Tag Archives: facebook

Writers

Why Authors Need Twitter

I wrote an article for Opportunities Planeet on why artists, authors, or anyone who needs to market a product should be on Twitter.

For Anyone Looking to Market a Product, Twitter Can Be Even More Important Than Facebook

Twitter birdie Twitter is the second-most popular social network in the world, and the ninth most-most popular website worldwide. But I believe for marketing, Twitter is the most important social media account to have. First let me say I’m comparing Twitter to Facebook not because they are the most similar, or because I think you should neglect to promote yourself on Facebook. I compare Twitter to Facebook because most people see Facebook as an important part of their marketing strategy, while neglecting the little blue bird. Sure, Facebook is the second-most popular website in the world. But most of the people who use it expect it to be a personal space. Facebook is where people share photos of their vacation and videos of kittens. You are expected to have one profile for all the different “hats” you wear, encompassing what you do at work, how you spend your free time, what music enjoy and what stories you’ve been reading…the whole kit and caboodle. Twitter allows you to brand yourself. You can have a multitude of Twitter profiles and no one frowns upon it as they would if you had a variety of Facebook personae. This means if you’ve written the book Zombies With Guns you can have a Twitter feed that focuses exclusively on weapons, ammo, and surviving the zombie apocalypse. On Facebook, your friends and family would be irritated by your constant stream of zombie and gun info, because they are not your target audience. On Twitter, your account is specifically for that purpose, so all of your followers would be people interested in that kind of content. Sure, you can get fifty of your friends to like your company on Facebook, but on Twitter those followers are not your pals but potential customers. Facebook has created a number of ways to compete with this advantage. They created groups, then changed, them, and are now getting rid of them. They created company pages. But in my experience, it is harder to gain followers of a Facebook company page than a Twitter page, even though many more people are on Facebook! That’s because people go to Facebook to talk to people they already know in real life. People go to Twitter to find out what’s going on in the world and to receive updates on their favorite subjects.

Read the rest of the article
at Opportunities Planet

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

Lifehacking, Tech

We Don’t Need Facebook

19 Comments

Facebook has given privacy a kick in the groin. If this is news to you, you should probably check out:

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative [Wired]

or

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook [Gizmodo]

or

Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information [EFF].

Longer than the Constitution
FB Privacy Policy: Longer Than the Constitution

Those who’ve been watching the plucky start-up were already aware that Facebook is mired in accusations that it was founded by a crook and funded by a nut and some gooks. Into this fray comes Facebook’s controversy over their privacy settings. It used to be that Facebook provided a space that was just for friends and family. “Just” as in “only.” As in, not public.

The new privacy settings even led to a movement last month to have a “Quit Facebook Day.” Even if you manage to tackle FB’s labyrinth of privacy settings, don’t use any apps, or never use FacebookConnect you still can’t control what happens when your friends fail to make their stuff private. You can’t stop Facebook from censoring your messages. Even if we all flock back to Myspace or Friendster or Tribe [or Whatever] we have no guarantee that that data won’t be given away. It would probably be wise to consider anything hosted on a faraway computer you can’t control as potentially public, even email. At the very least we should commit to using sites that have consistent and reasonable privacy policies (thus the total opposite of Facebook [1][2]).

But entrusting Facebook is clearly no longer the way to go. Here’s why. In my myriad conversations about this issue, I get one of three responses:

"I don't care who sees my data"“I don’t care about who sees my data or my friends’ data. I posted it so anyone could see it.”

This person shouldn’t be on Facebook. There are much better public sites that do everything Facebook does but better and more beautifully (more on that later).

“Privacy isn’t a big deal to me but there are some things I’d like to put online that I don’t want the whole world to see.” "I'm not super-concerned about privacy."

This person shouldn’t be on Facebook. These are the people Facebook seeks to confound with their myriad privacy on-off switches, e.g. most of us. Because these folks aren’t too concerned about most of what we put out there, we won’t be meticulous about making sure everything is set to private. We won’t think of our Facebook stream as a blog  for all the world to see and eventually we will accidentally post something that will get us embarrassed, fired, divorced or deported.

“privacy is very important to me. I only want to share stuff with my friends.”

This person shouldn’t be on Facebook. Because this person cares about privacy. If anything, they should be boycotting Facebook. Wake up: Facebook wants our info to be public so they can make more money on their ads. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he’s ok with the whole thing being confusing because he doesn’t believe in privacy.

"I want my stuff to stay private."

Oh the outrage!

But alas,  Quit Facebook Day has come and gone and your account still remains. Don’t feel too bad…so does mine.

Now that Facebook has decided to make it standard to share people’s stuff, why are we still using Facebook? Simple: because no matter how much better the other sites are, Facebook is where the people are. But having all the people didn’t stop Myspace fom sinking or Friendster before it. We just need a critical mass of people to join these other sites and Facebook will be history.

The thing is: we don’t need Facebook! Even if Facebook were offering a reasonable privacy policy there are much better sites. And here’s the good news! They all allow automatic posting to Facebook. For those of us not boldly motivated enough to quit Facebook, we can follow our friends on these sites while automatically sending updates to those still lost in the land of blue and white status updates. Eventually these sites (which are all still relatively new) will grow full of enough users that we can all jump ship.

“But,” I hear you asking, “what are these wondrous websites?” Patience, dear reader, for you have discovered the subject of page two…

Continue reading We Don’t Need Facebook →

Tech

Trust No One

My boyfriend got miffed at me a few weeks ago. I had put his email in a list that would invite him to join Shelfari. Though he was slightly annoyed to get email from them, he was more annoyed that I gave this site my google name and password. It really didn’t occur to me that this was possibly insecure.

I would have challenged him as paranoid but the day before I had been downloading aps for facebook. I came across a particularly lovely app that would auto-check your myspace and tell you if you had any updates. But the programmer who wrote the nifty app had taken it down. He had an accidental security hole that allowed the username and password to be transmitted transparently, causing malicious folks access to the email info of those who had the installed the application.

I have to remind myself that just becuase I trust the programmer that wrote the program not to do anything shady with my info doesn’t mean that its safe to pass it along.

Here’s another way to look at it: If you have a password, one reason you don’t give it out to those you trust is because if there is some kind of security breach — whether it be a home robbery or online identity theft — you can detective* out how your password got into the wrong hands. The more people who have access to your info, the more difficult that is. And I have heard of cases where the source wasn’t resolved and the same asshole cracker** came back and socked the victim again.

This is all a long lead-up to this link, from hackademix.net, about four recent security weaknesses in google.

This is particularly telling, as google is so widely respected. I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my passwords a little closer to my chest in the future.