we (think) we know as a "friend." Now that person can see all of our other friends and their profiles. But what I never really stopped to think about was just how easy it would be to steal someone's identity and pose as that person.

Mr. Elgan calls it "How to steal friends and influence people":

Step 1: Request to be "friends" with a dozen strangers on MySpace. Let's say half of them accept. Collect a list of all their friends.

Step 2: Go to Facebook and search for those six people. Let's say you find four of them also on Facebook. Request to be their friends on Facebook. All accept because you're already an established friend.

Step 3: Now compare the MySpace friends against the Facebook friends. Generate a list of people that are on MySpace but are not on Facebook. Grab the photos and profile data on those people from MySpace and use it to create false but convincing profiles on Facebook. Send "friend" requests to your victims on Facebook.

As a bonus, others who are friends of both your victims and your fake self will contact you to be friends and, of course, you'll accept. In fact, Facebook itself will suggest you as a friend to those people.

Yikes! Just think about that for a minute. Someone out there could be on another social media site right now using your name, your photo and your profile to lure people into a scam, or worse. Now, the bad news is - the damage may already be done.

As a precaution, I would suggest that people who are "into" the social media scene (and who isn't these days?) - check out some of the other social media sites by searching for yourself. If you find a fake that's on there - you owe it to yourself to report it to the appropriate service and get the "bad" profile removed.

I've never had to deal with this personally (thank goodness) - so I'm not sure what the policy would be. Do you get to keep the profile up there - but you just take over the username/password? What happens when you want to join that same network after the offending profile as been removed? Can you even keep your same name (your real name) - or will it be blacklisted?

GREAT! Just one more thing to be paranoid about...

If any of you out there have experience with this - or know of someone who does - be sure to leave a comment.

Twitter Phishing

There's nothing that people love to do more than know where they stand in society. Don't believe me? What brand of jeans to you wear? What kind of car do you drive? How many iPhones/iPods do you own? What kind of mobile phone?

It's like we're all just walking around proving our rank to each other - even in the world of social media. How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many contacts in Linkedin?

Come on, admit it. When you add someone to your social network - the first thing you look at is how they compare to you. "Oh, I see they only have 84 friends on Facebook... well, I hate to brag, but I have 142..."

And so on and so on.

It appears as if some enterprising person decided to tap into our collective egos and one-upsmanship and created a site called "Twitterrank". It's a very straightforward premise: "True to its namesake, it uses 'back references' of sorts to determine how worthy of a person you are in Twitterverse"

Oooooh - something shiny! Must... enter... my... secret... details... must... enter... my... secret... details...

There's a big disclaimer on the site that says:

I'm not out to steal ur twitterz. Frankly, I wish I didn't have to ask for your account info, but Twitter doesn't offer APIs using any other authentication mechanism (according to the docs). Read more about what I will and won't do with your account info/data in the FAQ.

I will not store your password. I will only use it once to calculate your Twitterank.

No, really, he won't. There's no "pinky swear" there - but it's implied. In researching a bit further, I came across a blog entry by Oliver Marks from ZDnet. In there, he points to a link with a screenshot of the source code of the application.

Well, if you look at the source code now - you'll see that those sort of offending remarks have been removed, and it appears as if Mr. Chijiiwa, the site's creator - decided it was best to take the criticisms of the social media community to heart - and has posted his site link and his resume.

Turns out he's a Google Engineer! Huh. Well, there's NO WAY that someone could put up a fake site or fake resume on the Internet... everyone knows that!

In the meantime, send ME your Twitter username and password - I won't store it either (wink, wink) and don't worry there's no way I would write an automated solution that would create 30 tweets an hour from your account that would point people to porn sites and scammer sites... I pinky swear!

Unified Contacts - NOW Please

So I've been working with various social media sites for over 2 months now - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Rejaw, Tumblr and I've also been using the hell out of my iPhone (yes, I'm one of those fanboy types who is not having any problems with my phone).

All in all, it's pretty cool. Except for one thing - my profiles. I have profiles on different sites and keeping them up to date can be a pain. It's sort of like keeping track of people when they move, change jobs, or get married and their contact information changes.

I have a copy of their email address and physical address and phone number in my email program, on my phone, and in a Christmas list database. For the contacts that both my wife and I know - she has a copy in her email program, her phone and probably written in her "big black daytimer" as well.

None of these things talk to one another.

What if I update my information? Then I would send out an email to the people I know, update all the social networking sites - and just HOPE that people that I know would even notice that I moved or got a new phone number or a new email address.

And, if you're like me - when you go to a meeting where you meet new people - you carry all your pertinent information on a little 2" x 3" scrap of paper known as a business card. The crappy part is - so does everyone else.

Then, after the event, you get to take those 20 little scraps of paper (sometimes with notes on it - like personal email addresses or a note about the person) and then I get to hand key that information back into my address book. And then find them on LinkedIn. And Facebook. And Twitter. And Rejaw. And Tumblr.

