My Thoughts On Social Media

I posted a few days ago on FriendFeed about wanting to get more social with my bookmarking. I primarily was referring to using all the features of Diigo to their full extent. One of which is the ability to comment on bookmarks. Hutch Carpenter recently commented on some of my Diigo bookmarks. This is what partially spurred this experiment. I rarely take part in the social aspect of commenting on bookmarks on Diigo or any of the other bookmarking websites. With the advent of bookmarking toolbars and browser plugins, one never has to actually go to the services website to collaborate on there latest finds. For most of us, this is fine as we use these services as link repositories, and feel no need to converse about our bookmarks.

Having the ability to share bookmarks on FriendFeed has truly put the social back into social bookmarking. To some, the true definition of social bookmarking is not only the opportunity to contribute, but to have the opportunity to comment and converse.I say to to each their own. Use social bookmarking as you see fit, at least your using it to suit a purpose. This is what makes FriendFeed such an invaluable tool for social bookmarking.

The concept of this experiment into social bookmarking, discovery and conversation is similar to the one I did in June. This time, instead of sharing Google reader feeds, I created a room for the sharing of bookmarks only. This is a focus room, group open to anyone who wants to participate. This is a group where you and I can focus in on other members’ bookmarks. A random assortment of bookmarks where you never know what you will find. Bookmarks are often considered quality content, pertaining to whatever the subject matter may be. It should be interesting to see what is shared in this room. Bookmarks are very telling of a person’s mindset, education, and interests. Please feel free to contribute, converse, collaborate in this social bookmarking profiling experiment with me.

To contribute, add your your bookmarking rss feed to the comments on this blog, or on the FriendFeed thread. Bookmark link feeds can be from Delicious, Diggo or any bookmark service that gives you an rss feed of your links.

The Share your bookmarks FriendFeed room is located here.

I hope to collaborate with Yuvi at some point for an in depth statistical analysis of the data.

Created by Ray Grieselhuber, Gridjit uses the FriendFeed & Twitter API extensively to create an interactive social portal home page.  It visually organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter time lines into columns. It spreads out your time line by user, and shows that users’ most recent posts, in arrangeable blocks, distributed vertically across the grid.

This could be your new home page, social portal.

Gridjit Features:

• Content streams displayed in three vertical columns as opposed to one vertical column.
• Visualization of your conversations on a clean layout, with arrangeable blocks of content.
• Displays of the latest messages according to user, instead of in chronological order.
• Ability to like, comment and post directly to FriendFeed & Twitter.
• Drill through other people’s view on the web by clicking on their usernames and the people they “@” tag

Grid of people I currently follow on FriendFeed.

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This grid consists of the current content I’m sharing on FriendFeed.

In addition to liking and commenting, you can post directly to FriendFeed and Twitter without ever leaving the Gridjit portal

Gridjit is currently in the private alpha stage. With that being said, the services and  feature set is relatively small. I’m sure it will go grow in time. The site looks promising, and it will be very interesting watching how it evolves.

Request an invite code by visting Gridjit and submitting your email address.

In the quest towards becoming early adapters, we often sign up for anything and everything.  It seems every other day there are new services launching. Most of us feel we need to stake an early claim within that service just in case the it actually takes off. While a few make it, the majority fade away into web 2.0 oblivion.

It has become a requirement to establish an account on some of these services. It helps you further extend your personal brand, and it also gives you more visibility in the search engines. These are just two solid reasons. There is nothing to lose by establishing an account with all of these services, and everything to gain. At the very least, think of these sites as micro blogrolls. The profiles you establish with all of your correlating friends and your links to all of your web 2.0 services, is essentially what I call “passport blogrolling.” Most of these services only allow for one link, which is usually your homepage url. Having more link placement is great, but I’m just fine with having one solid link back to whatever my brand might be. From a marketing perspective, services that do not allow for some sort of profile creation with outbound links should be avoided.

