I logged into GTalk on my iPhone recently looking for a friend and noticed a new Buzz link. Curious, I tapped on it and it told me “Safari Would Like to Use Your Current Location”. Anything that wants to automatically use my GPS location when I don’t expect it to creeps me out, so I declined. (And even though I declined, every so often it kept annoying me about wishing to use my location again and again presumably because I still had the site open.)

I just spent time at work reviewing and evaluating policies regarding the ethics and expectations of sharing contact information. In business (and I’ve also seen this bleed into personal lives), it’s always good etiquette to check with contacts before connecting them to each other and to ask for permission before sharing contact information. Coincidentally, thanks to GBuzz, this etiquette and respect for privacy is easily thrown out the door and GBuzz helps you sell out your friends anyway; it discloses who you email most often and who emails you frequently by default.

Check out more details in Google Buzz: Privacy Nightmare.

So… my dear frequent email pals, I’m not selling you out; I turned off that feature. The setting actually isn’t easy to find. If you haven’t gone through the GBuzz steps and you go to Edit Profile (as mentioned in the article above), it’s not there:

I also found a page indicating that my profile was not public which could be misleading to some. I was able to find the option for “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me” referred to in the article under the “view connected sites” link though it uses the term show instead of display. You can also get there by clicking on “# connected sites” next to your name.

When you click on the Next Step button:

It’s easy for someone to miss the tiny little note about showing people you follow and people who follow you in your profile and companies use this default and opt-out strategy to increase/encourage adoption by assuming that people don’t care enough to read carefully or pay attention. But seriously, who would easily think the lists automatically refer to the people you email frequently and vice versa? (I have 0 followers and I’m following 0 because I took the screenshot from an account I barely use.) Someone has already complained that she’s on an ex-boyfriend’s follow list and businesses/journalists/freelancers who use gmail could easily accidentally expose their business contacts and sources. If you click on the Edit link:

That’s where you find the option to change that setting. The good news is that if you weren’t paying attention the first time and just clicking quickly, your Edit Profile page finally has that setting added to it once you’ve gone through the GBuzz setup steps (use the direct link or navigate to it by logging into GMail or your Google Account, going to google.com, click on “Settings”, then “Google Account Settings”, finally “Edit Profile”):

If I remember correctly, I already had a profile and I still hadn’t seen the option to change the privacy setting via Edit Profile. Some speculate that if someone has a Google profile and hasn’t set up GBuzz yet, it may be possible to view their follow lists.

When Google rolled out Google Wave and I gave it a spin, I thought Google’s strategy wasn’t the right approach because it made it difficult for people to use with others in the collaborative way that GWave was intended to be used although in GWave, it does suggest contacts for you, but now Google has done the complete opposite with GBuzz in allowing everyone to use it and publicly sharing the suggested contacts. Something in between would have been better.

Note: The screenshots look slightly different from each other because I snapped some of them from another account for which GBuzz was not yet activated.

An old scam has been updated for the mobile 21st century.

Apparently there’s a new phishing scam that’s targeting iPhone users. I guess this means that iPhones have really saturated the market.

According to Sophos, the subject line:
IMPORTANT: Your iPhone Warranty Extension for 1 Year!
The forged sender:
iphonewarranty at apple dot com

The phishing scam is trying to get people to disclose their iPhone’s Serial number and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number.

The page asking for such information even includes links to the actual Apple site showing how one could find such information if the person doesn’t know how. How helpful. (Though, one would argue that Apple could then more easily find these fake sites and shut them down more quickly.)

According to Sophos’ researchers, they think it might be an effort to help with stolen iPhones. It’s like stealing license plates from cars and putting them on stolen cars so it looks legitimate.

Or maybe something else is to come.

The other day, I started seeing status updates of colors come across the News Feed in Facebook referring to the bra people were wearing themselves. It quickly devolved to guys messing around and posting things like “diamond studded”. Not only was it TMI (did my professional colleagues need to know what color bra I’m wearing?), but if the claim of breast cancer awareness is true, there was no call to action or informative references. And it was a flashback to the days of chain letters, but with more viral potency.

So sarcastically, yet seriously, I posted to Twitter and Facebook:

HUNGER! Re:colors as Facebook statuses: http://su.pr/1Oyadh . TMI. How about a social experiment re:humanitarian crises? http://su.pr/1k8qZ5

Then the earthquake in Haiti hit and next came the viral social network messages. Haiti Earthquake Relief donations via text reached a record $3 million and $5 million+ for social networks in general in the first day ($5+ million via texting to date) - now this is something worth posting about and passing on!

