facebook-privacy

Last week’s announcement that four NYU students were developing  a Facebook alternative suggests that they want its global dominance to shift: in the name of freedom. The students have more than raised their needed-for-development goal of $10,000 in 27 fewer days than scheduled.

But before the project, Diaspora*, is launched, we’ve found some articles that can be used in the meantime:

1) A timely article entitled “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative” which discusses the viral, yet ambiguous, nature of its privacy laws, or lack thereof.

2) ReclaimPrivacy’s tool that allows users to scan their profiles for privacy intrusion.

3) Consumer Report’s Facebook rule of thumb: “7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook”

4) SaveFace: A tool that allows users to reset most user settings back to “Friends Only.”

We aren’t against Facebook; we just want our privacy back.

In his email to us, he wrote that “CARE has an entire area of its website dedicated to Climate Change and how it’s affecting the world’s poorest people.” It’s worth a visit – it drives home the point Simon makes in his very first paragraph, and it drives home the importance of climate change, the subject of this year’s Blog Action Day.

"India - climate change canvas" by Oxfam International on Flickr

Climate change is not only about melting ice caps and polar bears. Climate change is about people.

Swinging weather patterns are creating disasters on a scale that human civilization has never before witnessed. For the world’s poorest people – the ones least equipped to deal with its effects – climate change is devastating their crops, livelihoods and communities.

“Climate change is worsening the plight of those hundreds of millions of men, women and children who already live in extreme poverty – and it threatens to push hundreds of millions more people into similar destitution,” says CARE International’s Secretary General Robert Glasser. “A concerted international response to this unprecedented challenge is required if we are to avoid catastrophic human suffering.”

CARE is working toward a world where poor people can create opportunity out of crises like climate change. But the current reality is that climate change makes poor people even more vulnerable.

For instance, agricultural production will likely decline in the poorest countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Less reliable rainfall will likely affect planting seasons, crop growth and livestock health – and lead to increased malnutrition. In other parts of the developing world, flooding will likely further diminish the quality of already-marginal soil and could cause outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

Climate change also is hurling many poor families into “Catch-22” situations. For example, they may select crops that are less sensitive to rainfall variation, but also less profitable. As incomes decline and people are not able to eke out a living, children are forced to leave school, assets are sold off to afford essentials, malnutrition rates increase and large-scale migration ensues. The end result? Deepening poverty for tens of millions of people around the world.

What Must Be Done?

At the international level, negotiations to develop a new treaty to guide global efforts to address climate change will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark in just a couple weeks. The United States must help lead those efforts, and forge a strong agreement that caps emissions, stops global warming and responds to the effects already in motion. We must do this for the sake of all of humanity.

What can I do to help?

First, you can make a tax-deductible donation to CARE to help poor families access the tools and education they need to adapt to the effects of climate change, make efficient use of their existing resources and overcome poverty for good.

Second, if you live in the Unites States, you can write your senators and urge them to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a critical step toward U.S. leadership in tackling climate change. U.S. leadership is critical to making the Copenhagen negotiations a success.

Third, you can join the CARE mailing list to be kept up to date on CARE’s activities and other ways you can take action in the days counting down to Copenhagen.

To donate, take action and join our e-mail list, please visit www.care.org/climate.

No doubt one of the great benefits of the Web is how malleable it can be; if you mess up, there’s still time to fix it. But often by the time an error is corrected it’s already been seen, and depending on your site traffic that could mean 10 people or it could mean 10,000. So, sure. The option to edit is nice — but why not get it right the first time?

Whether you manage a Web site for your business with thousands of unique views daily or a small personal blog with just a few thousand a month, consistency plays an important factor in establishing credibility. Style can be your greatest unsung hero or your worst glaring nightmare: if it remains consistent, it’s never noticed. But as soon as it’s inconsistent, it becomes like a bad nursery rhyme — caps lock here, no caps lock there, hyphens, dashes, everywhere.

Because we’re part of the media — whether you consider yourself part of the social media or an online publication like a webzine — we like to swear by the journalist’s bible: the AP StyleBook. Having a hard and fast reference point like the AP StyleBook allows for no gray area. If you’ve got a question on whether to capitalize or not, how to list something or where that comma belongs, the answers are here. We recommend ponying up for the $25 online subscription to the StyleBook because it’s easy to search and often faster than flipping through the printed version.

