Social Networking’s Invasion of Privacy Just Got a Whole Lot Messier

Today, computer software giant Microsoft announced that their latest version of MS-Office will integrate seamlessly with Facebook.

Previous versions of the world’s most popular set of applications – which include Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint – have allowed users to connect to LinkedIn using a plug-in called MS-Outlook Social Connector. The latest version of MS-Office not only has this plug-in built directly into the interface, it pulls far more information from Facebook than it did from LinkedIn.

From pulling Facebook photos into MS-Outlook, so now you’ll know what the other person you are emailing looks like, to revealing all their status updates, news feeds, even their wall posts – so you not only know what they like and are up too, but who their friends are, and what their friends like and are up too – all of this – and more is now publicly available to anyone you email using MS-Outlook, or any of the other MS-Office applications.

Cool sounding at first, but then think about all the personal information being shared. Do you really want your boss to see the drunken photos of you that you posted after celebrating your last birthday?

What if you are looking for work – do you want potential employers to see you vent off your frustrations about your current or past employer thanks to having access to your newsfeed and status updates?

Think you are very social network savvy, and you are extremely cautious about what you post on Facebook?

Doesn’t matter – if a friend posts something which you just might not want the whole world to know, too damn bad – because wall posts and news feeds are now shown directly in MS-Outlook.

So that video of you doing an air guitar rendition of Stairway to Heaven in your underwear that your girlfriend posted on her Facebook, could now be playing on a colleagues computer. Worse – that colleague can simply forward the email to everyone in your office so even your coworkers without Facebook accounts will see you dancing in your undies.

Social networking has come a long way in a very short time. It wasn’t all that long ago that unless you actually knew someone personally, you’d never know that person at all.

But thanks to the information powerhouse of the Internet, just type a name into a search engine, and you can see what they look like, who they work for, their kids names, the kind of car they drive, and even some of their silly photos from real-world social activities.

And thanks to Microsoft’s new and more direct integration of Facebook – the most popular social networking site – you don’t even have to search for the information. It’ll just appear right in your MS-Outlook inbox.

Not that social networking is all bad. Knowing more about a client may earn you brownie points and make your job easier.

If you discover that a hard to read client has just come back from a business trip in San Francisco, for example, you could use that as an opening to try and break the ice. Seeing photos of that client, with a beautiful woman wrapped around him while on that trip may prompt you to ask about his wife and their shared experiences on that trip, only to find out, that he didn’t take his wife on that “business” trip.

Uh-oh.

Awkward.

Thanks social networking!

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Want to Get Laid? There’s An App for That

How far would you push the bounds of technology to get what you want? Would you go so far as to use it to select a sexually compatible partner?

Today, MEDL Mobile released an application for Apple’s iPhone to assist men and women evaluate prospective sexual partners.

Free for the first two weeks, the application – or “app” in Apple lingo – let’s you create a sexual profile based on six categories of likes, dislikes, positions, fetishes and kinks, and then compares them to other user profiles using the same application.

The application connects to other iPhones using the BUMP app, which allows iPhone users to exchange contact information by “bumping” phones.

Don’t worry about airing out your dirty laundry to complete strangers – the application keeps your preferences private, it only shares whether or not the pairing is a good sexual match, leaving you to still make the first move. Though there is an option to post the number of BUMPS you’ve participated in to social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, and you can always share your success or failure stories online.

In our ever increasingly techno-dependent world, this was just bound to happen – an application which helps the one-night stand.

Although sexual attraction forms the basis for many first and second glances, it can never replace a good meal and fine conversation to really get to know someone. So if you’re looking for applications which will help you find that long-term soul mate, this isn’t the “app” for you.

However, if you’re looking for an easy way to break the ice with someone who shares the same sexual preferences you do, you may just get lucky.

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There Just Aren’t Enough Days in the Year for Quit Facebook Day

Two Toronto, Canada men created a website to encourage the 400-million-plus users of the world’s largest social networking site to abandon it, because of privacy concerns.

Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan created the www.quitfacebookday.com website, calling for Facebook users to quit en mass today, because Facebook is too hard to use.

Oh boo hoo you.

Yes, there is a complex web of settings to go through, but all it takes is a little time and even a child could figure out how to set their settings just the way they want.

And Facebook has since resolved this issue – last week their CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes to make it easier to protect private information.

Having a day of protest for a website?

Speak of lazy protesting. Back in my day, you would have grabbed a placard, your running shoes and a megaphone, and walked a picket line.

That’s how you make a statement. Or rather did.

I think that’s what concerns me more than the 6,000 nuts that joined the Quit Facebook Day website – the lack of real social awareness thanks to technological advances like the Internet.

These days, it is all too easy to create some online site to badmouth whoever or whatever you want, without any real thought.

And what’s even worse, is millions of people can join into these causes, with just as little thought or effort as the causes creators.

SO what you end up with, are a bunch of people YELLING AND SCREAMING online for reasons which they themselves don’t fully comprehend.

All it takes is for someone with an understanding of the issues to cleverly manipulate these naive protesters, and you end up with a group of people, yelling and screaming online, for something they didn’t intend too.

