Should we be overly concerned with the information people might be inadvertently sharing on social networks when many still haven’t learned about the dangers of using a cell phone in public?

That story reminds me of the time we were taking the train to Chicago and one of our fellow passengers spent part of the trip setting up a return of an item that had been delivered to her house. The conversation included her giving her name, address and credit card information, all within easy hearing range of a train-car full of people.

Dumb is dumb, no matter which communications medium you use.

Since It’s Wrong to Friend Your Boss on Facebook, I guess that makes me sort of an idiot, huh?

Yes, one of my Facebook “friends” is my boss. No, that doesn’t really bother me. Not because I would want my boss to know everything about my life, (I don’t want anyone to know everything about my life for that matter!), but because anything that I didn’t want my boss to know, I wouldn’t post on a social networking site!

I use Social Networking tools to connect with family and friends, yes. I also use them to connect with folks who read my blog, or who are involved with the child abuse survivor community online. I also count among my contacts coworkers, former coworkers, professional contacts, peers from other firms, vendors and consultants and probably a couple of people that I don’t even remember how we know each other. In fact, it’s a pretty varied group on Facebook.

That variety doesn’t mean I’m being “irresponsible” in who I share details of my life with. In my case, it actually serves to remind me to stay responsible in all of my online interactions, no matter who I’m interacting with. I’ve been involved in the earliest forms of online networking through blogs, since 2001. I’m comfortable with what I write on all the different subjects I write about. I recognize that some will find one, or more, of the topics I write about more interesting than others, which is why I do sort of separate those out to some extent, and why only one of my blogs feeds to my Facebook profile, but as far as I’m concerned, if I put it online, I’m ok with it being public knowledge and having my name attached to it. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t post it anywhere.

Of course, with Facebook, that also means keeping up with what others post on my profile, which I also do. I try not to associate with people I don’t trust enough to respect my desire to keep my page fun, educational, interesting, yet still professional. I regularly remove miscellaneous stuff from my Facebook Wall that makes it look less than that. Yes, that’s why, if you are sending gifts, hearts, angels or what have you to all your friends, I more than likely removed it from my wall. Nothing personal, it’s just not what I want all over my profile when people look at it. It’s my profile, my choice, and I choose to connect with coworkers, and my boss. Not because I’m naive, quite the opposite, in fact.

The big “story” this week has been the website Please Rob Me, which used some basic twitter searches for FourSquare check-in’s to try and convince people that posting where they are meant that anyone would know when they weren’t home. As if there weren’t a hundred easier ways to target someone and know when they weren’t home.

So no, I’m not overly impressed with what they did, but then again they did start a conversation, so maybe that is a good thing. The security aspect is probably overblown, as has been pointed out by many people, but the privacy implications are definitely worth a deeper discussion. Let’s take a couple of hypotheticals that I fully expect we’ll see in the news in the coming months:

1. Man tells spouse he’s going to sports bar “with some guys from the office”. Checks-in at bar, tweets his location. Hot chick from his office also checks in at the bar. None of his male coworkers who also use the service check-in from the bar, in fact, some check in from other locations. Busted.

2. Someone up for promotion, or job, that would mean possibly working long hours, and travel, checks-in from oncology appointment. Doesn’t get promotion due to inferred medical condition that would limit their ability to do said job. (Whether it’s actually true or not is irrelevant in this case, the check-in was enough to cause doubt, throwing the decision in favor of the perceived safer candidate.)

3. Attorney who specializes in corporate mergers frequently checks-in from Starbucks across the street from the main headquarters of a publicly traded company. Attentive followers buy up stock in anticipation of company being bought.

4. Relatively new user, who doesn’t realize check-ins are being publicly tweeted as opposed to only being shared in geolocation service, is stalked/harassed because they checked in from their home address.