In the meantime, we’ve pulled some notable Web-related entries from the StyleBook for you to peruse here.

dot-com An informal description of companies that do business mainly on the Internet.

e-mail Acceptable in all references for electronic mail. Many e-mail or Internet addresses use symbols such as the at symbol (@), or the tilde (~) that cannot be transmitted correctly by some computers. When needed, spell them out and provide an explanatory editor’s note.(Also e-book, e-commerce, e-business.)

Web Short form of World Wide Web, it is a service, or set of standards, that enables the publishing of multimedia documents on the Internet. The Web is not the same as the Internet, but is a subset; other applications, such as e-mail, exist on the Internet. It is generally credited as the concept of researcher Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the first practical system in 1989.
Also, Web site (an exception to Webster’s New World College Dictionary first listing), and Web page.
But webcam, webcast, webmaster.

software titles Capitalize but do not use quotation marks around such titles as WordPerfect or Windows, but use quotation marks for computer games: ”Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?“

composition titles Apply the guidelines listed here to book titles, computer game titles, movie titles, opera titles, play titles, poem titles, album and song titles, radio and television program titles, and the titles of lectures, speeches and works of art.

–Capitalize the principal words, including prepositions and conjunctions of four or more letters.
–Capitalize an article – the, a, an – or words of fewer than four letters if it is the first or last word in a title.
–Put quotation marks around the names of all such works except the Bible and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material. In addition to catalogs, this category includes almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, handbooks and similar publications. Do not use quotation marks around such software titles as WordPerfect or Windows.

home page Two words. The “front” page of a particular Web site.

You can also follow @APStyleBook on Twitter or download the new iPhone app.

Happy editing!

It’s those connections – both the personal, friend-of-a-friend connections, and the you-like-what-I-like connections based on interests – that make networks like Facebook possible in the first place.

Zuckerberg says in this interview that these connections really drive Facebook’s movement towards a decentralized network – one that behaves less like a website and more like a platform.

Facebook’s great opportunity lies in the vastness of information that people are putting out there – “Through tools like Facebook,” Zuckerberg says, “you can control that.” Facebook’s future is about privacy and having a say in what information people can see about you. He also notes that he believes that “the real thing that makes up a person’s identity is the set of people they’re connected with.”

Using tools like Facebook Connect, people can offer up selected information about themselves – and businesses can begin to tailor their products and services for the people who are coming to them, based on the information they’re recieving about the interests and identities of the people who are coming to them. The interconnectedness that this creates allows for real bonds of trust to be created between people, and softens the cold anonymity of a Web 1.0 world.

Facebook’s goals for the future have a lot to do with the concept of a “social graph” that illustrates the whole interconnectedness that Zuckerberg has been interested in. “Being able to map out all those things in one graph is going to be really valuable for understanding what all those people and things are, and what they’re doing.”

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is moving away from the old school model of value being centralized on one site, based on their experience with the application ecosystem – all of that value lies in the long tail – many applications, with small audiences, bring in far more value than one widespread application.

Having Facebook’s capability for helping users build their identities spread out over many sites will help them capitalize on the long tail of the internet. What’s fascinating about this is that Zuckerberg seems to have learned the lessons of Friendster and MySpace: rather than allow a closed ecosystem like this to suffocate and wilt over time, Facebook is looking out toward the long tail.

By making sure that the system’s vitality is not linked to one site – which may well come in and out of fashion faster than Beanie Babies – Facebook is turning its vitality into longevity. And while collecting this kind of information seems, at first glance, a little Orwellian, Zuckerberg places just such a dystopian future on the opposite end of the spectrum from Facebook.

He believes that by allowing people a say in which information they make public, we can avert the loss of control over our own identities. Facebook really just wants to make it easy for people to integrate their internet lives, thereby making themselves a truly powerful platform for brand and personal identity management. But all of that is in the longer-term future, even if the groundwork is currently being rolled out.

