Archive for Social Networking

| January 15, 2011
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Happy B-Day Wikipedia

Happy B-Day WikipediaWikipedia is 10 years today. The “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project,” was launched on January 15, 2001. The New York Times says Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th anniversary with conferences and parties across the globe, including in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, organized by its community of users.

An early example of crowd-sourcing, allowing regular people to shape the content of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia went live with no fanfare in 2001. There were doubts whether people would contribute or if the information they submitted would be reliable. 10 years later, Wikipedia, is an important source of information for millions of topics according to the NYT. Although it has suffered its share of inaccuracies and hoaxes, Wikipedia remains among the Internet’s most visited sites.

The percentage of all American adults who use Wikipedia to look for information has increased from 25% in February 2007 to 42% in May 2010. This translates to 53% of adult internet users according to the Pew Internet report. Pew says that using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (done by 47% of internet users) and the NYT says Wikipedia is more popular than eBay.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that oversees Wikipedia, told the NYT, “Wikipedia is modest. It isn’t a beautiful site. It looks a little awkward — sometimes the writing is a little bit awkward.” But she added that people still have “a deep and abiding affection for it.”

Wikipedia is working to improve the site. Among the initiatives the NYT points to are:

  • Opening its first overseas office in India
  • A partnership with 16 universities to have professors assign students to write about public policy,
  • Increasing the number of experts who contribute, and
  • Recruiting museums, which could offer better images for the site.

Wikipedia’s plan is to make it easier to add new articles and photos to the site. Tweaks to the underlying software are intended to streamline the service, although Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia told the NYT the site would never become flashy. “We are not going to become Facebook, we are not going to become MySpace or YouTube.”

Do you use Wikipedia? Does Wikipedia need to become more like Facebook?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , ,
| January 12, 2011
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Social Media Going to the Dogs

Updated 11/30/2011 – The BusinessInsider called Puppy Tweets one of the 10 Stupid Gadgets That We Can’t Believe Exist. Sometimes BI needs to lighten up.

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Social Media Going to the DogsIn 1993, the New Yorker declared, “On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.” Now your dog can be on social media. Toymaker Mattel (MAT) has developed a way for your pooch to have his own site on Twitter. Fido can now send you the usual 140 characters tweets. These messages are reportedly the same brief comments about his doggies activities that humans post on social media network Twitter.

New Yorker declared, "On the Internet no one knows you are a dog." According to an article in Psychology Today, by Stanley Coren, psychologists have beenstudying the human-canine bond. They  have long understood that dogs improve our lives. Dogs do this by providing a social presence. Humans interact with dogs in much the same way that they interact with other people, or at least with children. We talk to our dogs, and their presence relieves feelings of loneliness. Research suggests that this is why people who live alone, especially seniors, are much less likely to become clinically depressed if they have a dog as a pet.

Puppy Tweets make it possible for Internet-connected owners to benefit from social contact with their dogs. The social media device has two parts. The first is a USB receiver which connects to a computer. The second part is a sensor, which looks like a big pink or blue dog tag. The tag has a microphone to pick up any sounds the dog makes and a motion sensor that detects movement and acceleration as Fido goes about its daily activities. Based on the sound and motion readings the programming then analyzes makes a guess about what the dog is doing and at random intervals tweets about Spot’s activities. Mattel claims that it can detect 500 different activities and then send a clever tweet that updates Fido’s Twitter page.

Puppy Tweets logoThe article explains that after a session of fast movements and turns there might be a Tweet like, “It’s not the catching of the tail, it’s the chase.” A short period of moderate movement but no acceleration might result in the message “Guess what I’m licking right now.” A bout of barking might yield the message, “I bark because I miss you – there, now hurry home.” There is even a tweet to show that Spot is sleeping.  A Mattel representative told the author  that the degree of processing of sounds and activities was “not very high-powered.” According to the Mattel representative Puppy Tweets, “determines if sounds are coming in, and how much movement there is, and then selects from a set of candidate messages. So if you get a tweet saying that he is chasing a squirrel, he might actually be chasing a cat, running to the door, or digging a hole.”