I’m usually a sucker for any new shiny social media toy. I will usually sign up for anything with a web2.0 name and functionality. However, the repetitive task of finding your friends from the various social networking sites and adding them yet again to another new shiny service begins. Until OpenSocial is adapted and widely used, it’s not exactly an easy task finding all those friends spread across multiple networks. The lack of interoperability between the social networks, makes me even less inclined to spend the time searching for those friends. The ability to find and add friends via address lists from email accounts has become useless. I do not have the email address of more then half the people I interact with online.The quickest way I have found for finding my existing friends from sites such as FriendFeed, is to look for a popular friend and early adapter such as Louis Gray. Through his profile I can always find a good core of our mutual friends and begin to add them to my passport profile. There are a few hundred or so friends I can not locate. This is why now, more then ever, I will continue to network and invest my time in only one or two sites, and/or applications in their respective social spaces. Most of these new shiny toys in the end, end up becoming only shiny badges for blog sidebars.

I am always on the search for the latest and greatest social media applications. I am often too quick to sign up for a service based solely on hype. Perhaps most of us technophiles are an easy sell. Mention the word “beta” and you have a new instant subscriber, no questions asked. Whether or not I stick around with the service is a different story. Most of the beta applications and sites I sign up for are just for establishing a presence on that network. Often these sites will lack innovation, and never attract an active user base. Often these services stay in beta. They usually die a silent slow web 2.0 death. The ones that pull ahead and start to establish themselves will  continue to receive my support. An example of this is Toluu.

What is Streamulo.us?

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Quite simply put, Streamulo.us, which is currently in private pre-alpha (omega?) testing, is the aggregator for all your aggregators. It is the lifestream for your lifestreams. It’s the…ok, ok, you get it. It’s pretty darn amazing.

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Within a few hours it took on a life of it’s own. It was shared, bookmarked and discussed throughout FriendFeed and Twitter. Daniel took it a step further, adding an invite form! This was for all you early adapters to signup for “pre-alpha testing.”

Prominent blogger, Jennifer Van Grove was skeptical at first and nearly fell for it. Justin Korn fell for it as well and realized shorty after that something was not kosher. Hao Chen was blinded, but he quickly realized that something was not kosher. I must say thank you to Hao Chen for being a good sport, and because he also coined the saying ” I’ve been shiny-object-rolled.”

While this was a very interesting insight into the power of social media, it shows that a majority of us are always searching for that next new shiny toy. We all to often get caught up in the hype, and will believe anything that’s thrown at us with little or no source checking. Some times we need to sit back and take things in, let them marinate a bit, before rushing to be on the front lines.

Last week I decided to stray from the herd on FriendFeed. My mission was to spend five days getting to know the people that I follow better. For five days I only commented, liked and shared content of individuals in my member circle. For the most part the experiment was a success. My mistake was only doing this for 5 days. In actuality I should of did it for 30 days. This would of exposed me to more members in my circle who are not active on FriendFeed every day. Five days limited me to only those who were on FF at the same time as me. Thirty days would have given me a broader experience.

It was an interesting five days. The first day was the most challenging. I spent the night before loading a fresh new Google reader account. This was filled with 80 rss feeds from members that are subscribed to me. These feeds are from members who I seldom interact or engage with on FriendFeed. The non stop, flowing river on FriendFeed is partly to blame.  The rest is due to their low activity on FriendFeed, or activities that simply do not interest me, such as streams of twitter or britekite broadcasts. I figured 80 blogs was enough to supplement my social consumption for 5 days. The problem I often ran into was finding new content. The majority of blogs were not regularly updated for days, even months. I’m partly to blame. I should have clearly stated I was looking for blogs with a higher update frequency. I often had to resort back to my, most recently analyzed trusted Google Reader to fill the void. That was easy because the majority of the content I already share on a daily basis comes from members that are in my member circle such as, Louis Gray, Steve Hodson, Corvida to name just a few.

Within the time frame I established of five days, I allowed myself to steer away from the herd, and roam into uncharted areas. I dug deep into this focus group of blogs. The Discovery phase was the fun part. I often found myself looking through pages and archives to find the gold nuggets I was looking for. The nugget had to shine or at the very least spark some sort of interest, and make a connection with me. I ended up finding and learning some great things about the people I follow, as much as one can through a blog or FriendFeed. Michael Nielsen explained to me, Why the world needs quantum mechanics. Bill Sodeman wrote on how to Fix the DNS security hole with OpenDNS. Andy Brudtkuhl had his Twitter account deleted for no apparent reason. Daynah Introduced me to the creative world of scrap booking. I also learned Mona has an obsession with bacon. These are just a few of the examples that I otherwise would not have discovered, and most likely would have floated by me in the river.