Then I go to the next person - and repeat.

Surly in 2008 - there must be a better way! I'm looking for some digital solution that would allow people to exchange basic contact information with social media sites, and have that data synchronize across my address book to my phone.

It would contain my basic information (like on a Facebook profile) - and allow me to specify what I would share with whom (name and company for strangers, mobile phone for family and selected friends, etc.). Then it would just automatically synch with anyone that has me marked as a friend (or follower or whatever).

I would have just a single place to update my stuff, and I would know that everyone that is linked to me has the most up to date information all the time. And, I would also know that everyone I'm linked TO is up to date as well.

As long as I'm dreaming, I would also put in my preferred method of contact (email, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and I would be able to update my profile at any time to remove information (I didn't mean to publish my mobile phone number to everyone) and it would just automatically be removed from everyone's data store as well.

The technology exists. It shouldn't be THAT hard to do. The issue (like any other technology) would come down to one of adoption. Adoption of not just the people with the connections - but to people like handset makers who could build in a "update profile" button on their contact management apps, or software developers of either browsers, social media sites and email programs to all write to and read from a set of specifications.

Yeah, good luck on that! I guess I'll just re-order my business cards now....

Social Media Tech Tools

So, I was bitching about social media sites a while back - and I was bemoaning the fact that since I had a "real job" - it was difficult for me to keep up on all the sites.

Well, I do still hold that opinion, however - I did find a tool that makes updating stuff (at least your "status") a helluva lot easier: ping.fm.

This nifty site (still in beta - but just request a login and in a couple of days they will give you one) - has made life so much easier when trying to post to all those media sites. Basically, it's an aggregation service that will allow you to input all your logins for all the social media sites you're a member of - and then blast your update to them in realtime.

It will also let you post to any single service by adding "@" and then a two letter abbreviation - e.g. Twitter = @tt. Not only will it allow you to do status updates and microblogging - but it will allow you to do full blog posts as well. To post a blog entry to blogger - you would use something like this: @bl This is Cool!^Body of my blog. Ping.fm would then post a new posting to your blogger account with title^posting.

I also ran across some very interesting other stuff when looking at the APIs of LinkedIn (still not public yet) and Twitter.

For LinkedIn there is a webservice widget called "Company Insider" that you can call that will see if there is anyone you know in any company. It's VERY easy to insert into any HTML page.

If you're into Twitter - there is some great documentation on their RESTful API here. Basically, a RESTful API means you can call it with simple URLs. For example - enter this text into a browser (Firefox or IE work best): http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml. You will be prompted to enter your username/password (use your Twitter login and password) - and you'll get back an XML string of the last 2 people that posted to you.

You can also get it back in atom, rss, or json formats as well - simply by changing the "xml" in the url to one of the supported formats.

It's basically the same thing for Tumblr, Rejaw, Pownce, Plurk, etc. They all offer a RESTful API that you can get XML or JSON files out of. This means that you can add all of this social media to whatever site you have. In fact, if you develop applications - it's conceivable to create a really cool social networking mashup/dashboard type of application...

Servoy developers - can you hear me now?

Real World Test: iPhone Apps

I took most of the day off on Friday - I definitely needed a "mental health" day (or more than one!) - and took a day-long ride on my motorcycle. Now, as you probably already know - I recently bought an iPhone - so I thought that I'd use nothing but that to run my whole day. And here's what happened:

I started off checking the weather in various locations - trying to decide where the best place would be (not too cloudy or hot). I used the default app - but then I also downloaded a free app called WeatherBug. It allows you to get all the weather data about a particular place - more than you'll actually ever need.

Then I fired up the browser and Google Maps to plan my route. I decided that I would go from Moorpark to Valencia on the 126, then up the 5 freeway to Fraiser Park, then over the mountain to Hwy 166, into Santa Maria, and then up the 153 into Santa Barbara, then back up the 101 to the 126 and back to Moorpark.

Once on the road I stopped in Valencia to get some water (it was 95 degrees - 3 degrees hotter than the weather thing said). I checked my email while in line (only junk), checked my voicemails (I don't listen to music or phone when riding - it's too distracting) and then hit the road again.

I stopped again in Fraiser Park for gas and some junk food. When the service was unbelievably slow at the Jack In The Box I went to - I fired up the phone and used Twinkle to post to my Twitter account. It's really a great (and free) application.

While eating, I was listening to some streaming music from Pandora.com via their native iPhone app. Because Apple won't allow any background processes to run (except the iPod music?) - every time I wanted to do something else the stream stopped. After a while, I just put on the tunes from the local device, and headed over to my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts - also via their native iPhone applications - to check what was going on.

At various places I was able to take photos and email them to friends - documenting my progress for future posterity. As I rode down into the HOT valley between Fraiser Park and Santa Maria on the 166 - I was thinking about my upcoming ServoyWorld sessions and made some mental notes.

When I stopped in Santa Maria - I used the SpeakEasy voice recorder to capture my ramblings on ServoyWorld, consulted the Google Maps application (to make sure I hadn't passed the turn off for the 153 already), then checked the traffic in Santa Barbara (heavy on a Friday, but only for 2 miles). Then I did a quick check of the Servoy official blog using WordPress - and headed out for the last leg.

The traffic updates from Google were correct - there WAS traffic right where it said - and it really was only 2 miles long (seemed much longer at the time).

I have to say - that all in all - the iPhone performed above my expectations. I was able to have some fun while staying connected to the data I needed where and when I needed it. I didn't have any problems with the 3G reception (unlike a lot of other people) - but the battery life was a bit on the "suck" side.

I even turned off the 3G radio and used the Edge network - which I found to be relatively fast - almost as fast as the 3G network most of the time. Using the Edge network also increased the battery life by almost 50%.

For me, the iPhone honeymoon continues...

Ning Bitch Slaps WidgetLabs

Social network giant Ning has suddenly pulled the plug on one of the biggest plug-in developers - WidgetLaboratory. They just summarily removed all of WidgetLaboratory's widgets from every single user's site - leaving a smoking pile of twisted debris in their wake.

Let's just say that the folks who had spent (literally) hundreds of hours perfecting their vertical social networks found themselves with sites that didn't work, or had big, gaping holes where there was once functionality.

All of this happened overnight. Without any warning from Ning to their members.

Ning says that WidgetLaboratory violated their Terms of Service. They haven't specified exactly what TOS they violated - but hey, nice job in blowing up a large portion of your user's sites!

The folks over at WidgetLabs haven't taken kindly to getting the boot. In a recent blog entry - they went on the warpath and decided to just totally open source all of their widgets so that their customers could get their sites back up and running. Considering that WidgetLabs was actually being paid for each widget (usually on a monthly basis) from each customer - this is a very big move that is a clear case of doing the right thing in the name of customer service.

Opening up their code should also put Ning in a bind. If Ning continues to ban the WidgetLabs software (which the users paid for and uploaded themselves to their own private site), then end users can just skim through the code and either re-create their own widget. If Ning allows the widgets to stay, then the "network degradation" issue they sited as the reason for the ban - is just a smokescreen.

Ning claims that they were just "protecting their network" in this Friday post. In that post one of Ning's controversial founders, Gina Bianchini, keeps talking in circles while she fails to mention anything of substance. What is interesting, however is this statement: "If we could fill these holes today, we would. We will start this effort shortly"

Something stinks in Denmark.

I wonder if it's nothing more than greed. Maybe WidgetLabs had been getting too successful? Did Ning sense a revenue opportunity? Or did WidgetLabs simply piss the Ning folks off?

Ning is in the wrong here. Providers of infrastructure shouldn't just pull off a third-party developer's content (used on hundreds if not thousands) of sites - with zero notification. There's no reason in the world why Ning couldn't have given people 30 days notice or something. I mean, it's not like we're in China or something...

Socially Unsocial

I don't want to sound like the Andy Rooney of social networking - but, I just don't get it. I spent some middle-of-the-night time this weekend trying my darndest to figure it out.

I updated my Facebook profile, I added people to my Twitter account, updated my LinkedIn profile, sent a Jott and then I spent a bunch of time (literally 4+ hours) reading profiles of other people who are "connected", or "linked" or "are friends of" the people I know.

Here's what I found out:

• I'm not the most social person ever invented
• Everybody in the world knows more people than I do
  

I also determined that most (not ALL) the people that I have linked to my various online profiles - must have a helluva' lot of down time. I mean, I can barely find time to write this blog - never mind keep up on 5 different social networking sites, posting things, updating things, pinging, twittering, twirling, and flickring.

I can understand it if you're a journalist, PR person, marketing person, recruiter, etc. But 99% of these folks are none of the above. I mean REALLY! People! Wow! Let me know the jobs you have that allow that much free time.

I can understand if you wanted to join one of these services because your friends are there - and it's a way to "hang out" without really doing anything... ummm... together... but I would still rather watch an episode of Lost - than obsess over who is doing what - RIGHT NOW(!).

And wow - how much personal information do you really want to share? I hear all sorts of people piss and moan about how little privacy there is in the world these days, how all these nameless, faceless corporations are putting up all sorts of personal information for sale to the highest bidder.

But some of these people are doing it to themselves. Lots of people give waaaayyyy too much information about themselves in all these social networking profiles. I'm not sure I really need to know your turn-ons and turn-offs, and what you had for dinner last night. If I did - I'd either call you - or send you an email.

OK, so I'd send you an email...