Social paraSites

Written by halans | Published on May 23, 2009

We already had online viruses and worms, now we got paraSites too.

The word ‘parasite’ comes from the Greek ‘parasitos’ (but then in Greek) which means ‘person who eats at the table of another’. In general we use parasite to refer to “an animal or plant that lives in or on a host; it obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host”. I first heard of web paraSites on the APWG mailing list, used by Russ McRee from Microsoft (working at Live Messenger looking for malware and phishing sites) to refer to a sites which are:

“service” offerings designed to see who has blocked or deleted your IM alias from their messaging contacts. These sites always have significant disclaimer language, and often disclose that they will send SPIM (SPam over Instant Messenger) to your contacts if you enter your Live ID credentials.

One such example he gives is finecommunity.com which bluntly asks for your Microsoft Live ID and has a very dry Terms Of Use at the bottom of the page, which nobody ever reads, and which ends with:

To unsubscribe from our services you just need to change your Windows Live password.

This is all too familiar on the Twitterverse. Due to the lack of a decent authentication api for Twitter (until recently, they now support oAuth, but the damage has been done), a lot of Twitter related services have popped up asking for your Twitter username and password. But even besides Twitter, other social networking sites would ask for your Gmail or Hotmail credentials to “find your friends” and “invite them”. This isn’t phishing (for your credentials), they just ask them from you so they could “help” you. There have been plenty of instances where these services would add spammy content and links to for example your Twitter stream, or send out emails to your contacts, automatically (because that’s part of the service they offer). Those too are what you could call paraSites, living off of your account.

Even right before I started writing this post I encountered such instance: the HP Touch the Future Now contest, which tells you to twitter about the future (or rather answer some weekly questions on Twitter) in order to win and asks for your Twitter username and password. The T&C doesn’t say anything about spamming your Twitter account. It does say if you don’t provide the required details, you’re disqualified. And that it may pass your personal information to related bodies corporate and agencies assisting with the contest. But why would they need your Twitter username and password? Just tell people to tweet and reply to @hp_<whatever>. Would you trust HP with your Twitter username and password? Didn’t people get bitten before by one of those other “services” wanting your credentials? This might well be a lack of understanding of social media on the part of HP and their marketing team, and they actually mean no harm (as in they won’t spam your Twitter stream). Or at one point in time they might just suck the life out of your Twitter account!

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , Leave a comment

A Twitter social support system

Written by halans | Published on April 26, 2009

Just the other week I experienced two occurrences where Twitter was used by business for product support, which I’d like to share, for those who still doubt the power of social media. These are web businesses (UserVoice and Google) but that shouldn’t make any difference. Any business should monitor the Internet for their brand and reputation. I wasn’t necessarily looking for answers from them, but they did answer.

Earlier last week Google introduces a new version of their Profiles. I had set mine up, and using it I had a concern:

Google Profiles tweetIt was a rather generalized question I put out there for the twitterverse. I wasn’t expecting a response at all. Less than two hours later I did get a response:

GProfiles response tweetGoogle obviously cares about their reputation and seem keen to keep track of whatever’s being said about them. Unfortunatly they didn’t include a link to their report abuse system, which would have been nice if I had a problem (which I didn’t). They could have pointed to a particular blogpost addressing these concerns, or they could create one based on these concerns found around Twitter or the blogosphere in general.

Then last Thursday at a workshop I was demoing a couple of my little web apps where I noticed that one was crashing Firefox and the other had a weird Firefox rendering issue (in effect duplicating the content, though view source only showed the content once). I quickly dugg around and uncommented the UserVoice script loading in those page, which seem to resolve the issues. I posted my concerns on Twitter, to see if anyone else had the same problem.

UserVoice concern

Two minutes later someone (who I think/hope is involved in UserVoice which wasn’t obvious) replied:

UserVoice responseSince I had the UserVoice code removed and was at a workshop (and it’s not really critical to me), I told him I had fixed it for now, and would look at it again later, to which he let me know that I could contact him if I needed any more help. I did not have to go to a UserVoice forum to get help (I wasn’t looking for help actually) , as it could well be an issue with one of the Firefox plugins I have installed. But UserVoice cares enough about their reputation that they try to keep all customers (even little old me, even free customers) happy.

