Tag: Online social networking

Tonight I Was Chatty

I discovered livestream.com this afternoon. By this evening I was live streaming! It was a good opportunity to interact a little with my viewers.

I discovered livestream.com this afternoon. By this evening I was live streaming! It was a good opportunity to interact with my viewers.

I liked livestream’s control room type app a lot. It let me stream my webcam and switch back-and-forth between it and my computer’s screen. That allowed me to show webpages and photos to illustrate my points.

What I didn’t like was the app crashing halfway through my chat!

Because I’m new and haven’t yet been verified by livestream I was limited to 50 participants. My quota was quickly filled. Wow! Thanks.

I have jumped through livestream’s hoops and hope to have unlimited capacity soon.

The response on Facebook and Twitter was positive. I will be back.

The Nigerian Scams Come To Facebook Email

If Facebook is going to get into messaging in a big way as they said last week they need to stop these scams before they hit my inbox. The legacy email providers have already learned how.

I got a Facebook email from Jonas Ugwudekede today. Well, that’s what the return address said. The email was ‘signed’ by Kyrian Madunagu and included a ‘real world’ email link with yet another name. It makes no difference. Most likely none is the real name of the person who sent it.

Though the email offers $40,000,000 the sender really wants to extract cash from me. It’s a ‘419’ or advanced fee scam. Ground zero for these is assumed to be Nigeria. The scam itself is actually older than the Internet! These things used to come via snail mail.

This is the first time I’ve gotten a ‘419’ via Facebook.

To the scammer knowing my Facebook name is more valuable than knowing my regular email address. Facebook has some personal information and links to my friends you can’t easily get elsewhere.

If Facebook is going to get into messaging in a big way as they said last week they need to stop these scams before they hit my inbox. The legacy email providers have already learned how. For Facebook to have any credibility they’ve got to step up too… right now.

It’s Not That I Don’t Trust Facebook… OK, I Don’t

I’m not talking about posts in bad taste, but scams and links to viruses which pop up on my wall like dandelions in the spring! Facebook seems slow in stopping these

Facebook announced their new messaging plan yesterday. On the face of it it sounds great. Unified messaging without regard to platform.

That’s my clumsy way of saying what Facebook’s Joel Seligstein wrote:

Today I’m excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message.

Great, except I don’t trust Facebook.

I think Facebook does a terrible job of policing what its members post. I’m not talking about posts in bad taste, but scams and links to viruses which pop up on my wall like dandelions in the spring! Facebook seems slow in stopping these. With Facebook mail that problem will only get worse.

Facebook also drops the ball in policing the apps that run on its platform. Clicking a Facebook link shouldn’t lead to a scam, but it often does.

Beyond that Facebook has played fast-and-loose with privacy. Their money is made by selling your eyeballs! You are not Facebook’s customer and your concerns will always fall behind those who send cash Facebook’s way.

With a half billion members Facebook could become the Internet equivalent of too big to fail! We might be forced to put up with their shortcomings.

At the moment I will look warily at making Facebook the gatekeeper for my messages.

This Could Kill Facebook

In both cases my ‘friends’ were making mass mailings without regard to whether their product or client’s product was worthwhile to me. This irks me.

I had to block two Facebook friends this afternoon. It seems they were friending me on behalf of their business so they could send commercial email. Because of Facebook’s inherent friend-to-friend trust there’s not the same kind of spam filtering you find on more traditional email.

In both cases my ‘friends’ were making mass mailings without regard to whether their product or client’s product was worthwhile to me. This irks me.

As it is I already ignore friend requests from businesses. Businesses shouldn’t have personal accounts. They do. This seems to be poorly policed by Facebook. Maybe it’s not policed at all.

When Facebook becomes more pain than fun it will disappear. I will miss stalking your photos.

Here Comes The Spam

Since the bog has been up with Wordpress (under 24 hours and only now beginning to be seen by Google) I’ve gotten 46 comments. 41 were spam!

While setting up this new iteration of the blog I made a decision–all my older entries would again be open for comments. A few years ago faced with a plethora of blog spam comments were shut off after a week or two.

You know what spam is, but blog spam? It’s much more insidious!

Did you create your own blog or did a program do it? Could you please respond? 18 – Leila Caracci

Looks harmless, right? Except Leila’s email address says she’s GailWoolfolk@aol.com. There’s more.

My blog’s comment form allows you to enter a website address. Leila/Gail has attached MLBH0TD0G.TK (I have sanitized the site by substituting zeros). There lies the rub.

If that comment had gotten posted, accompanied by that URL, the named website would get a little rub of my Google glory. It would rank a tiny bit higher in searches. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of sites and the effect can become enormous.

I would have spotted this on my own, but WordPress comes with Akismet, a filter which performs the job silently and very well.

This blog is great. How did you come up witht he idea? 6 3 4

That’s another one appealing to my ego. Notice the random numbers at the end to try and throw off filtering. It didn’t work.

Great site! Your writing is so fresh compared to most other bloggers. Thanks for writing when you get the chance to, I’ll be sure to keep visiting!

That’s another with a non-matching email/name combo. The linked website soft sells French Press coffee makers with an affiliate link to Amazon. These folks are resourceful.

Any time anyone has something of value others want a piece of it, like my Google karma. What the Internet does is make tiny inconsequential pieces easy to aggregate. I would guess getting many Geoff’s to post your URL produces significant income for little effort!

Since the bog has been up with WordPress (under 24 hours and only now beginning to be seen by Google) I’ve gotten 46 comments. 41 were spam!

As long as Akismet holds its ground I’ll keep everything open. I am only marginally optimistic.