Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Is Facebook Going to Start Forcing Us to Make Some Info Public?

To say that Facebook has come under fire for its privacy (or lack there of) would be an understatement. They’ve been opening up users’ data to the world with changes to privacy settings after the introduction of several new features. All of that seemed to come to a point for me today when I logged in to my profile and was greeted with a new feature to find pages I might be interested in linking to. Handy? Well, maybe. The feature scans your profile for key elements and finds pages “for you” so you can join. Problem is, it does things like search hometowns, jobs, etc. which is all the information in our profiles that we’re trying to keep private in the first place. Keep in mind that pages are public to the world, and for me personally, I’ve become very selective in the pages that I link to. But what was scary were the options at the bottom of the prompt:

If you’ll notice, there’s a very important option that’s missing: “No”. Perhaps this is a misconception due to a poorly-worded prompt, but it was a bad one to screw up at this stage in the privacy game.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2010

Forget Monitoring, Just Check Twitter!

Tonight Facebook seems to be having some issues. It has been resetting connections from my browser and is almost as reliable as my workout schedule. How do I know it’s not just me? I searched Twitter, of course, and seem to have found a significant amount of others having similar problems. At the beginning of this month, Gmail had a fairly major outage and Twitter was alive with comments about Gmail being down as well.

This concept really isn’t all that new, but it’s amazing how much visibility one can have into what’s going on in the world. The last two issues that I’ve experienced with large services, I found out that thousands of others were having problems within moments. Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of things that Twitter can be useful for. Being able to see what’s being said about your product all the time is incredibly useful as well. I suppose the system works, however, only until Twitter breaks down and we have to find some out-of-band tool to check on it (which, given Twitter’s track record, we may need that fairly often).

Update: Ha! Just after posting, I had problems logging in to my Adsense account. Guess where the first place I looked for and found others having the same problem? :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 19th, 2009

The $10 Free App

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about my Snow Leopard experience this weekend without talking about the hosing I took from the iTunes App Store this weekend. A coworker of mine and Digg both told me about the new Facebook app for the iPhone. My wife uses Facebook incessantly and I thought that she would be excited about it, but she never said a word. When I asked her about it she checked for updates on her iPod Touch and it said there were none.

Not one to give up easily, I checked the article that was posted on Digg and found out that others had had problems with their devices finding the update and the recommendation was to remove and reinstall to get the new version. So.. we quickly removed the old Facebook app and went to install the new one. Sadly, we were disappointed (more like she was mad and I was in trouble..) to find out that it required the iPhone 3.0 upgrade (her iPod was a gen 2 without the upgrade). Since the iTunes App Store is so closed and wont’ allow to get the older version, Facebook 3.0 did end up being the $10 free app for us..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 1st, 2009