Twitter has been useful for me before in resolving (or sharing) problems. For example, when all my sites hosted on (MediaTemple) were down a couple of weeks ago, I obviously tweeted about this, and got responses back from other people having the same problems. Some of them then pointed me to the MediaTemple Twitter account which was giving out status updates on the cluster problems they were having, to which I then subscribed and got into the loop of how and when things got resolved.

Twitter is an open micro messaging platform which allows people to use it in any way they see fit (within the 140 character constraints). It’s a diary, a bulletin board, a self-help system, a publishing platform,… enabling real time search for events, brands, people… and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , , Leave a comment

The Power Of Social(ized) Search

Written by halans | Published on April 19, 2009

We are on a the road to a major conversion of different technologies, a merger of disparate data points into a singular intelligence previously unknown (yeah, sounds preposterous, I know). And Google is (yet again) right in the middle of it. I won’t be fear mongering about a Skynet entity, or any of the privacy issues related to this. It is the nature of progress that technology disrupts people’s lives. People will adapt, and life evolves.

Google already knows all there is to know. But knowledge is only as powerful as the relationships you can make between facts. Recently Google started to add related results to its search results list. For example, you might look for Copernicus, and it dutifully lists all facts it can find about Copernicus. But Google also knows “who” Copernicus is, and it shows me related subjects, like Plato and Galileo. We finally see the Semantic Web coming into fruition, usable in our day to day lives. But it is still Google who decides to show me what it thinks I am looking for, what it thinks is interesting based on an algorithm, PageRank, they developed, based on number of relevant keywords and links.

But what if I was to ask my friends, my social network of contacts? What if I ask Twitter who Copernicus is, or services like Aardvark who query not a humongous set of data, but a collection of real people, my friends, my connections. They would point me to particular interesting articles they have read, book titles, facts they know. This is where the power of social recommendation comes into play, and the reputation (or social evaluation) of individuals, my connections. I know people who know nothing about software, or cars, or whatever, but who now a lot about philosophy, and are, for me, reputable sources of knowledge on this. They could have a list of recommended books on this subject at Amazon, or Goodreads,… or bookmarks to articles on Delicious.

How can I grow my own reputation in a connected world? By participation in the online social environment. Not a single social network (not just Facebook, or just LinkedIn), but a collection of different, topic specific networks. I am participating: bookmarking on Delicious, postings links on Facebook, blogposts on various websites, Twittering hashtags, writing book or movie reviews, reviewing restaurants (or public toilets), posting and (geo)tagging pictures on Flickr, presentations on Slideshare… The participatory design of social applications not only adds value to the network and whoever visits them, but they grow my own reputation which adds value to my own personal social network.

How does Google fit into Social Search (or Socialized Search)? Google started out as “just” a powerful search engine. Now it offers a whole bunch of, seemingly disparate, tools. With Gmail it knows what I converse about, who I talk to (people and companies) and it neatly keeps track of my address book with Google Contacts. It knows my day to day connections. Google allows me to broadcast my location using Google Latitude (in quasi real time using Android or iPhone), and knows who from my contacts I allow access to my location data, who I trust with this information. Based in Latitude’s proximity, it knows which contacts I socialize with not only online but also in real life. Google knows about Groups and Alerts I subscribe to, the Docs I have online, my search queries, my Calendar. I have a Google Profile which conveniently shows me a list of links of what it thinks are my public pages that I can add to my profile, and I can add additional ones myself. It even allows me to prioritize these links. Through my profile Google knows which social networks I reside on. It knows about me. It knows me.

Next time I ask Google “what movie to see tonight”, in stead of showing me some strangers’ recommendations, while it knows about me (and what I like), it could query my personal social knowledge network for movie reviews and recommendations, and show me a timetable for movies near me. In stead of merely searching for information, I could “discover” what my connections like or dislike, growing my relationships at the same time. Google could incorporate this through their OneBox results or optional through Subscribed Links (subscribing to my personal links). There still are some technological limitations for Social Search, especially with data portability, as a lot of this data lives behind social network walled gardens, and we might need to trust Google as a friend in order to allow it to handle this information.