There are, literally, a thousand ways that someone can infer details of your life based on where you check-in from, especially when you check in from doctor appointments, political events, churches, etc. Many people go out of their way, either for personal reasons or because the nature of their jobs require it, to not post about religious or political beliefs publicly, or to talk about who their clients are, etc. but leave enough details in their public locations that would allow others to make inferences just the same. I’m sure you can come up with your own examples of how location information can be used, or misused, to your own detriment. Those are the real threats posed by geolocation services, and the things that users should be thinking long and hard about before checking in from everywhere. It may be relatively harmless to check-in at a restaurant, or coffee shop. It may not be harmless to check-in from anywhere that would be sharing personal information.

I noticed this evening that they’ve added a beta “browse bar” feature. Seems that, in a nutshell, you can use that address to simply browse from one bookmarked site to the next. Great for creating a to-read list, or even a nice quick check of a handful of sites you want to look at.

Go here, for example, to “browse” my latest bookmarks one at a time instead of just seeing the list of links.

And yes, it also supports tags, simply add the appropriate tag to the end of the address, like this http://delicious.com/browsebar/mikemac29/photography

Nice. Think I might have to consider creating an ediscovery reading list this way and sharing it with others. Could be a very useful tool to help attorneys and others stay on top of ediscovery news without the need to click through articles or use an RSS reader themselves.

What other uses can you come up with?

Like most of you, my gmail account was integrated into Google’s new “Buzz” social networking tool, and unlike many in the blogosphere, I decided to give it a little while before commenting on it. So, after using it for a few days, and seeing what the “early” commentators had to say, I’d have to say that I think Google really is too little, too late to this game, and that Google has no idea how normal people use social networking tools, or email for that matter.

See, here’s part of my problem with Google. Months ago, I wrote about Google Wave, that it was underwhelming, but that I had faith that Google would continue to add to it and make it something useful. They haven’t done anything useful to Wave yet, but here they are rolling out Buzz as the new “This is going to be great” application, only it’s not, in it’s current format, great, or even good for that matter. Given the past few months with Wave, I have no faith that they’re going to really improve this much, and as it stands now, it just sort of sucks. Like Friendfeed, it can pull things from other sources into Buzz, but currently those sources are severely limited. Twitter, Reader Shared Items, Flickr, Picasa, and maybe a blog feed. That’s it. It’s not Friendfeed on steroids, it’s Friendfeed on diet pills.

Those aren’t even the only Google products that I am have been expecting improvements to, that never seem to come. I don’t use Google Reader’s shared items feature, because there’s no way to tag items, which would generate different RSS feeds based on those tags, or items you could follow based on a tag, so that I could use shared items on both of my sites at once. Delicious does that, has for years.For that matter, Google still hasn’t integrated Google Reader’s shared items with Feedburner’s link splicer feature, and they own both of those! So I have to use Delicious if I want to be able to put daily “links” in the RSS feeds for my blogs, not that I care, because again, I can use Delicious to send different tag groups to different blog feeds right now too!

So now, they roll out Buzz, and integrate social networking into email and Google Reader, two places I don’t actually want social networking. (And I’ll leave the ridiculously stupid idea to autofollow your Gmail contacts and the privacy implications alone, since they’ve already sort of acknowledged that was a bad idea.) They’ve hacked their way into two products I actually do use, Gmail, and Reader (as an RSS reader only), and made them more annoying. They’ve decided that I want to follow the people I email most frequently, which is where they are too late to this game. The people I follow on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, are not the people I email the most. When I need to send them a message, or see what they’re up to, I go there. My Gmail account is for people who aren’t connected to me in those places. I use email to interact with people about my various websites, give them a way to contact me for help, and, occasionally, I get an offer to get a copy of a book for review, or a request from someone doing research, etc. I reply to those people, about that subject, but that hardly means I want to start following them on Buzz. Again, the people I want to follow, I already do! I don’t need them added to Gmail or Reader, and most of them don’t have Google Profiles anyway. Why would they? They have Facebook and Twitter profiles, and are easily accessible from there.

