Social media security

In the past week, Burger King and Jeep had their Twitter accounts hacked.  It looked pretty silly to lose control over their official Twitter handle.  Seeing some prankster's tweets on their timeline gave us something to talk about.  But in the end, it's something that could have happened to anyone.

We all know the right thing to do to avoid getting our accounts hacked.  Randomize our password, change our password a few times a year, and don't use the same password for multiple sites.  These are all well known best practices.  But who proactively changes the passwords without being prompted by the site?  Even when we are forced to change our password, we often have trouble coming up with a difficult-to-guess password because we all have too many passwords to remember already.

Who knows what to do with too much data?

Continuing the thought from yesterday.  I wrote about how too-much-data (TMD) problem is creating a new challenges for social network users of filtering out signals from the noises.  Although it's a partly self-inflicted problem, because of difficulties with not knowing what to filter out ahead of time, there are opportunities for creating solutions around solving the TMD problem.

There are three user stories that I see:

Decentralized social network

I find many content from the web.  Some I get from well known hi-tech news sites like TechCrunch, All Things D, Business Insider, etc.  Others I discover directly from the source, that is, individual bloggers.

Reading blogger's writing is like peeking into their personal journals.  They all come in different styles, unique perspectives and a lot of passion about the subject.  That's what makes reading blog entry so much more intimate and engaging.  You can almost hear the writer's breathing as you read through the text.

As I read more and more of these, I started running into a problem.  The trouble is that there is no easy way to keep track of these interesting bloggers.  There are a few interesting blogs that I keep coming back to, which I tend to remember by the Google auto-complete feature.  But there are equally many blogs that I visit that I wish I had a time and energy to thread in a meaningful way.  Random inspiration tends to happen when you are least expecting.  It would be nice to keep them in an organized manner.

Many Agent Smiths on social media

Do you remember agent Smith from the Matrix?  In the movie, Agent Smith has a special power to hack the Matrix and turn anyone into a carbon copy of himself.  In effect, he is present wherever any one is present, and can monitor people at will.

Source: http://ireporters.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/smiths.jpg

As improbable as it may have sounded in 1999 when the movie Matrix was released, we are effectively surrounded Agent Smith when we walk down any city street.  Thanks to cellphone cameras and Facebook, we are now living in an era where anything that you do in presence of others can be recorded and posted on social media site.

App.net is growing up to be a platform

I haven't been paying much attention since I signed up for App.net access several weeks ago.  But when I logged back on to the network, I was pleasantly surprised that it had the application directory service called App.net Directory.

It already had about a couple of dozen applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, PC and even Windows phone.  It's great to see that App.net is living up to its original promise of becoming a truly open social streaming platform for all application developers.

Source: https://directory.app.net/

Tent is open subscription protocol

Let's say you are a Facebook user.  You have a bunch of friends that you hang out with on Facebook.  When you wanted to reach someone, you make a post.  All your friends could see and comment on the post.  Everything was cool.

Then you discovered Twitter.  It was all about posting short updates.  It let you follow anyone and be followed by anyone.  You came to appreciate that Twitter is all about putting on public persona on display.  Twitter was useful on its own.

But when the time came to send a message to everyone that you connected on Facebook and Twitter, you realized that it's not like webmail.  You couldn't send a message from Facebook and expect Twitter followers to receive and respond.  Well, there are ways now, but no easy way available right on the Facebook website.

Three questions to consider when building cross network utility

After reading Fred Wilson's post Cross Network Utility and Networks, I spent a few minutes thinking about what makes a social network not a cross network utility.  This post resonated with me because I have been working on cross network utility.  When we started, it seemed clear to me that we were not in business of building a new social network.  But as I started drilling in deeper into how to make our service more compelling, I found it difficult to just focus on building cross network utility and say no to creating a new social network.

I think the reason is a simple one.  If a cross network utility is serving a niche user segment, users want to share ideas and data with each other in a way that benefits everyone.  In other words, users see the win-win situation from collaborating with others.

One way to solve this problem is not
to create social profile on all social networks
(Image from justbeingseriouslysocial.com)

When users are logging in to a site and the site is closely integrated with social networks (such as cross network utility), they expect to share information, send messages and leave comments for their group members to see within the site, not in other social networks that it integrates with.

This makes perfect sense when you break down the reasons of why anyone might use a new site.  When user signs up for a new site, there are three main reasons why users decide to become a fan of the site.