The immediate future, of course, is rooted in smartphones. More people are opting to pick up phones like the Palm Pre or the iPhone that function as tiny computers, and smarter, more powerful applications for those platforms will be the immediate future of social networking.

It should be noted here that Zuckerberg stops well short of calling Facebook’s future a utopia. He has a charmingly grounded sense of Facebook’s place in society – when Scoble says offhand that everyone is on Facebook, Zuckerberg corrects him. “Well, 200,000,000 of them anyway,” he says, as if to say ‘well, it’s only something like 3% of the world’s population on Facebook. We’re not that big a deal.’

LunaWeb Home Page

Redesign

We’ve changed from the old design completely to include a much more colorful interface, as well as Flash on the homepage to keep things interesting – but if you’re on an iPhone, don’t worry, we aren’t going to leave you with the sad-looking question mark cube. We’ve slipped a nice, pretty static image in there. We’ve created a cleaner, updated, friendlier overall look.

Social Media

Social Media made a huge impact on our new presence. We took advantage of tools which allow us to make the site more interactive and conversational. We’ve brought in a Twitter feed that not only shows our tweets, but shows what others are saying about us. Videos that we switch out occasionally will be featured prominently. We also have links that give you one-click access to several of our Social Networking presences so you can join us in the conversation.

New Pages

You’ll find a few new pages on the site that we’re especially proud of. Primarily, new content reflecting our Social Presence offering (we have the most experienced and largest department of Social Media in Memphis). You will also find a link straight to our blog (this very one), which we update with some regularity with related information. There is also a portfolio page that will give you a quick peek at some of the websites we’ve created for our clients.

There’s a lot more new to be seen. Thank you for taking a look at our new home. We hope you like the changes.

The post “LunaWeb Launches New Site” by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

As a result, we’ve been thinking a lot about the recent explosion in popularity of Twitter.

There used to be a standard progression for people making their way through social media.

The online presence of the first digital natives seemed to evolve from writing online journals read by only four or five people to maintaining MySpace and Facebook profiles with a few dozen friends on to full-fledged blogs and Twitter accounts accessible by the general public.

“Digital Natives at Work” by Gerard Bierens on Flickr.

Though other sites and services empowered them to take those steps, Twitter seems to have been the triggering mechanism for making social media into a more truly mainstream phenomenon.

Twitter’s simplicity took the focus off of the means of communication and put it right onto the communication itself.

It may have been that simplicity, along with the suddenness of communication via Twitter, that led mainstream media to embrace it as a way to get information to consumers as quickly as possible. National Public Radio and the New York Times, for example, have been using Twitter since the network was still in relative infancy.

Even celebrities of all kinds have embraced Twitter, from TV Host and comedienne Ellen Degeneres to basketball player Shaquille O’Neal to songwriter Colin Meloy.

Twitter has officially broken down the barriers between the common person and celebrity. We here at LunaWeb have to wonder if this is why people who haven’t really dipped their toes in the waters of social media are now doing cannonballs into the deep end of Twitter.

If so, this marks not so much a gradual evolution in people’s progression through social media as a sudden mutation.

Whereas the digital natives eased themselves in, this new flock of Twitter users seems to be jumping right into using publicly accessible forums.

It’s exciting to watch. Especially considering that many of these new users aren’t digital natives at all. They’re immigrants to the internet world. By jumping in like they have, they’re expressing a newly empowered willingness to learn a new – online – dialect.

Once these new digital immigrants are acclimated and fluent, however, and they decide they need something other than what Twitter has to offer, where do they go?

Will they behave like a flock of migratory birds, moving almost as a single organism, or will they simply quietly disperse, as though the party has ended?

One (completely unresearched) impulse, based on Facebook’s near-simultaneous bump in membership, is to say that this new social wave is like a flock of birds. It’s not exactly predictable, but it undulates gracefully, pulsing with each new possible direction.

"Flock of Birds" by Picture Perfect Rose on Flickr.

Here at LunaWeb, we’ve been giving a lot of beginning social media lessons to our clients. We’re thinking about opening these up to the public. If you’re part of this new wave of users, please sound off in the comments. Let us know what you’d like us to cover.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What makes us as a species so drawn to creating these connections between one another, whether we even know one another or not? What is it, from a psychological perspective, that drives us to online meeting spaces?