Is this a privacy nightmare? It sure could be. Private data could be inferred from querying social data. But you only put out what you want, when you want it. And when you do, whatever you loose in privacy, you win in knowledge and reputation. Knowledge is power, reputation is social control.

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , , Leave a comment

Reputation as a Service

Written by halans | Published on April 1, 2009

I don’t remember who it was they were quoting yesterday morning at Sun’s Let’s Talk breakfast presentation on Cloud computing, but Facebook being defined as “Friendship as a Service” kinda made sense.

In which case LinkedIn would be “Reputation as a Service”, I guess, and as Reputation Management as a business slowly starts to take off (as a specialization of SEO), this service could well be considered “Reputation as a Service” too: SocialRecommendator.com. Give it some information like a name, company name, position,… and it generates a randomised recommendation for use in endorsements on sites like LinkedIn or Xing (refresh to get another one).

It even sort of has an API, returning plain text:
http://socialrecommendator.com/recommend.php?name=aname&gender=M&positionTitle=atitle&positionDescription=adescr&positionType=sometype&companyName=acompany&domain=aspecialtydomain

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , Leave a comment

Tackling Social Poverty – Blog Action Day

Written by halans | Published on October 15, 2008

Poverty manifests itself through different guises. When we think of poverty, we’d immediately recall a homeless person or a malnourished African child, a reflection of economical poverty. Social poverty is the result of lack of social capital. As per J.D. Lewandowski, “the concept of social capital refers to the networks of social trust and social connections that serve to enable individual and collective actions in a given social structure or society.” Social exclusion is often a cause of poverty, conflict and insecurity. Improving social inclusion increases one’s well-being, mentally as well as economically.

The Internet has enabled a way of social interaction and connections which facilitate the kinds of action that “make democracy work” (Robert Putnam). It enables freedom of movement up and down the socio-economic and cultural ladder through social participation and human development. It offers economic opportunities and access to public and social services.

On the Internet, everyone can be anyone, and social division becomes a non-issue (though actually new social divisions are constantly being created, on a different level – are you on MySpace or Facebook?). In fact, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (Peter Steiner’s cartoon). Another joke goes “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Internet and he won’t bother you for weeks.” But that man might rise up to be the next Internet millionaire. Access to the Internet is an instrumental right for the improvement of people’s capability. Missing out restrains personal growth. That’s also why gouvernments provide libraries, and Internet access at libraries. It gives people access to knowledge, but libraries are a less than ideal environment for social interaction. Bringing the Internet closer to the community, closer to home, empowers people to take control of their own social network (online and offline). That’s where Free Sydney Wireless (Free Australia Wireless) fits in. By providing free Internet access, through a shared connection, we try to bridge the social divide in our own community, closest to us. This hardly costs us anything extra, as we already pay for Internet access. This is our small contribution to tackle social poverty.

The growth of social networking and user generated content reflects the deep rooted need of people for self expression, social interaction and peer validation. People sharing without personal financial gain. As they do, others do. Or so we hope anyway.
What are you waiting for, why not get involved?

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged Leave a comment

Reality Mining

Written by halans | Published on August 19, 2008

Technology Review has a special report on 10 emerging technologies for 2008. One is Offline Web Applications, which I’m not going to talk about, it’s kind of obvious (Air, Gears, etc). Others are very “out there” (“Connectomics”, “NanoRadio”, “Probabilistic Chips” anyone…?). Another one though is pretty real: “Reality Mining“.

So what are they talking about? MIT Media Lab:

Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behaviour. Reality Mining measures information access and use in different contexts, recognizes social patterns in daily user activity, infers relationships, identifies socially significant locations, and models organizational rhythms.

It is emerging in a sense that it is only now that recent advances in mobile technology put the tools in people’s hands to actually aggregate large, realistic datasets of measurable information. In the last 6 to 12 months new mobile phone handsets are being combined with Wifi and GPS. The boundary between mobile phone (a phone to make, you know, phone calls and send text messages) and smart phone (a mobile phone with additional business related applications like email, office documents, multimedia) is blurring fast, and mobile data is getting faster and more affordable. But Reality Mining as an academic experiment at MIT has been happening for more than 5 years already (using Bluetooth) and they have collected over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behaviour (100 subjects at MIT – Sensing complex social systems – pdf).

Only recently several other Reality Mining experiments came to light, like Cityware’s Digital Footprint in the UK and bluetoothtracking.org in the Netherlands. The goal of Cityware is “to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape.” But in both projects participants are actually unaware that they are participating, in fact they are covertly being tracked without their consent in a technology experiment using Bluetooth scanners installed at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people’s whereabouts. And they have been doing so for 3 years.

More than 1,000 scanners across the world at any time detect passing Bluetooth signals and send the data to Cityware’s central database. Those with access to the database admit they do not know precisely how many scanners have been created, but there are known to be scanners in San Diego, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Toronto and Berlin.

Although anonymous, most Bluetooth devices are given a personal name (Tom’s Blackberry), and the Bluetooth scanners can even pick up full names, email addresses, and address books from poorly configured devices.

Closer to our hearts (as it were), Yahoo! is experimenting with its MyBlogLog service:

MyBlogLog allows users to bind their Bluetooth address to their MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and find out if they have any shared interests. Meetspace [meat-space?] keeps track of time spent with others so they have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about.”

MyBlogLog uses a mobile Java applet to tie your Bluetooth device to your MyBlogLog account, then polls for new activity every two minutes. There are plenty of other services out there doing the same (Google Dodgeball).

But back to today’s future… and the iPhone. The iPhone for example offers assisted GPS which means you don’t even need a GPS signal for location aware services, cell-tower triangulation can be used, as well as Wifi AP triangulation (which by the way also works nicely on the iPod touch), as long as there are known access points around (known to Skyhook that is). And we happily use those services together with our social network apps. There are already countless social, location-aware apps available on the Apple App store like Exposure and Twinkle, and if our favourite social app doesn’t have a iPhone native app, we’ll happily connect to Brightkite or other Yahoo! Fire Eagle enable service and tell everyone (or only friends and family) where we are and what we do, and who we do it with…

Where previously thousands of Bluetooth enabled device where being scanned and tracked (unknowingly and unwillingly) by ten scanners spread around Bath, UK, now, at the same locations around Bath, or for that matter around the country, hundreds of thousands of users would be broadcasting their doings and location, and do so voluntarily. Though we might not know what is happening with that information. While we try to retain control of (and monetize) our Attention data on the web, will we be able to retain control (and monetize) our Lifestream data?

The mobile phone as a social artefact becomes more and more a personal black box, recording our every move (into the cloud), for later playback. Where we currently see governments worldwide implement retention policies for email, we might see, in a not so distant future, a retention policy on our lifestream. I do hope I’m wrong.

Have a look at this short video interview (4 min) on Reality Mining, with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT.

BTW, I love my iPhone, and I love location aware applications, but I always have Bluetooth disabled on my phone.

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , Leave a comment

Vanity Validator

Written by halans | Published on July 26, 2008

Wired’s Vanity Validator widget for iGoogle, found on the Julia Allison Wired article:

How famous are you online? Inspired by Chris Anderson’s best-selling book, The Long Tail, this gadget uses Google’s PageRank™ technology to give you a number based on how many good websites mention the name you enter.

Try for yourself:

What’s your score? (mine was 50 at this time, not quite famous or fabulous)

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged Leave a comment

What is Twitter anyway?

Written by halans | Published on May 28, 2008

Great YouTube video explaining what Twitter is:

Posted in Fabulizd | Tagged , Leave a comment

Passwords

Written by halans | Published on May 18, 2008

Before you start building out your online presence, think for a moment about the use of your passwords. That’s plural. You do use multiple passwords, right? Oh, you don’t? Too hard to remember, is it? Let me guess, is it “password”?

But seriously, you need a decent password policy. Think of the different web applications you encounter online. Internet banking, email, instant messaging, blogging, social networks,… Each serve a different purpose. Each will have their own password policy. They will require you to use a password of minimum 4 to 8 characters long, and up to (or as short as) 10 to 30 characters long. But some will only allow regular characters, while others will require stronger password. Some websites will even mail you your password as a reference. Not good practice but something you need to keep in mind, as your password may be viewable by all (if people read along over your shoulder)!

What makes a password strong? Or, to turn it around, what makes a password weak?

  • A weak password is less than 15 characters long.
  • It contains a word which can be found in a dictionary.
  • It contains a commonly used word, as for example:
    • Names of family members, pets, friends,…
    • Names of locations (cities, employer,…)
    • Birthdays, address information, number plates, your email address…
    • Common letter or number combinations like qwerty, 1234567890, abcdefg,…

So the longer a password, the better. At least 8 characters long at any time (even for less valuable passwords, only good for temporary passwords), but better starting at 10 or even 15 long. Use a combination of letters in lower case and upper case as well as numbers, and at least one punctuation character like !@#$%^&*()_+|~- =\`{}[]:”;’<>?,./) Don’t use a single word in any language, or slang, or dialect.
Better yet, don’t just use a “word”, but use a phrase, a passphrase! Especially for financial information like your internet banking or PayPal account. But use something you can remember.
“DonteatSh@rkmeats0up”, “Br1ngTwinPeaksB@ck” (oh, don’t use these, get your own!).

And then for each web application, or at least for each web application category, create a unique password, which might sound daunting. For example you can use a single password for all low security applications, such as reading on-line newspapers and accessing entertainment web sites. But use another one for messaging and blogging, and then yet other ones for each financial application you register for. To make the password unique, you could incorporate (part of, like a couple of letters) the domain of the web application into your password.
But since your email address is probably used by all online applications, you should have a single unique password for your email account, totally different from any of the other passwords! Lots of password retrieval methods involve sending you the password (or temporary password) to your email account, and you don’t want any of the online applications (and the people behind them) given access to your email account which would contain references to any of the applications your subscribe to.

And of course, don’t share your passwords, write them down, and stick them to your monitor, or keep them in your desk drawer. Don’t give out your password over email. Don’t type your password on devices you don’t control, like public computers at the airport, library, internet cafe, kiosks,.. They might contain keyloggers, logging your username and password.

You can test out your password’s strength over at Microsoft’s Password Checker.

Reference:
SANS Password Policy http://www.sans.org/resources/policies/Password_Policy.pdf
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_policy
GetSafeOnline http://www.getsafeonline.org/
Bruce Schneier http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/12/72300

Posted in Fabulizd Leave a comment

Why should you care?

Written by halans | Published on May 15, 2008

The Internet has become part of every day life, on every level of life. Government, banking, employment, shopping, social interaction,… Looking for a new job? You would probably set up a CV online, and look for potential employers on job sites. But the other way round, an employer might very well look up any potential employees too. Again, on job sites for CV’s, but whenever an employer receives a CV, they can easily search for your name too and see what gets returned. Now, they can either find nothing (but find positive things for another candidate), they can find less favorable things or they can find whatever you put out there (the volunteer work you’ve done, your insightful comments on blog post or forums, short articles you wrote on one of your pet subjects,…).

Take control now. Build up an online presence, at all the right places. Start using the Internet to your advantage. Make yourself look a little bit better. Bury any dirt that’s around to the back of any search results, manage your online reputation! It’s about looking good, online.

Geekredentials

I believe in each of use there is an inner geek, big or small. Want to find, and release, your inner geek? You are reading this blog, god knows how you came here. Actually, Google knows (in fact) how you came here. The fact that you did find this page, is your inner geek trying to break out… This blog will improve your geekredentials.

Posted in Fabulizd Leave a comment

  • Fabulizd – fabulized?

    To fabulize
    1. 1. To improve something. The Simpsons, Lisa: “Can’t a girl fabulize herself before the big dance?“ urbandictionary.com
    2. 2. To invent, compose, or relate fables or fictions. thefreedictionary.com
Scroll To Top
Another WordPress blog. Cared for by
© 2007-2010