However, knowing the pitfalls of technology and having done some research on charitable donations a few years ago, the thoughts crossed my mind… what are the disadvantages of text donations? What are the consequences of disclosing your cell phone number?

In my previous research, I discovered Charity Navigator a few years ago and ever since then I’ve used them to research a charity before deciding where my dollars should go. They have financial information regarding the percentage they’re using for their cause vs. administrative expenses and you can even see how much the non-profit CEOs are making.

One of my previous dilemmas regarding charitable giving had also been to either give via credit card vs. personal check. I had learned from talking to someone in Alumni Relations and Development for my high school’s alumni association that they started adding credit card donations because members asked for it and despite the credit card processing fees, more people were donating because of the convenience. When I thought about it myself, it’s possible that the credit card processing fees offset the administrative costs incurred to process a check donation enough and the charity supposedly receives the money more quickly. Unfortunately, I was not able to find if this is indeed true.

So what’s the deal with charitable giving via texting? Check out Charity Navigator’s recent post on “Are Text Donations Safe?”

Their answer: Some, but not all and as with credit card or personal check donations, make sure you do your research and know if your charity is getting the percentage of your donation you’re expecting.

As for me, I got an email from the Red Cross. After hearing about how the first 48 hours are crucial and unable to find any avenues for matching donations at the time, I submitted my donation via credit card.

Update (1/20/2010): As of yesterday, text donations have topped $27 million… even more impressive! Also according to CNN, text donations may take up to 90 days to process; in the case of the Red Cross, the text donations are replenishing the funds that have already been sent. So while text donations are convenient, online, phone, or mail is quicker according to the Better Business Bureau. As in the case of Haiti donations, at least some cell phone carriers have recently decided to advance the donated money and mGive is waiving the administrative fee for processing text donations to the Red Cross. If your cell phone carrier charges you for the text (some are 20 cents) and the donation is only $5 or $10 (2-4%), the charity is probably better off with a non texted donation and getting the money more quickly and definitely more so if the mobile text donation processor isn’t waiving their processing fee.

Donate to Help Haiti:
American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Charity Navigator’s List

Image from @USGSted/twitpic

Yesterday, there was an earthquake and instead of Stopping, Dropping, and Covering as I had done many times during earthquake drills in elementary and middle and probably even high school, I just stopped… and then I checked the USGS website for the report. And when I got on Facebook and Twitter, I was not surprised that the reports were also coming in from my social networks.

There were 296 tweets per minute about this.

I had filled out USGS’ “Did You Feel It?” surveys for other earthquakes before, and at that point it occurred to me that the tweets could help provide this type of information and sure enough, USGS is already ON IT with their Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED) project. People all over the world tweet about earthquakes:

Image from @USGSted/twitpic

Even the news was reporting based on tweets from people who felt the earthquake. (I sure hope Twitter is not the new Wikipedia, though.)

Since I grew up around this area, the earthquake was not a surprise to me, but my colleagues have mentioned how their peers were taken by surprise when they experienced their first earthquake in the area as college students. I wondered what the freshmen experience was like from yesterday’s earthquake and I’m sure their social media networks provided some answers. I also wondered what the 1989 or the 1906 earthquake aftermath would have been like in this day and age of social media.

As for the earthquake yesterday… I was around for October 1989 and this one was a light tap.

Image from earthquake.usgs.gov

Connect with the USGS via social media.

I remember the days of handwritten and typed love letters, but this was in high school… how the times have changed as you can see from the video. Someone emailed me a letter to proofread recently and I recommended that we use Google Docs instead of using Microsoft Word with the Track Changes feature and emailing back and forth possibly causing confusion. This was a cover letter for a job application, though. Google Docs isn’t completely real time as there is a slight lag in updating changes, but it’s pretty close; with many editors at the same time, you might step over each other editing the same words and sentences, though.

Google Docs has a few useful templates for Resident Assistants, Teaching Assistants, and Student Leaders, too:

• Dorm Event RSVP Forms
• RA and Club Officer Reimbursement Forms
• Dorm and Club Meeting Agenda/Minutes
• Course Syllabus
• Student Group Trip Planning
• Club Event Requests
• and Student Group Budget Record

There’s also a few suggestions on other ways to use Google Docs for college. The college experience has definitely changed with technology.

