So I’ve been getting a boatload of app requests on Facebook from this BranchOut service. Apparently they are using Facebook for professional networking, but in all honesty I haven’t been keeping up with all the new social networking stuff. Busy with the new job and all.

Is anyone out there using it? Anyone want to volunteer their experience so the rest of us can decide if it’s worth looking at, or is this another case of an app sending requests to all of your friends without your knowledge and that’s why I seem to get a new one every day?

Thanks in advance!

I know there’s been a lot of bigger news about Instgram this week, what with the company being purchased by Facebook and all. That’s been covered to death all over the internet, so I’ll skip boring you with my take on that. (Suffice it to say, I simply hope FB keeps the tool working the way it does.)

I did want to share a service that works with Instagram that I saw via one of my own Facebook friends today. The odd thing, to me, about Instagram is that while it’s a great app, and now a great Android app as well, there’s no website where you can take a peek at your network, or your photos on a PC. Seriously, go to instagr.am, nothing but the downloads for the apps.Well, whenever there’s an opening in the social networking realm nowadays, someone will step up. That precisely what Statigram has done. Give it access to your Instagram account and it will act as a desktop client for the Instagram sevice, including giving you a public URL you can give out to share your Instagram photos with folks who are not using the service. (Mine is http://statigr.am/mikemac29) Give it access to your Facebook profile and it will let you do things like create an Instagram tab for your fan page, and let you create a cover photo for your timeline from your Instagram photos. Not too shabby, if you want to trust them with your login information. (Which is always a concern too!)

Anyone else using the service, or something similar?

Apparently, while 2011 was a year of huge changes for me, the changes just keep coming in 2012. I won’t be relocating again, but I will be switching jobs, and that is going to also impact what I’m doing on this site. I’ve accepted a Litigation Support Trainer position with AccessData. I’ll be based out of my home office, doing online training and various other projects from there, while also traveling to do onsite training, working at some of the various trade shows, etc.

I’ll also be contributing to AD’s eDiscovery Insight Blog (http://ediscoveryinsight.com/). In the interest of not competing with myself, or with the company that pays my bills, I will not be writing about the legal industry or litigation support on this site any longer, short of pointing you to things I write over there.

What does that mean for mikemcbrideonline.com? I think it goes back to being the blog it started out as all those years ago. A little tech, some geeky stuff, some personal lessons learned about careers and travel, and, of course, photography. I’ll still be sharing interesting articles in the legal and litigation support fields, here and on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, along with links to various other things I find interesting. There won’t be a complete purge of all things legal, but it certainly won’t be the main focus the way it has been for the last few years.

If you’ve been coming here for the litigation support stuff, I hope you’ll join us over on eDiscovery Insight, and I hope to be able to continue to share information and insights with you in various ways. If you’ve been following along for years and trying your best to weed through the boring legal stuff, I hope you’ll enjoy the new turn on the site. Just bear with me as I go through an adjustment period and figure out exactly what I’m doing around here.

On a personal note, I’m excited by this new opportunity. I’ll be working with a great team, at a very exciting time in the history of the Summation product line. I’ll be getting a chance to teach others, and help them understand this crazy world of eDiscovery, on a regular basis. It will certainly make for a different 2012 than I was expecting, but a very interesting one too!

Hopefully, I’ll even get a chance to meet up with some of you in my travels, or at trade shows, so stay in touch!

With recent announcements about Google migrating their privacy policy into one large policy, that lets them share your information across any and all of the Google tools, some folks are starting to get up in arms about Google moving away from their unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”.

Some are even comparing Google’s moves to AOL.

There’s some truth to this. Unlike Facebook, which started out as a social network only, and has tried to bring more things into the walled garden, Google has a number of various things out there, that people have been using for years, and now they’re simply forcing all of it into the walled garden, and into Google+ specifically. Facebook, rightly, got their hands slapped when they tried to bring in “partners” and made folks opt-out of those additional postings to their profile. They’ve recently added partners, but have made the process more of an opt-in, where you can choose whether a partner has rights to interact with your profile information the first time you use it.

Google, on the other hand, has no opt-out. The various Google properties will, as a matter of business, share your information. Does that mean Google will start posting your activities to G+ publicly? Of course not. (Thought there’s nothing, technically, stopping them from, is there?) It does, however, mean that Google is using information from your email, maps,  your calendar, from G+, and from your search history to target ads to you. What kinds of ads you get from Google will wind up saying a lot about the information that you are looking at and not sharing.Hope your boss or spouse doesn’t see that, eh?

For me, the unintended consequence of Google’s recent maneuvers to the end of anonymity on Google. Since we now know that they are striving, with G+, to be a one-stop identity source, and since signup for any Google product requires a Google account, which in turn creates a G+ profile, which of course, requires your real name, how could you use Blogger, Analytics, Gmail, etc. anonymously?