Seems to me that someone in Google has been charged with making a social network, no matter what. So they’ve tried Profiles, only there wasn’t any incentive to use those for much. Then they tried Wave, which showed some promise, but confused people too much to really grow beyond the geek crowd. So, they looked around at the various Google services, saw the large number of users on Gmail, and decided that if they couldn’t make a truly revolutionary product for social networking, they would just glom onto that user base, and add Buzz to existing Gmail accounts. Voila, millions of users! An overnight success!

Personally, I haven’t seen an iota of value from Buzz. The only place I see the potential for usefulness is in the mobile version, which can show you Buzz going on nearby, but even that doesn’t interest me all that much as a every day tool. Might be great when tailgating at an OSU game or some other big event, but when I’m looking at Buzz from the office, or my house, not so much.

Still, I’m going to leave Buzz up and running for a little while longer, but I fully anticipate that I’ll either be turning it off completely, or unfollowing everyone and leaving my “buzz” posting so those who really want to use it to follow me can. Just don’t expect me to reply to you there. I’m already interacting with folks in plenty of other places.

In an otherwise maddening post about his experience with a law school student, Craig Ball makes an interesting “throw away” comment:

We look to the crop of eager young lawyers to be inherently more adept at e-discovery than we who preceded them. After all, they have iPhones.

Craig (who I assume was being facetious), is confusing the comfort level of using technology, with an understanding of technology. They are not the same. Younger attorneys may have an advantage when it comes to using their PC or smartphone to get work done, by virtue of having grown up in a world where this is the norm. Much the same way that older folks used to joke about getting their 9 year old to program the VCR, that doesn’t mean the 9 year old knows how the VCR works. She is just comfortable using the menu to program it because she’s never not had one. Expecting that, because this young girl can program the VCR means that she will, undoubtedly, also understand how video tape gets written to, how the VCR adjusts for different playback speeds, how the broadcast is received by the television, etc. is folly. The ability to use an iPhone has nothing to do with knowing how to create a data-map, a deep understanding of PST files, using hash values to locate duplicate files, an understanding of metadata and forensics, or the hundreds of other things an attorney may run into in the course of an eDiscovery project.

It reminds me of the many organizations who’s use of social media is being directed by a 20 something employee fresh out of college who happens to have 500 friends on Facebook or Twitter, as if that somehow magically qualifies them to direct marketing strategy. It’s simply not the same thing.

Both of these examples bring to mind something else that has bothered me for a long time about the “generational diversity” presentations that I know you’ve all heard over and over, and which was described so well by Manager Tools just last week. In this case, just because an associate is young, doesn’t mean they are better with technology. Some are, and some aren’t. They are individuals, not an composite of the “average” for people their age, or from their culture.

For example,  if you meet another 41 year old, male, white Litigation Support Manager, chances are, they are a lot different than I am, you might want to take notice of that. Heck, they are probably less grumpy, if nothing else!

In several recent conversations on Twitter, and elsewhere, I’ve been noticing a bit of a trend. Seems like some of the “add-on” services that use Twitter to piggy back the social aspects of their own service, FourSquare being a prime example, seem to have an interesting effect on how followers interact with some of the folks in their tweetstream. I’m seeing many more people start to unfollow users of these services, because they don’t use them, and just don’t care.

Case in point, I don’t use any of the geolocation services. I have somewhere around 900 followers, and my rough guess would be that maybe 100-150 of them are actually local to me. That means that if I were to start tweeting all of my FourSquare “check-ins” they would be totally irrelevant to 80% of my followers. They aren’t local, they aren’t going to be meeting up with me, and they likely aren’t looking for reviews to every single place I eat out, or get a haircut. So, for me, and many others who are using Twitter to interact professionally with people who work in my industry, as opposed to people who are local to me, these services make no sense.