The Tweets are not totally random according to the article. The Mattel rep continued, “The device is paying attention to the sound and movements to some degree. However, its accuracy should not be an issue. Look at it this way, several times each day the dog’s owner will get a message posted that the dog is doing something. Whether the tweet reflects what is actually going on at the moment or not, it gives his owner the feeling that the dog is connected to him or somehow near to him, and his loving owner then thinks about his dog for a moment or two. This makes the person feel good, and loved, even if it is more of an illusion than reality. That’s what toys are supposed to do – make people feel good and happy even if it is just for a short time and even if they are merely based on fantasy.”

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Dog tweetingThis product gives Mattel a unique entry into the social media market. It also capitalizes on the emerging trend of machine-to-machine computing. Puppy Tweets also opens new opportunities to develop canine content filtering software and parental control applications to check who Fido is tweeting with “Hey is there an app for that?”

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , ,
| December 21, 2010
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Social Media Bubble

Social Media BubbleThere is growing speculation that a backlash against social networking is brewing. At CustomerThink.com there was a recent article When the social media bubble burst which points out that “We rarely see people as enthused as they are over social media. Among those recent rare times are: when the high-tech balloon popped; at the height of the housing bubble; just before the market crashed; and when Sarah Palin was nominated for VP. Hey, exuberance can be headiest just before the fall.”

Socail media

The author, Axel Schultze, CEO of the social business application development firm Xeesm says YES. Schultze believes that the social media bubble is about to burst. Schultze, the founder of the Social Media Academy, said in the article that people are starting the usefulness of social media, “People are recognizing already that the endless hours of watching the incoming streams from Twitter and Facebook or all the status updates on LinkedIn are hours wasted. All the paid tweets and people or agencies, who have been hired to tweet are not going to contribute to the bottom line. And the fan pages people build to get “fans, followers, connections” just hope that it will do something for the business – but it won’t.”

Schultze concludes that the social networking bubble will burst because, “Socializing is work, it takes time and focus, discipline and a clear understanding what to do and what not to do. And as 80% of humans continue to look for getting the job done automatically and get rich instantly, they will leave the social web because they just learned again and again – there is no free lunch.”

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In the article, Schultze reiterates the fundamental change factor of the Internet, “from anywhere at any time”, when he says that the biggest benefit of social media is to do “more business with more people in a grander geography and in less time than ever before.” Schultze continues that the benefits of social media come at a price, “…the price you pay is to be more open, more social, more connected, more interactive, more helpful and more conversational than ever before.” Making organizations more open, more social, more connected, interactive, and helpful is hard work which means that many organizations will fail and the social networking bubble will burst.

Related articles

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| November 27, 2010
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Social Networks Are Risky

Social Networks Are RiskyAccording to the Czech security firm TrustPort, social networking’s popularity and ease of use can cause users to forget its risks.  These risks include the loss of private personal data and malware infection.  Even though social networking is new, a recent IBM (IBM) X-Force report says the threats are not.  According to IBM, traditional threats like phishing, malware, 419 fraud schemes, identity theft, data harvesting, and botnets now use social networks as attack vectors.

FacebookMany social networking users fall victim to attackers offering new apps or features for joining the group.  Net Security.org cites the Facebook Stalker Catcher as an example of such a scam.  Even though this malicious app appeared in 2009, Facebook users still fall victim to it.  To start a Stalker Catcher attack, Net Security.org says users are lured to the group on the pretext that they will see exactly who and when is visiting their personal profile.  The alleged instructions for feature activation result in nothing more and nothing less than sending group invitations to all contacts of the victim.

Sunbelt Software reports that the latest scam targeting Facebook users specifically targets kids.  The scam promises a free proxy service for those who want to bypass parental controls and blocks set up by schools.  The scam tempts the victims to try the service at hxxp://myfatherisonline.com to access Facebook in school.  Of course, when the victims visit the website, they can’t find the advertised service.  The researchers instead found a plethora of scam attempts.  The victims are faced with an affiliate site containing malware, surveys, quizzes, and offers for free iPhones that will try to get them to subscribe to a premium rate service or sign up for spam.