I recently visited the Googleplex (Google Headquarters) and saw their collaborative conference rooms with video conferencing capabilities. Friends who work at Google often prefer to video conference with a colleague in another building on the campus, than travel over there to meet face to face. It’s no wonder that Google Docs came from Google.

Logged into my Twitter account today to find a new lists feature available to me (it seems it’s not rolled out to everyone yet). Twitter is following the tagging trend and you can now categorize your own Twitter subscriptions. Though similar to Facebook’s feature in allowing you to create lists of friends, I haven’t found the need to read the newsfeed that way. However, being able to create lists allows the sharing of Twitter content of interest to me, just like my delicious bookmarks on travel.

So here’s my Twitter list for Travel (seems it’s not available yet). Now I’m just waiting for TweetDeck to recognize this new feature so that I might start using it to easily automatically filter out the extra tweets and read updates by category.

I could see how it might be useful if others could join lists especially for conferences. For example, I just went to the SIGUCCS conference and the use of Twitter was encouraged and even the closing session speaker posed some reflection questions and asked everyone to tweet their answers. Throughout the conference, I followed the related tweets by monitoring the #siguccs tag via search.twitter.com, but not everyone remembers or knows to include the hash tag. If people were able to join a Twitter list, that would easily aggregate the tweets of the group. However, I could see how this could be another avenue for spam if random Twitter users were able to join any list so there would need to be some sort of moderation available.

On another note, Twitter has gone mobile in Japanese.

I joined Twitter almost two years ago, used it for about 4 months and took a break for 5 months until I was able to link up my Twitter updates to update my Facebook status. Since then I’ve been hearing about impact of Twitter like getting a fellow Cal bear out of foreign prison and increasingly more about it in the news and on TV as a “super cool new thing”.

I haven’t been keeping up with my online news feeds lately so I only recently learned about Ashton Kutcher challenging and racing CNN to the 1 million Twitter followers mark… actually I saw it on Oprah! The interview:

Ashton comments on the far reaching possibilities and power of The Social Web, but the blogosphere, web 2.0 companies, and academia have known this for a long time (remember the viral Saturday Night Live clip on Youtube?):

In some ways it’s a commentary on the state of media. I believe that we’re at a place now with social media where one person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network, an entire media network. That is the power of the social web. You, through your own stream, can actually have a voice that’s as loud as a media network. You can create your content through a collaborative effort, you can edit your content, you can broadcast your content, and you can consume your content all in one place. And I thought it was kind of almost like an uprising of the Internet in a way.
[...]
You can really rally people around different causes… There are giant things that we can do through this platform at 140 characters at a time.

Though I have to disagree with Gayle King who said during the interview:

When you think about it, it really is astounding Ashton, that one guy can really take on a conglomerate and win. It’s really the democratization of the media. I think you’ve changed the game of how people now get their information.

But he didn’t change the game, Twitter and other social web companies yes, but not one person, unless you’re talking about the founders and the employees of those companies.

Continue reading ‘Is Ashton Kutcher More Powerful than CNN?’

As more and more of the people I know and the people they know are having kids, I’ve seen more photos popping up on Facebook of newborns and childhood moments. And even though some kids don’t even know how to type, they already have Facebook profiles! It seems the parents are registering their children on Facebook. That was when I realized that the days of embarrassing childhood photos tucked away in dusty albums only visible when visiting the parents are disappearing quickly.

I’m beginning to wonder what kind of consequences their parents’ actions will have on the kids in the future especially since the Internet is forever. There’s already discussion about how Facebook will affect future politicians who are growing up now.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on a new Stanford class on Facebook for Parents (registration has been full since early February) and it’s taught by BJ Fogg, a Facebook researcher at Stanford. He also taught the first course on Facebook apps and the subsequent Psychology of Facebook course. He’s teaching the Facebook for Parents class with his sister who has eight(!) kids. They also have a newsletter. The course plans:

Feb. 19: The ABC’s of Facebook: New user to fanatic
March 5: Ten steps to protect loved ones on Facebook
March 19: Friending, posting & updating: Life skills for the future
April 2: Five ways to stay ahead of kids on Facebook

And their Five Step for Parents on Facebook:

1. Join Facebook.
2. “Friend” your kids.
3. Review your kids’ profile pages.
4. Review who is “friends” with your kids.
5. Select “More About” for your kids.