To many others, it seems like they really are trying to be local in their tweets. There’s a lot of meeting up, sharing local places of interest, etc., and that’s not exactly a bad thing. On the other hand, if you’re one of those folks, especially if you’re not local to me, please understand why I don’t want to follow you. The value your tweets bring me is diminished by the number of geolocation tweets you post. You and I are trying to accomplish different things. I think, as twitter grows, you’re going to see more of this. There are lots of different people using hte service now, and there is likely to be some segmentation of it’s users. I happen to think the use of geolocation services is one area where you’re going to see this, and Twitters new “local trends” is going to exacerbate this. Again, I, for one, don’t care about local trends, because the vast majority of people I interact with on Twitter aren’t local. If they were, I might care about that, but I’m not primarily looking for what’s happening in Columbus, I’m looking for what’s happening with the legal industry and ediscovery.

So, if you want to be local, and also be universal, perhaps you should consider leaving your foursquare interactions over there, instead of bringing them all to twitter? It’s going to be awfully tempting to unfollow you when you try and mix the two. You might want to decide which is more important to you, and then your followers can decide for themselves too. Soon, we might just see very distinct groups forming on twitter, folks who want to be local and are posting constant location updates and yelp reviews, and those who aren’t, and don’t. Shall the two ever meet again? I have my doubts.

Using ReadTwit the last couple of weeks has been interesting. It’s enabled me to see more of what people I follow on Twitter are linking to, and that’s not always a good thing. It seems that by occasionally looking at Twitter, I might be missing the fact that some of the people I follow actually spend a lot of time sharing stuff I don’t care about at all.

So it was with that in mind, that I found myself nodding my head in agreement with this.

You’re Pissing Off Your Twitter Followers — Stop!

I’ve already mentioned my complete disregard for all things FourSquare, and how using ReadTwit helped me realize just how often some people “check-in” for no apparent purpose other than to become mayor of their dentist office, or something equally strange. It’s also helping me realize that some people I follow have a tendency to promote the same stuff every single day, or just link to hollywood gossip stories that mean nothing to me. In essence, it has helped me see some the things that are normally hidden by the shear volume of tweets. 

Of course, if you read the article, you also know they have  huge problem with people feeding their blog posts to Twitter. I actually don’t mind that, and I do it so I hope most people don’t mind it. If you only have one link to your blog posts, and aren’t posting 4-5 times a day, it’s easy enough to skip on by without too much difficulty. On the other hand, if you repost the link for days on end, well that’s just annoying.

 
So what are your biggest Twitter pet peeves? Do you think if you saw more of the details of what was in the firehose that you would be pretty quick to unfollow. I’m finding the unfollow button a lot more often myself.

So I noticed earlier this week that your profile photo was being sent out to anyone who had you as a contact on through the iPhone app, today F-Secure points out something about private photos that you might not have noticed, that anyone with access to them can share them!

Still, complaints about privacy aside, I think they have the best bit of advice:

There’s is a very simple solution. If you absolutely don’t want to share it, then don’t upload it to a SOCIAL networking site.

I’d have to agree. Ultimately, even if Facebook did fix all the little holes and give you a chance to lock down every little bit of your profile to just a select group, there’s nothing stopping that group from doing screen captures, or whatever, and sharing it with the whole world! If you really want to keep something private, don’t post it online. Such a simple rule, it boggles the mind that so few seem capable of following it.

Being the avid social networker that I am, as well as an iPhone owner, of course I was excited to see that both the LinkedIn and Facebook apps were introducing features that let you sync information from those networks to your phone’s address book. However, after I got both updates, downloaded my LinkedIn contacts to my phone and turned on “syncing” in the Facebook app, a curious thing happened.

I noticed that some folks I am connected with on LinkedIn, who don’t happen to have a photo on their profile, and who I wasn’t even aware were on Facebook, suddenly had photos along with their contact information on my phone. It seems that the Facebook app was grabbing their publicly available information, which now includes the profile photo, by matching up the LinkedIn email address, even if I’m not connected to them on Facebook.

So, if you’ve got a somehwat questionable profile photo on Facebook, you might want to be aware that it may be getting attached to your LinkedIn info, and sent to folks you connect with there, despite your best attempts to keep your Facebook profile a secret from them! Consider this your warning.