Posted by Luke | Posted on 13-05-2010
Category : Internet/Tech, Security
Tags: Facebook, Policy, Privacy, Security
Facebook have been tinkering with their privacy settings on their wildly popular social network within the last couple of weeks, and out of these changes it got me thinking a little about how much has changed on this site since its early days.
After a curious look at my privacy settings page under my account today, I made the decision that it looked way to hard and time consuming to even think about starting to understand all of that! Oh and by the way you need to do yourself a favour and check it out just to see what I am talking about. Now I consider myself pretty good when it comes to understanding things like that but geez Facebook, that page has more options than a prestige car, you guys really need to simplify that for us mere mortals a little bit. I hate to think just how many people out there are uploading personal information day to day and filling their profiles with data without realising just how many third parties have access to this stuff.
If you are interested in finding out a little more about just how much Facebooks privacy has changed since it began you might like to wander on over to a blog by Matt McKeon, the post called ‘The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook‘. There is an excellent graphical representation of just how things have changed as you can see a little bit of in the image below.
And if you are into the real nitty gritty details of the changes you may like to mosey on over to the Facebook Privacy Policy blog. Where they have all the juicy details about just what they have changed.
Posted by Luke | Posted on 03-03-2010
Category : Internet/Tech
Tags: buzz, connecting, Facebook, Google, internet, social network
It has been a few weeks now since Google launched their latest addition to their online repertoire of tools, their latest addition is Buzz. Essentially Buzz is aimed squarely at getting your social networking attention, designed as a competitor to everyones long term favourite Facebook.
Buzz sounds awfully promising in what it intends to deliver, in that it is intended to be a central online place that brings together all aspects of things that you want to share with others whether its just your family or the whole world. If you want to share pictures – Buzz links up with your Flickr or Picasa web albums to ingeniously show off your photos. Same idea for videos from your YouTube account, or tweets you publish from your Twitter account.
Buzz allows you to link up all of these aspects of your social networking life and share them. I guess what it intends to do is to give a central location so that there is no need for you to post to twitter, do the usual copy and paste and re-post it for your other friends on facebook who don’t use twitter. While doing this is does away with the need for users to navigate away from Buzz as it shows videos and pictures as part of the timeline that you’re viewing.
There are a few detractors here, as with any social network it relies heavily on you’re friends also being a part of the same online community. If you have a lot of friends using Gmail already or that you communicate with through Google Talk etc you will probably find that Buzz works really well for you. However if you – like me – have become so centralised around Facebook I’m seeing may not work as well for me. Where is the fun of posting and putting content into a social network that never gets any attention from the people I want to see it.
Apart from this as one drawback I see, I have had nothing but trouble trying to get this to connect to my different sites. It just seems to lock up and freeze all the time. To add to this it just doesn’t seem to come across as being polished or elegant to use. This may just be a part of me needing to get connected with more people on the service, or it could also be that I’m so used to using Facebook now that I need to re-train my brain.
So it may just be me but it seems to be a little under-ripe, and perhaps in time it will mature and become more of a useful service for me. However, while I’m willing to sign up and give it a go I just don’t know whether it is going to be a game changer for me. If you have any suggestions for getting more out of Buzz or have opinions one way or the other about the service feel free to leave a comment and let us all know what you think.
Posted by Luke | Posted on 18-08-2009
Category : apple, iPhone
Tags: apple, Applications, Facebook, iphone 3.0
Macworld.com.au today reported that an update to the Facbook app for the iPhone has been submitted to Apple. I was wondering how much longer it would be until an update was to be done as there have been quite a number of changes and upgrades to facebook since the last update to the iPhone app.
The update is set to give a number of new features unique to the 3.0 software update, the most notable is the capability for 3GS users to shoot and upload videos directly to your facebook account. There’s added functionality giving you the ability to create photo albums, it will save text that you are typing incase you’re interrupted by a text or phone call. The update also refreshes the design of the app to better reflect the recent changes in facebook’s overall design. It would also seem that there have been upgrades to the overall stability of the app, the developer was quoted to say “Everything that used to scroll slowly now scrolls like butter.”
Overall even though it’s just an update I’m looking forward to the update as it is one of my most frequently used apps on my iPhone.
There is one thing that continues to irritate me, especially given the day and age we live in and the technology we all have available to us, it’s the fact that so many businesses maintain ignorant to the benefits of having a presence on the web.
I come accross it all the time, a big portion of where I do my information search before making a purchase decision is on the Internet. Because of this I find it really frustrating when businesses either have absolutely no presence on the web or they have a very poor website with so little information they needn’t have bothered.
I really feel that as the younger generations such as Gen Y and the up and coming Gen Z’s become more and more prominent in the market place if businesses want to keep attracting these kind of people they will have to get their act together. I understand that to have a fully fledged website is sometimes very expensive if you don’t have the knowledge of how to build one yourself, but what about all of these great free alternatives?!? Twitter, Facebook or any free kind of blogging software, or very inexpensive solutions like Squarespace which allow you to easily build very pro looking pages with very little hassle!
It just dumbfounds me that these business owners or managers are willing to let opportunities just go past and miss out on making that extra all important dollar just because they couldn’t be bothered to spend a little time in building a place for themselves on the internet.