I don’t know if I completely agree since according to danah boyd’s research, teens “want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk“. And checking out the kid’s “friends” when done too much seems like a form of helicopter parenting where parents are asking for roommate switches before their kid starts his or her very first day at college and where parents are going on their kid’s job interviews. (By the way, I gave a presentation about Facebook to College Housing Administrators last year at an international conference and they were amazed at how my university doesn’t release roommate information and were in disbelief as to how parents aren’t freaking out about it.)

As for “friending”, I never friend the students who work for me, but will accept their friend requests and I find that’s true for many of my colleagues. But perhaps it’s different when you talk about the parent/child relationship. Then again, doesn’t some freedom encourage learning instead of sheltering and protecting them in a bubble too much?

When people post photos or other content on Facebook, chances are they’re not thinking about what Facebook can do with them. People are freaking about it now, though (again). The reality is that much of this stuff isn’t news; Facebook has always claimed rights to your photos and content.

Here’s Facebook’s recent Terms of Use statement:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

And one main reason why people are freaking out is the removal of the following text:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

So now Facebook is basically saying you can’t take it back… even if you delete your account. Mark Zuckerberg himself explains that On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information, though.

Maybe I’m not freaking out about this because it’s always been the case that the Internet is forever (my first web page from 1995 still out there in cyberspace proves that). Similarly, Creative Commons licenses can’t be revoked.

So it’s not surprising that there are no take backs and we all agree to the rules of the game when we sign up:

We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these Terms at any time without further notice. Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.

As for me, I don’t post photos I really care about on Facebook (they’re mostly snapshots of people). Instead, I post most photos on Flickr with Creative Commons licenses. I also don’t import the full content of blog posts or write Facebook notes and instead, pull an excerpt from the original source. And I never assume the privacy settings work because you never know, especially since the settings are confusing and unclear that it’s easy to assume you have certain rights and expectations of privacy when it could disappear either through a narrowly communicated policy change or an unexpected technical glitch. Don’t forget about Friendster’s rollout of the anti-stalking anti-privacy feature.

Continue reading ‘Your Facebook Photos, Rights, and Privacy’

The asynchronous nature of email has increased productivity by allowing people to send information and ask questions 24 hours, 7 days a week. Long ago, when you had a thought or question, you’d save it up with others until you had the next meeting or phone call with a person, but now you can just shoot them a quick email and cross it off your own list of things on your mind. And through the constant stream of emails, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what’s important and what’s not. This becomes worse when you go on vacation.

You come back from vacation and find yourself in email debt and sometimes take some more days to catch up. (I often leave my email and voicemail vacation message up for a day or two so others know I just got back and hopefully assume that I’m likely still catching up.) I know of people who are afraid of going on vacation or even taking a day off fearing the piles of email that will greet them when they return. I have that same problem and worse, since I have a Blackberry, I’ve often ended up checking some email while on vacation with the instinctive rationale that checking email earlier will reduce the mounds of email I’ll have to deal with when I get back.

I like the way danah boyd, famous social networks researcher extraordinaire (and fellow Cal Bear), approaches email while on vacation… Don’t get it.

I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation… You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off…

She actually sets up the email system to delete all the email she receives (using a procmail filter rule to /dev/null) and explains further for taking a much needed break after finishing up her PhD degree and before starting her new job with Microsoft Research, even though some people have called her rude for refusing to accept email.

I was curious if danah had done anything about Facebook messages since she researches social networks and Facebook wants to take over the world’s communication mediums. Turns out that her Facebook profile photo directs people to send her email with the message: “No FB msgs; email plz.” which conveniently works with the communication sabbatical.

The email sabbatical method reduces the risk of email debt and having to declare Email Bankruptcy, something Lawrence Lessig, copyright activist and Stanford law professor, did back in 2004. Here’s what he suggests on how to erase email debt:

1. Email everyone waiting for an email from you
2. Apologize and explain politely you’re declaring bankruptcy
3. Request people to send email again if important

If that’s too much, a compromise would be the DMZ method which starts you with an empty inbox. The debt’s still there, but it’s a way to chisel away at the existing debt while trying not to get deeper in debt.

Maybe I’ll try an email sabbatical when I go on my next vacation. I’ve talked to my colleagues about this and the problem that could potentially creep up is getting cc’d on messages. (I get a lot of indirect FYI work emails). One possible solution we discussed is to archive those messages and let the senders know they’re being archived for future reference. However, if you’re being selective about which email gets through, doesn’t that just make you look bad? Plus, you’ll still need to read the cc’d messages when you return which doesn’t get rid of the stress of catching up.