Kris Markman, Ph.D., from the University of Memphis might have an answer. She has been studying the the social impacts of new media since 2001. She’ll be the guest speaker at April’s Social Media Expedition Breakfast, 7 a.m., April 1 at the U of M Holiday Inn. Her presentation will be titled “A Species Driven to Connect.”

A veteran of public radio, Markman is currently collecting research about independent podcasters – those producing programs unaffiliated with traditional media at all.

Be sure to RSVP for this breakfast at MeetUp. Admission is $20, or $15 each for you and a guest.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What makes us as a species so drawn to creating these connections between one another, whether we even know one another or not? What is it, from a psychological perspective, that drives us to online meeting spaces?

Kris Markman, Ph.D., from the University of Memphis might have an answer. She has been studying the the social impacts of new media since 2001. She’ll be the guest speaker at April’s Social Media Expedition Breakfast, 7 a.m., April 1 at the U of M Holiday Inn. Her presentation will be titled “A Species Driven to Connect.”

A veteran of public radio, Markman is currently collecting research about independent podcasters – those producing programs unaffiliated with traditional media at all.

Be sure to RSVP for this breakfast at MeetUp. Admission is $20, or $15 each for you and a guest.

It’s hard to believe, but the Social Media Breakfasts seem to keep getting better! This month we had our largest group yet meet at the Crescent Club in Midtown Memphis for what promised to be a great way to start the morning. There were plenty of familiar faces mixed in with a great group of Social Media newcomers.

LunaWeb President, Dave Barger, hosted the event and kept everything running smoothly, as well as answering questions on all thing Social from a crowd that eagerly supplied both answers and inquiries. After some initial discussion, long time Social Media Breakfast attendee, Bob Hazlett, gave a hilariously informative presentation on Social Media campaigns gone wrong entitled, “You Suck at Social Media.” He effectively walked us through the best of the best on down to the abysmally low in Social success (from Zappos shoes to Microsoft’s twitter presence).

As always though, the best of Social Media Breakfast happened before and after the official presentations. Staying true to the idea of being “social” there were plenty of opportunities for networking, catching up, meeting new connections, and sharing new Social Media information.

You can already RSVP for the next Social Media Breakfast on the MeetUp page. And be sure to check out photos from SMB #7 here! If you haven’t already been to one of the Social Media Breakfasts, talk to one of the people who have. We’ll see you at the next one!

Over the course of its existence, Facebook has been a benchmark for security among social networking sites.  However, within the last few months even Facebook has fallen victim to the worst of the web… SPAMMERS! Now that we have your attention, please refrain from spiraling into a panic, deleting all of your social accounts, and retreating into the mountains.  Not only is Facebook fighting back against would-be evil doers, but there are simple actions you can take to protect yourself while out in the social spheres.  These are straight from the security experts over at Facebook.

• Remember, Facebook will never ask for your password in an email, Facebook message, or any medium that isn’t the login page. Though you will need to re-enter your password when you set a security question, change your contact email, or send a virtual gift.

• Be extra aware of weird Wall posts. Don’t click on any links—on a Wall or elsewhere—if you don’t know where they go.

• Set a security question for yourself on your Account page. If somehow something malicious shuts you out of your account, you will need the answer to that question in order for our User Operations team to let you back in. (If you’ve already set your security question, you won’t see a prompt for it on your Account page.)

• Be extra aware of what website you are using to log in to Facebook (and other websites). Phishing websites can be made to look like other websites (like the Facebook log in page), and might try to disguise their urls. Be smart: www.facebook.com.profile.a36h8su2m8.info/login starts out looking like a legitimate Facebook website, but that a36h8su2m8.info part means it’s fraudulent. Set and use a browser bookmark to make sure you always log in from facebook.com

• If you see a Wall post that looks like spam on a friend’s Wall, tell the author to delete it and reset their password immediately.

• Use a modern web browser to benefit from anti-phishing protection

• Check out opendns.com. This is another method for blocking specific domains that host phishing sites.

If you think you’ve been phished or find a phishing site,

• Reset your password on your Account page.

• Report the issue to Facebook here.

• Submit phishing sites here and here.