Discovering new blogs and content was one aspect of it. On FriendFeed I actively looked for members in my circles online, and took part in as many conversations as possible. My liking of content was more selective, and I geared it towards the members in my circle that are often overlooked. It’s amazing how much great content is hidden on feeds that are seldom seen on FriendFeed. I tried as much as possible to shine some light on these hidden treasures. Sharing through Google reader and using the FriendFeed Bookmarklet helped shine some light on these feeds. The power of foaf also works in mysterious ways. For the five days I turned off foaf, this slowed the river down for me, allowing me to focus on my member circle with more clarity and less disruption.

Overall for the 5 days it was a success. My level of engagement on FriendFeed was more enlightened and fulfilling. I also have found a few silent members that I need to make sure I follow a little more closely. If anything has come out of this little experiment, it’s the new faces that now appear on my radar. Not just a one time fly by anymore, but they now have become reoccurring blips on my screen.

Five days has given me limited results. I plan on keeping up with this experiment for at least 30 days for a more thorough analysis. Stay tuned.

This idea was inspired from this post by J. Phil of scribkin.com. The idea is simple, and I think will be very rewarding.

When I first joined FreindFeed in February, it was easy to maintain a normal balance of my friends and their activities. This was easy because my number of subscriptions was low. Five months later, over 330+ people are subscribed to me, and I have reciprocated back to about the same number. The core group of people I follow are great. They provide tremendous value to me with the content and conversations they create, contribute and participate in. I often find myself on FriendFeed sticking to and staying close to the herd I follow. While there is nothing wrong with this, it’s coming at an expense which is isolation.

I feel like I have isolated myself and a lot of subscribers by sticking to the herd. I very often will visit the blogs, like content, comment or share the content of people who are newly subscribed to me. This has become a nearly impossible task, to keep up with over 330+subscriptions. Google reader helped tremendously in this task when my member circle and rss feed count was lower. I currently have about 300+ feeds in Google reader & Toluu alone. In some respect it has become what I feared the most, quantity and not quality. The time has come for me to broaden my horizons on FriendFeed and stray from the pack.

This will last for 5 days beginning midnight tonight 7/29.

The Objective: To participate only in my circle of 330 friends. Sorry foafs. This entails only liking and commenting on content from members that are subscribed to me. Now the noticeable change will be in the content I share via Google reader, and the content I post via bookmarking using Diigo and the Friendfeed bookmarklet. The content I share must come from a members blog that is subscribed to me on Friendfeed. The usual content from the trusted sources such as Duncan Riley, Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter, Steve Hodson and Sarah Parez will still be shared on my feed for the next 5 days. Not only because I like their writing, but more importantly because they are subscribed to me on Friendfeed and part of my member circle. Begining tommorow and lasting 5 days, I will actively share content from a majority of members blogs I have never seen, much less visited. I will have the same level of engagement with my conversations, comments and liking.

I have set up a new Google Reader account for this purpose. This account is only for member blogs that are subscribed to me. Going through 330+ members profile is not feasible, so I started this thread on FriendFeed asking members in my circle to post their blogs. If you subscribe to me and publish a blog, please list it in this thread.

The Goal: To broaden my horizons and to truly get to know the people that follow me better. I hope after 5 days, my level of engagement on FriendFeed will be more enriched and fufilling. I will post a follow up once the 5 days are over.

One of my core responsibilities as a system admin is preventing credit card fraud on our network. I’m basically the primary gatekeeper who determines the validity and legitimacy of all new online orders. With the large amount of business we do on a daily basis, it’s impossible to completely eliminate credit card fraud. Even with the help of filters and automated systems, inevitably fraud gets through. I am realistic about the situation, all I can do is minimize, deter and stay one step ahead of them.

It’s a daunting task. These fraudsters are mostly international.  They often work in organized groups and are constantly adapting their tactics and testing our systems. These probes of our security, at the front door and inside are non stop. This continues around the clock, 365 days a year.

The company I work for  has been in the industry for over 10 years. The name is well known and established. The down side to that is the scammers caught on long ago, and word got around that we were the one stop shop for hosting accounts. That was 1997, fast forward to today and things have changed drastically. We have improved our systems, the cyber criminals have improved theirs. They are and always will be one step ahead of us. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse.  In 1997 the cyber criminals were mainly reeking havoc on networks by sending spam, and launching DDoS attacks. The Internet was young then and scammers were just learning to take advantage of this new medium.

