Keeping emails and security under control

Do you receive tons of notification emails form your various subscriptions or social sites like Twitter and Facebook and the others? Have you thought about the impact on your productivity all these teasers are?

Well, you might have forgotten (or are you too busy to figure out) how to manage or shutdown the notifications. Check out this handy toy that I just came across: Notification Control.

And in a related story, here's a similar site if you want to review your security and permissions settings on all these sites. Another chore often put off to our own detriment! My Permissions.

Yeah there's really very little to these two sites but I think you might find them very useful!

Tens of Thousands of Servers. Wait.

Just one phrase that jumped out of the new missive from Zuck about privacy:

"As a matter of fact, privacy is so deeply embedded in all of the development we do that every day tens of thousands of servers worth of computational resources are consumed checking to make sure that on any webpage we serve, that you have access to see each of the sometimes hundreds or even thousands of individual pieces of information that come together to form a Facebook page." (from Our Commitment to the Facebook Community)

When I tell (non computer) people that it takes hundreds or thousands of servers in hundreds of data centers to run something like Google or Facebook they are surprised.

Even I am surprised at "tens of thousands of servers worth of computational resources."

Wait, why the nuanced phrasing? What is a server's worth of computational resource? Is that a server or something else? Wait, what's a server anyway? Oh well. Parsing.

Facebook - Group your Place on a List and Put it on A page … or something

I am a big fan of Facebook. They are doing so many things well. They have become so pervasive that if anyone is doing anything that involves a group of people online the first and biggest question should be, why should we not put this on Facebook? Because it works on so many levels.

But all is not rosy. I wanted to create a presence on Facebook for a place called Windward Harbor. Should I be creating a Place, Page, a Group or a List? I don't have the time or inclination to try to figure that out. Here's one example where having more than one way to do the same thing is just not that useful.

If you know better, please illuminate me!

Photo sharing thoughts

I just returned from my mother's birthday party with about 300 photos - I would say 70% of them are no good, so I selected about 40 of the best ones and then had to decide how to share them with everyone who cared.

A little bit of research produced the following options which I am sharing with YOU to save you and me some time in the future.

Note that I am on a Mac and thus I use iPhoto to store the pictures, and have an Apple MobileMe account.

• Option 1: Create a MobileMe Gallery directly from iPhoto and upload the pictures. This works well but the gallery has many clever features which may confuse some of the inexperienced computer users who want to see the pictures.


• Option 2: Send to FaceBook directly from iPhoto. This also works well. Because most (but not all) of the people who would like to see the photos are my friends on Facebook they will immediately see the photos and I don't have to send them emails. Also there are many friends on facebook who I would normally not bother with an email announcement but who will appreciate seeing the photos. On the other hand, once the album 'scrolls' off their feed in facebook they will probably have a hard time finding it.


• Option 3: I am experimenting with a very simple and free site called Yogile which offers a brain dead simple viewer experience. Drawback is that I cannot send the photos directly from iPhoto, but on the other hand it gives an easy URL which I can email to everyone who might be interested.


• Option 4: I considered Flickr, which I love. But I often find that people who don't know it or are very inexperienced with computers oddly get quite confused because again it has many many features.

Any other that I should consider?

Facebook security

I was experimenting with a little known feature in Facebook, "Download Your Information" which will actually supposedly give you a copy of everything that is 'yours' on Facebook.

The definition of what is 'yours' is fairly tricky of course: is what you posted on someone else's wall 'yours' or 'theirs'? And so on.

But what interested me was how they made double and triple sure that in fact it was me who was downloading my information.

I had to supply my own password again: ok that makes sense.

But then for extra extra security I was shown a bunch of wall photos of people who are my 'friends' and asked to identify them from a multiple choice set of friends. This is harder than you think: not every friend is such a good friend. And not all the wall photos are recognizable. They might be childhood photos, or out of focus group shots at a party or whatever.

But really quite a smart way to make sure that the downloaded content does not fall into the wrong hands.

Facebook and Twitter Hacking

I guess it's not surprising that people's Facebook and twitter accounts are getting compromised. From the New York Times:

"Malicious programs are rampaging through Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, spreading themselves by taking over people’s accounts and sending out messages to all of their friends and followers. The result is that people are inadvertently telling their co-workers and loved ones how to raise their I.Q.’s or make money instantly, or urging them to watch an awesome new video in which they star." (from From Viral Crooks, Social Networks are Prime Targets)

I just changed my three Twitter accounts, and Facebook accounts to use a "very hard" password. I suggest you consider doing it too :)

Trade-off: Facebook vs. Ning

I am advising a client who is interested in reaching out to a huge existing community of folks who they, historically and today, can count as their natural constituency.The problem is, they don't have their names or email addresses and want to connect to them, and them to each other. The question is, how to do that.

I explored three options with them: create a Facebook 'Group' and/or Application, create a Ning social network, or create a new and beautifully designed new web site to serve as the hub of the effort.

Here are some of my tentative conclusions.

• Outreach: No matter what approach is taken, a big part of the effort will be outreach, via email or google ads or something along those lines, to get the attention of these people, and motivate/incent them to register. The message, tone, language and incentive have to be carefully designed and monitored and tweaked to make it work.


• Design and Look: Facebook will allow the least customization of the look, followed by Ning, and of course creating a new site will give you any design you want. But don't get all caught up in how important having a unique look is. There is something to be said for the familiarity and trust that a Facebook-looking group elicits.


• Cost: There is a similar trade-off in cost: A Facebook group will be the cheapest, a Ning site a little more, and a custom web site will almost certainly cost much more than you expect.


• Facebook has captured a lot of the 'social graph': This one is the hardest to explain because my point is subtle. [I await comments from someone saying that this point isn't subtle at all] Facebook's magic is that it has already recorded many relationships, who is who's friend etc. They are trying to 'capture the social graph' So, it is much easier to encourage John to tell his friend Jane to also join this group because neither John or Jane have to 'sign up' - create a profile. So this is one unique advantage of using Facebook, assuming that there is reasonable overlap between Facebook users and the people we are trying to find.

Those are some of my insights in assessing the trade-offs. Please tell me all the things I am missing!