Either way, it certainly raises concerns over grass roots democracies which formed the basis of our current governments, via real protests over real issues, with really intelligent, thoughtful and aware individuals that actually knew what they were protesting and why.

Many of our greatest leaders have risen from the protest movement of the 1960’s – former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau was known to cause a ruckus in his university days, even current American President Barack Obama was known to take a stand on controversial issues in his pre-political days – much as he does today. Just look President Obama’s healthcare and fiscal reforms – they are very clearly taken in part from his younger days of action.

But these days, protests are days of inaction – by asking anyone with half-a-brain to “sign” online petitions, mass email everyone they know, and even going so far as to quit using online sites.

Can’t get any more inactive than to quit.

Inaction leads to no action – it is a basic law of physics, which just so happens to work with policies and procedures just as well as it does an apple falling from a tree.

Does this mean the end of grass roots politics – and in turn – the end of real knowledge, power and good governance?

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Ensuring Your Facebook Account Doesn’t Harm You

Over the weekend, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart expressed concerns in a newspaper story about the world’s most popular social networking site, Facebook.

Last week, Facebook changed the way its estimated 400-million members could share information – most without really knowing it. The thumbs-up symbol with the innocuous “like” next to it has been a familiar and easy way for Facebook users to positively comment on a friend’s posting on the social networking site.
But as of last week, that like symbol will not be exclusive to the Facebook domain – now anyone on any partnering Internet site can click that symbol.

For Step-By-Step Instructions on How to Protect Your Private Personal Information on Facebook, scroll down to the end of this article.

At first glance, it seems pretty harmless -- if you like something on your travels through cyberspace, what’s the harm in telling your Facebook friends?

But just by clicking that thumbs-up symbol you are automatically linking your Facebook account to that participating site’s, and the next thing you know, someone you don’t know has access to information all about you – from your name, age and sex, to your hometown, even your email address, and telephone numbers, if you provided that information to Facebook when you initially joined.

“I’m very concerned about these changes,” Stoddart says in the article. “More than half-a-million developers will have access to this data.”

Stoddart goes on to explain how unlike previously, where Facebook’s policies forced developers to delete this personal information within 24-hours, the new changes allow developers, and many other partner companies participating in the new “like” program, to retain personal information indefinitely.

Unscrupulous marketers could use this personal information for any reason beyond the traditional marketing of goods and services for sale.

It could increase the amount of scams, trying to lure unsuspecting Facebook users away from their hard earned coin. We’ve all seen those annoyingly obvious emails from some long lost relative in some third-world country, trying desperately to contact us about collecting an outrageously large inheritance.
Those scams may not be so obvious if the scam artists have obtained your personal information – in fact it could look very legitimate. All the worse – you voluntarily gave these scum bags your personal private information just by using Facebook’s “like” feature.

Other malicious uses could be to blackmail you, or to harass you, forcing you to pay up just to get those you willingly and without thinking gave your personal private information too, off your back.

Not that the partner companies are all bad seeds, but that could change. Partner companies can keep your personal private information forever – even when the company changes hands, or ceases to function.

Think a disgruntled employee can cause a lot of harm? What about a disgruntled employee with yours and millions of other Facebook users addresses, phone numbers, email accounts, and other personal information.

And it isn’t just those partner companies you have to worry about, Facebook isn’t exactly harmless either.

Last year, Stoddart accused Facebook of breaching Canadian privacy laws, by holding onto personal information from deactivated accounts. After a lengthy Canadian government probe, Stoddart’s office made a series of recommendations last July, to assist the American-based company in complying with Canadian privacy laws.

Almost a year later, Facebook has not complied fully with Canadian privacy laws. The recent changes only further complicate the issue, showing that profits over privacy, it is profits that win out at Facebook.

There hasn’t been any word yet from American legislators on Facebook’s privacy rules, and until then, it is up to you to take an active role in protecting your own personal information, or else “facebook” the consequences.

How To Protect Yourself

The best way is simply NOT to click on any thumbs-up “like” icons outside of the Facebook domain(facebook.com) – if you are not on Facebook, no matter how tempting, don’t do it!

As a further way to protect yourself, you should make sure your privacy settings prohibit anyone but those you want (such as your friends) to know your likes and interests. To change these settings:

1. Log In
Login to your Facebook account as you normally do, with your email address and password.

2. Go to the Privacy Settings
From the top-right, click the Accounts drop-down menu, and then select Privacy.
The Privacy Settings options appear.

3. Go to the Privacy Settings for Profile Information
Click the very first item from the top – Profile Information.
The Privacy Settings – Profile Information page appears.

4. Change the Privacy Settings Affecting Likes and Interests
The second item from the top – Likes and Interests – displays who can access your personal profile information every time you click the thumbs-up “like” button, regardless of whether or not you are on the Facebook site. Change this setting to what you are comfortable with from the drop-down menu to the right. For interacting with your Facebook friends, select Only Friends, or for total security (and what we recommend), you can select Customize and limit this to just yourself, or to specific Facebook friends.

5. Save Your Changes and Return Home
Click on the Facebook logo at the top-left to save your changes and return you to your Facebook home page.