The number of users who voluntarily join fraudulent groups and send invitations to all their contacts is strikingly high.  In the Net Security.org article, IBM says the informal feel of social networks is the real risk.

We’re all friends here,” you’re thinking to yourself, and you’re mind chooses to ignore the things that would usually set off alarm bells in your head. Who knows – maybe it’s our inherent sense of safety that we get when surrounded by lot of people? Safety in numbers, so to speak. In any case, most of us are just less careful.

SPAM

These same users then access Facebook at work, exposing their employers to more risks.  The anti-malware firm Sophos recently found that reports (PDF) by companies of spam and malware derived from social networks were up 70 percent from a year earlier and concludes that “Because of this, social networks have become one of the most significant vectors for data loss and identity theft.”

Due to this carelessness, the criminals behind the scams quickly gain large databases of contacts.  These databases are later sold to other cybercriminals and used for sending spam or for further phishing scams.  Some fraudulent groups explicitly invite users to install a particular application, which is even more dangerous.  According to the article, the risk of malware infection should never be underestimated.

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So the important message here is:

  1. Keep your computer up to date
  2. Use regularly updated antivirus and antispyware software
  3. Verify what you are doing before you do it
  4. If it is too good to be true, it probably is

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005.  You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.  Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , ,
| November 21, 2010
Comments Off on Facebook is Biggest Social Networking Risk

Facebook is Biggest Social Networking Risk

Facebook is Biggest Social Networking Risk Data from anti-malware vendor Sophos‘ 2010 Security Threat Report (PDF) says Facebook is the leader in privacy risks, spam, and other malicious activity. 60 percent of the respondents to a Sophos survey identified Facebook as the biggest security risk in social networking, followed by MySpace (18%), Twitter (17%), and LinkedIn (4%).

It is not surprising that users regard Facebook as the top risk. Facebook’s over 500 million users, offer criminals a cornucopia of personal data to exploit. “Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

Criminals have focused their efforts on social media

Sophos’ research shows that criminals have focused their efforts on social networking users in the last 12 months creating an “explosion” in social networking spam and malware complaints. Sophos found that 57% of social network users were spammed on one of the sites, an increase of 70 percent compared to last year.  They also found 36%  of social network users reported being sent malware, a 70% increase over last year. “The dramatic rise in attacks in the last year tells us that social networks and their millions of users have to do more to protect themselves from organized cybercrime, or risk falling prey to identity theft schemes, scams, and malware attacks,” Sophos’ Cluley added.

Three things working against Facebook users

There are three things working against Facebook users, themselves, malware, and Facebook. Facebook users typically give away more private information to Facebook than other sites. Though most people’s profiles it is possible to find out their first, last, and maiden names, where they live, where they went to school, and even worse, historical information like where they lived in the past. A lot of this private information is required on many online credit checks, providing a boom for criminals looking to exploit a user’s credit history or steal their identity.

The most common malware used on social networks is Koobface. Koobface can target all the popular social portals, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Tagged, and Twitter. According to the report, Koobface is capable of, “... registering a Facebook account, activating the account by confirming an email sent to a Gmail address, befriending random strangers on the site, joining random Facebook groups, and posting messages on the walls of Facebook friends. Furthermore, it includes code to avoid drawing attention to itself by restricting how many new Facebook friends it makes each day.”

Another threat is Facebook applications. Criminals can create malicious Facebook applications designed to steal information and they can find holes in pre-existing applications and exploit them. Legitimate Facebook apps will give away your information if you allow them to (as I have written about here and here). Once an app has permission it can harvest all the information in a Facebook profile and send it to criminals. Before users grant an application access to all of their information, they should Google the publisher to see if they are legitimate or not. Any application that starts doing anything strange or suspicious should be removed immediately.

Facebook has tried to address these risks by issuing a new privacy policy. However, Sophos’ Cluley called it a step backward, because the new settings are “encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet.” According to Facebook only 35% of their users actually customized their settings leaving 65% who presumably didn’t change their settings and continue to share valuable data, which is then used to propagate spam and malware.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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