Social network to social media

LinkedIn started out as professional networking site.  It was a networking site for sure, but it did not have traffic that members would be excited about.  It was meant for sharing your resume as Profile and keep in touch with your colleagues from earlier gigs.

When Facebook first came along, it was also a virtual Profile browsing site.  It had bunch of photos and people create their profiles.  It was meant for sharing photos and let others comment on who has the coolest photo on her profile.

Only after Facebook introduced news feed and Twitter came along, then it started becoming social network.  People started connecting with friends that they knew, and it created huge network effect for sharing information.  In order to see what someone else is sharing, you have to be on Facebook or Twitter to see what's going on.  Real social network began.

List of social networks.
Wait.  Where is Facebook on this picture?
Obviously it's not drawn by user base...

Will social network federate?

There are a few horror stories on developing apps on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn's public API.  Among them Dalton Caldwell's recent experience dealing with Facebook has been making Hacker News headlines.  Caldwell wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and posted it on his blog after he has been advised to either join Facebook or stop using Facebook Open API.  Caldwell created an app that looked similar to Facebook App Center using API, and he believed that Facebook changed their tactic from supporting his efforts to cutting his access off to his project unless he joins Facebook on acqui-hire term.

This story reminded me of the question that I posed to myself earlier: Will social network like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn federate to create network of social networks?

Dark side of social network

Social network has brought many positive changes.  But it also brought new challenges.  As more and more people use smartphone to access social networks (some even carry their phones to their beds), keeping up with all the news and updates from friends around you is turning out to be more harm than good in some instances.

July 16th edition of Newsweek had an interesting article on how connection addiction is rewiring our brains.  The article described how many of us are getting addicted to immediate reactions and constantly staying connected.  Because we are rewarded by receiving quick comments or likes and chatting on virtual social network, our plastic brain is changing to adopt to the new environment.  We are training ourselves to be constantly distracted and incapable to think deeply on one subject.


It's especially worrisome that our kids are getting exposed to social network and smartphones at such a young age.  They are more vulnerable to internet addiction including social network.  As first generation who are growing up on these technologies, no one really knows how the social network is shaping their brain development.

Digg got sold for $500K

Digg just got sold for $500K.  It is a disappointing exit for once a rising star of social news sites.  Digg has raised $45 million from who's-who among VC investors, including Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen.

Natural question is why.

Circa 2006.  Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.
Rumor has it that Google once offered $200 for Digg.

What comes after Facebook IPO?

While I was reading today's Wall Street Journal coverage of Facebook IPO, I started to think about what might be coming up for social networks after Facebook IPO.  If we were to make some broad prediction of social network trends, what would they be?

As Sheryl Sandberg outlined three clear trends, I think there are quite clear trends that will accelerate into post Facebook IPO era.  Here is what I see happening.

Social network definition revisited

Recently I started to think about the question: what makes social network work?  What is sitting at the core of social network that makes it different from other types of networks?  What is the basis of all social networks?

I started to wonder about this question because I think knowing the core essence will help me understand where the focus will be to continue its adoption and predict what will come out of social network as the next trend.

Email vs Social Network: Differences

The other day I blogged about similarities between email and Social Network. I talked about how Social Network might evolve in future looking at how email has evolved. In today's blog, I want to talk about the differences between them, and where the future may look like for these two different communication mediums.

There are several differences between email and Social Network (again, I'm using capitalized Social Network to mean social Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoint, etc.).

Email vs Social Network: Similarities

Today I had a lively discussion about the evolution of social network and where it's all heading with our executive team. During the discussion, one question that kept coming up on my mind was the similarities and dissimilarities between how email and Social Network have been evolved and their future (I use capitalized Social Network because I'm talking about Web 2.0 sites that are categorized as social media or social collaboration sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoints, etc.).

How To Bootstrap Your New Social Network

What Can We Learn From Facebook and
Disappointing Google Wave and Buzz?

These days I seem to hear new social networking sites launching every other day: Social classified ads site Neezz.com, social site for college students CollegeOnly (I touched on them in my earlier blog), social group site The Fridge, open source privacy-sensitive social network package Diaspora, personal network site Path, etc. If you look at location-based social network (LBSN) only, there are dozens of them starting out following initial success of Foursquare. It seems like every website is either thinking about starting up a new social networking site or incorporating social networking feature into existing site.

This got me wondering. Is there any lesson that we could draw from failed social network attempt, such as Google Wave and Google Buzz? What strategies can we imitate from Facebook and LinkedIn's success? What should be the strategy for new social networking site to bootstrap themselves?