Let’s use this scenario. I’m a current Google account holder, and I want to create a second Gmail account, for use with an anonymous blog dealing with a highly sensitive subject. My attempt to create a second Google account is met with the creation of my G+ profile, which I can’t actually create without using my name, as I understand the TOS. Since there’s already a G+ profile out there for me, it’s not clear that I could create a second account.  So, I’m left with walking away from Google, and using other web services to do what I want to do.

Ultimately, when your business model is encouraging users to use your competitor’s products, maybe you are FUBAR?

What do you think, will Google’s policy changes make you think twice about using Google products? Or are you so far into the Borg that there’s no turning back?

Just the other day the wife and I were discussing the problem with using Flickr to host your online photos. For both of us, we paid for a pro Flickr account, and enjoy the fact that Flickr allows our photos to be discoverable by anyone, any time. I also like the ease of linking to the photos from there on the blog. Facebook really requires someone to “friend” you in order to even discover your photos.

On the other hand, most of our online interaction with family and friends takes place on Facebook now. We’d like for folks to be able to interact with our photos whether they have a Flickr account or not.

Well, in an amazing coincidence, our friend Kevin shared an app on Facebook called Goyaka Export, that allows you to simply grab a photo set from Flickr, complete with titles and descriptions, and import it as a new photo set on Facebook. Now, I can share photos in both places without going through the extra steps of typing titles and descriptions on both sites.

Even nicer is that when you import a new set, it will automatically be set to being only viewable by you. So you can import a bunch of sets, but only make them visible when you’re ready to share them, instead of overloading your friends newsfeeds.

I’ve started selecting some photo sets from Flickr to my Facebook profile. Looking forward to sharing the memories of vacations on my Timeline!

I’ve talked before about the things that show up on procedural TV shows (I’m looking at you CSI) that simply aren’t possible in the real world. Think about the number of times you’ve seen a crime drama take a crappy cell phone picture, for example, and using “technology” get a crystal clear image of a license plate 200 feet behind the subject of the photo, for example? It drives me up the wall when attorneys expect those of us who work with electronic evidence to just magically be able to do something similar.

I’ve always wondered how much of what we see on television in areas that I’m not as familiar with, is completely wrong as well.

Worse yet, as someone who’s worked in technology for awhile, it’s somewhat shocking how many incorrect “facts” show up in actual news articles about technology. Articles that complain about missing features, that aren’t missing, or reviews that seem very biased written by people with a clear agenda, etc.

The other day I was listening to a hockey game and one of the announcers started talking about the schedule having “back to back visits by teams from British Columbia”, which seemed odd to me, as Vancouver is the only BC team in the NHL that I know of. Of course, I checked the team’s schedule and saw the next two games were against those great BC outposts of Edmonton and Calgary.

The point is not to poke fun at hockey announcers and technology writers, however. As I thought more about this mistake, I started to think about how many American’s probably do think those cities are in BC, or just don’t have any idea. I’ve been a hockey fan since childhood, and following the game means I probably know more about Canada than most Americans. Given that, I knew the statement being made was incorrect. But, how many areas of knowledge can I be expert enough in to make sure I’m getting “facts” from journalists? For most of us, when we hear economic, health, geopolitical, or scientific “news” reports, we don’t have the expertise to know an inaccuracy when we hear it, or the resources to fact-check the reports. The best we can hope is that someone who does know differently will point out the inaccuracies, or the misleading uses of statistics, etc.

But what if they can’t reach most of us? Are you looking for the corrections, or just taking what your favorite news sources tells you at face value?

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday weekend!

Added as an update to this post:

As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

I’ve written many times that I’m very appreciative of tools that allow me to post to various networks, with one-step. RSS feeds, for example, are great to feed from WordPress to Twitter or Facebook to allow a new blog post to show up in multiple places without any extra effort from me.

In that same vein, one tool that isn’t really new, but that I’ve only recently started playing with is Instagram. On it’s face, it’s a neat little add-on for the iPhone camera, that allows you to take photos, apply some neat filter effects, and share those photos. It’s behind the scenes that I really see the value though. After taking a photo, and applying a creative effect, I am then presented some options to Geotag, and share across other networks.

In my own workflow, I can take a cool little photo of a place we are visiting, like walking around the campus at Furman.

Now I can push the photo out to Twitter and Facebook, letting folks know where I am, what kind of cool things I’m seeing right at that moment, and I can also store a copy of the photo along with my other online photos at Flickr.  And, I can do all this in one iPhone app, not by making visits to a bunch of different networks.

To me, having the ability to share information to the people who are interested in seeing it, wherever they happen to be, without me having to take extra time, is a huge benefit. Instagram gets that.

I’ve decided to go ahead and turn off the automatic posting of new blog posts to my personal Facebook profile. If you’re using Facebook to follow the blog, you can still do so from the blog’s page. If you’ve only been “friends” with me on Facebook to keep up with the blog, I won’t be offended if you unfriend me and only “Like” the page instead.

BTW, my Child Abuse Survivor site also has a Facebook page, and the same rules apply.

I will share posts on my personal profile from time to time, I just don’t want to share all of them when they are already on Facebook elsewhere.

Of course, this is subject to change.