It did not take them long, and we now have a cesspool of fraud on the Internet. What adds to the cesspool of fraud is globalization.

The majority of these cyber criminals are from, Africa, Romania, Russia, South East Asia. These global criminals often come from poverty and third world countries. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain, to the tune of $49.3 billion in 2007 in the United States for identity theft alone. Most of these countries simply don’t have the man power nor funding to arrest these cyber thugs. It certainly is not a priority for them or the FBI.

To understand a cyber criminals mind, you must think like them, essentially almost become one of them.  This is how I play the game everyday. Unfortunately at this point in the game, it’s often at some unknowingly random individuals expense. This persons credit card number, possibly social security number, drivers license info is floating around the net, being sold or traded in IRC rooms for instance. I often use social networking sites such as Friendster and Myspace as a tool for learning who our enemies are, their tactics, strengths and weaknesses. I have tracked a few individuals and groups down this way, I assume an alias and gain trust within there organizations. I use the necessary tools and translation software to extract what information of value I need. I randomly monitor IRC for activity.  IRC is social networking for cyber criminals.  Channels or rooms are used routinely to buy and sell breached consumer data. This data ranges from credit card numbers with or with out cvv2, social security numbers, bank account numbers and so forth.

The scammer is now armed with a fresh credit card. Their shopping spree might start off buying Skype credits and maybe some fresh Itunes. They then come to us to start their fraudulent activities off for the day. They are usually armed with numerous stolen credit cards, including cvv2, full name, billing address, telephone etc. In some cases they take over email accounts, or create new ones assuming the persons identity along with email passwords and personal information.  The smarter and more sophisticated criminals almost go undetected, these are the true challenge for me. The majority of the cyber thugs I have encountered are sloppy. They do not  attempt to use a proxy to hide their IP or use any other means to disguise themselves. They often test the system to see what will get through. The smarter ones can do it first time around, usually one or two fresh credit cards and correlating information is needed along with a good proxy.

Once they are in the door, it’s a race against time.

• Phishing
• Fraudulent escrow sites
• Fraudulent shipping sites
• Identity theft
• SQL Injection
• Spam
• DDoS attacks

This will be a continuing piece. More of the hosting underbelly will be upcoming in the days and weeks to follow. Stay tuned.

• Google reader
• Linkriver
• RSSmeme

Word of mouth offline via keywords

Michael Harris recently posted on his blog, “Should I unsubscribe from people who don’t follow me back?”

Felix, a member on FriendFeed, recently released a handy little FriendFeed script called FriendVenn.

The script tells you 3 important things:

• People who you subscribe to, and people who do not reciprocate.
• People who subscribe to you and who reciprocate.
  
• People who only subscribe to you.

In the early stages of my experience in social networking, I had very little criteria for subscriptions. You subscribed to me, and I reciprocated. Looking back, that was purely a numbers game. Nowadays I have become more selective with whom I follow on the various social networking sites. I primarily follow people with the same interests as me, whether it’s social media, applications, baseball or boxers. The underlying theme is interests and content value. What value do you bring me? What value do I bring you? Value comes in different forms. It could be the content you are sharing, content you created, or comments you have made. I will not blindly follow or follow for bragging purposes on who has the most followers. I would rather have quality then quantity when it comes to my virtual friends and networks.

The chart above reiterates that fact. There are people who do not reciprocate, and I am totally fine with that. Why? Because they bring to me consistent quality content. Will they reciprocate back? Probably not, if they have not done so by now. Quality speaks for itself and should require no reciprocation. If I lived by the 2 way reciprocation law, I would unsubscribe from them, and I still would be able see their content through FOAF’S. On Friendfeed, when I subscribe to someone, I don’t need or expect instant reciprocation,or gratification. It’s a nice feeling, but not a requirement. I subscribed to Louis Gray shortly after discovering Friendfeed in February. It was 2+ months later that Louis reciprocated back. Louis did not blindly follow me back, It took time for him to recognize quality and value, and then reciprocate. The only way to get earned reciprocation is by contribution. I try to contribute quality topic related content , via blog posts, shared content, comments, likes, bookmarks and other related media as often as I can.

This leads me to the followability factor in social networking. What criteria prompts you to subscribe or follow a member?

• Affiliations
• Quality of content
• Quality of conversations
• Similar interests
• Popularity
• Recommendations
• Networking
  

Are you expecting reciprocation?

Related reads:

The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand