Category Archives: Social Networking
Socialcam Raises Facebook Apps Privacy Concerns Once Again
I’m back! OK, things aren’t normal yet, and they may very well not quite return to my definition of normal for a while, BUT I have Internet and here’s my first blog post from Hamilton, Ohio!
Actually, I’m going to point you to a pretty dire concern that Becky Worley on Yahoo! News writes about, and that is “Why (and How) to Turn Off Socialcam on Facebook”. Her opening sentence sums it up quite nicely: “Friends — I beg of you — TURN OFF SHARING for the Socialcam app on Facebook.”
The concern isn’t just the content of the videos themselves but the fact that you are watching them is being shared to everyone on Facebook, sometimes without you even knowing it! Even with public sharing turned off, Worley found that just using it sometimes turned the settings back on!
The type of marketing being used in Socialcam, IMO, should be of enough of a concern to tell people to just plain avoid it. If you want to watch videos of a man supposedly being eaten by a snake, then there are other less embarrassing ways to do it (especially when it turns out to be all hype).
Social Fixer Is the Must-Have Extension for Facebook
It isn’t very often, unfortunately, that I come across a piece of software that absolutely blows me away. However, Social Fixer definitely falls in that category! Thanks to a tip on LifeHacker, I found out about this extension and immediately got curious. I’ve been playing with it ever since.
What does it do? Actually, what doesn’t it do? You can skin your wall, add filters, turn off the stupid new picture thing (what do you call that, anyhow?), hide already read posts, and much, much more! I suggest going to their homepage just to get a partial list of everything it can do.
“Second Screens” Being Targeted for Super Bowl Ads
According to Fox News, Super Bowl advertisers going after ‘second screens’?, advertisers are going after the tweets and the posts that are happening during the game and especially while the ads being played. Some are even offering apps that can be downloaded to rate commercials and other things, it seems.
It’s no surprise that the Super Bowl has become a huge cash cow. The difference now is that instead of a more passive approach to social networking, advertisers are finding ways to make consumers more active in the event.
Facebook Going Public?
As rumor has it, “Facebook May File for IPO By Wednesday: Report”. This is the one that many investors have been waiting on, but it has been delayed in part due to Facebook attempting various models of monetizing the social media site. Some of those past attempts have outraged the online community over privacy concerns. The question now is whether or not Facebook becoming a public company will increase or decrease their sensitivity to privacy issues.
Is Facebook the New Porn Site?
According to the BBC News Technology site, “Facebook ‘virus’ shows hardcore porn and violent images”. According to the article, it is a linkspam virus, which spreads by users clicking on links that are supposedly posted by friends. Reports are that it has become so widespread that one user wrote, “Discovered a new porn site, it’s called Facebook.”
What is concerning is that it might not even be the user whose wall the images show up on that clicked on the link. Apparently, it exploits a browser capability to spread.
In spite of rumors that the group Anonymous was somehow involved, it appears that they did not coordinate this attack. In an interesting twist, a comment on ZDNet article “Facebook Porn and Gore Exploit Spiraling Out Of Control” indicates that 4chan was under its own attack when this all started. At the same time, the very content being portrayed in this indicates a very real attack intended to shame Facebook as a corporation. Some users have already had the last straw and are leaving it, at least for now.
Geek Friday: Video Broadcasting Using Justin.tv, Part 2: Share Your Desktop Using X-Split
In part 1, I outlined some basics about broadcasting using the Justin.tv service. Much of it wasn’t exactly “geek” material, and you certainly don’t have to be a geek in order to do a streaming broadcast. However, there may be times when you will want to broadcast what is on your desktop as well as a live broadcast. Many share their games this way, and others might have slide presentations to share. While not difficult, this is also not as straight forward.
In steps XSplit. It is designed for just this purpose. You can take video input from various sources and mix them for your broadcast. For example, you can broadcast your desktop while putting a live video inset from your webcam into a corner (or, vice-versa if you wish). Perhaps you just want to flip back and forth between sources, and you can do that also.
On the Way to Facebook, I Met MySpace Instead?
When Google+ launched, it was evident that it was meant to be a more “serious” social networking platform. It is something like Facebook, but without all the Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc., stuff. It is supposed to be more “real life”. Yesterday, it was announced in some circles that “Google Plus Is Now Open to All Users”.
So, how is poor Facebook to keep up? Well, yesterday, Facebook launched a few new features that many people just raved foamed at the mouth about. There were over 36,000 love complaint messages directed at Facebook’s announcement of the new feature rollout.
Facebook should be a textbook case study of how to not rollout software. New features, new look and feel, etc., happen on all sorts of platforms. Apple continually pushes out user interface (UI) changes to iPhone and iPad products, and of course Microsoft is already letting people test drive Windows 8. There are those who would compare the rollout of a new OS to the changes in Facebook, but that is a fallacious argument. They are not the same. However, even if they were, the complaints have a lot more to do with how Facebook continually rolls out changes rather than what the changes really are.
Geek Friday: Video Broadcasting Using Justin.tv, Part 1: Introduction
There are tons of ways to record, store, manipulate and broadcast multimedia streams from a PC. However, I wanted an easy but low-cost way to broadcast video, so I have been experimenting with Justin.tv. This might not seem very geek-like, but it takes just a little bit of technical knowledge to get a decent broadcast up and running, and it might at first seem intimidating to those who are not.
First of all, why would you want to do a video in the first place? There are probably as many reasons as there are broadcasters. Most people on Justin.tv or Stickam are into “social broadcasting”. They have slightly different ways to do it, but in essence you have a video broadcast and a chat area. You can use Skype and other means to carry on voice conversations and broadcast them as well. There are people who broadcast church services, what’s playing on their TV and just about anything video. With some additional software, you can also broadcast from a game or your desktop as well. In fact, you could put together a series of lectures with screenshots of a computer screen (or, overlaid) and produce some tutorial videos. If the technology exists to display it, then it appears that there is a way to capture it and broadcast it.
The Online World Is a Reflection of the Real World, So Watch Who You Trust
It’s sort of odd that a story like “Californian woman has home ransacked after renting it out through Airbnb website” would make The Telegraph, as it is just a reflection of the reality that there are bad people in the world and some of them are … online (gasp!).
My mom, when she was alive, would be very skeptical of some of those commercials on TV. However, it was really difficult to try to convince her that Bill Gates not only would not but could not track who you forwarded emails to, and he was certainly not about to give away a thousand copies of Microsoft Windows. As I have learned, though, she isn’t the only one that would believe something just because it was in an email while being normally a bit more questioning in other areas of life.
Hackers Post Obama Assassination
Fox News Politics’ Twitter account was hacked by a group calling themselves “The Script Kiddies”, according to The Telegraph article “Fox News hackers claim Barack Obama assassinated”. According to the hoax, President Barak Obama was “shot twice at a Ross’ restaurant in Iowa while campaigning. RIP Obama, best regards to the Obama family.”
It would seem that being vigilant about security is a must even for Twitter. Somehow, though, a lot of people seem to think that social networking sites don’t need as much security.