You should go through all your privacy settings, to make sure you aren’t sharing personal private information with anyone you don’t feel comfortable with.

Just follow step two above to get to the privacy settings, and go through every single menu, choice and option – if you can select it, and change it – do so.

The most secure options (where available) are None or No One But Me but these will seriously limit your ability to interact with anyone on Facebook. A happy middle-ground is selecting Only Friends which limits the information being shared to only those you are friends with on Facebook, but if the option is available, select Customize and specifically choose which friends or groups of friends to share the information with (this option isn’t available for all settings, though it should be).

There are also settings under the Accounts section, from the Accounts drop-down menu which also affect how your image and personal information are shared with Facebook advertisers and partners.

By limiting these settings to restrict access to your profile, you are going a long way towards protecting the most important asset you have – yourself.

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The Dire Pleas of Missed Connections

Did something I rarely do – read the “Missed Connections” section in one of those tabloid free daily papers the other day.

Had a good chuckle, wondered what kind of person would actually write these things, and how much the paper was making by charging these characters for providing the service – assuming they do.

“Missed Connections” sections are springing up in the “Classified” sections of newspapers and online sites all over the world. Essentially, people write about others they encountered during their daily journeys, but for whatever reason didn’t get a way to reconnect with that person – no

Image via Wikipedia

phone number, not even an email address to write too. They write in, hoping the exact same person they made eye contact with, or happened to talk to about the weather, reads the very same section of the very same paper or online site, and reaches out to the author.

They read like desperate attempts by stalkers trying to lure victims into their web of psycho-babble. That’s harsh – but if you strike up a conversation with a total stranger on the bus, in the park, or anywhere else, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask that person for their name and number or business card at that point in time? It certainly makes more sense than putting any chance of further meeting into the complete randomness of a “Missed Connection” in a publication which may be read by thousands – but never by the very person you want to read it.

A “Missed Connection” reads something like this:

You were walking your pet poodle through the park. We started talking, sat on the benches by the big oak tree and talked about dogs, work and cooking. I was wearing a green sweater and blue jeans, you wore a neon pink top and hat and bright red shoes. Wanted to ask you out, but too shy, dinner? Call me at . . .

Rejection is one of the hardest things to overcome – I was shy once, I ought know. But if you feel that connection upon meeting someone new, the time is in the here and the now, not the later.

It is like that saying, never cry over spilled milk – it doesn’t make any sense dwelling on the past. Next time you’ll know to make your move. In the here and now, get on with your life.

Apparently though, these “Missed Connections” work. There have been stories about people who met in the park, chatted up a storm, and then went their separate ways. But then they reconnect after one person posts a “Missed Connection,” the responds, and now they are happily married. Speak of target marketing.

Though with all the nuts placing these ads, and all the more nuts responding, makes you wonder just how many of those people who respond are really the person who the ad was meant for? And if the person who wrote the ad even cares – if the shoe fits, wear it – maybe they’ll take

Image by Stitch via Flickr

someone who is close to their intended person?

You have to be pretty desperate to take out any form of personals ad, especially in this high-tech world, where all you need is a computer and an Internet connection to instantly chat with millions of other people, just as lonely and desperate for some company.

That raises the question of safety too – desperate times call for desperate measures. Just how well can you trust a complete stranger who posts one of these ads?

Not everyone who posts a “Missed Connection” is crazy, but how do you really know the person you are calling isn’t one of the few who is?

Though without some risk taking, none of us would ever really meet in life – we’d all be too afraid to leap out of our own universes.

But if a person is desperate enough to take out an ad in a newspaper or online, begging for you to contact them, is that someone a sweet and romantic-type of person, or a stalking crazy psychopath to be avoided?

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MySpace VS Facebook War Over – MySpace Concedes Defeat

The battle to be the largest online social networking site is over with a clear winner and loser. This past Thursday (October 22), the recently anointed chief executive officer of MySpace told the Financial Times that the company is no longer competing with Facebook.

Former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta, who became MySpace’s executive officer a mere six-months ago told the newspaper “Facebook is not our competition, we’re very focused on a different space.”

Image via CrunchBase

This announcement comes as MySpace (owned by Rupert Mudoch’s NewsCorp) has taken a severe – and now fatal – beating. Just this past September, Facebook had over 58 percent of the American social network traffic, while the older, and once larger MySpace’s share crashed to a low of just 30 percent – a substantial drop from their 66 percent score a year ago, according to online research firm Hitwise.

Looking at the unique number of people using each site, again MySpace has taken its lumps. Although MySpace is still one of the most popular websites on the Internet, it averaged about 100 million unique members worldwide, the new king of social networking, Facebook has about 300 million unique users worldwide.

In the six-months since Van Natta took the helm at MySpace, the comp

Image via Wikipedia

any has slashed costs and jobs, eliminating 30 percent of their workforce. They’ve also removed the least used features, which include the weather and classified jobs sections.

MySpace has also been known to have unusual – some may say downright odd – methods for determining membership. When Jordan’s Daily – Almost! signed up for a MySpace account, and had spent over two-hours customizing and designing the page for our reader’s engagement and interaction, within a handful of hours later MySpace deleted the account, without giving any reason whatsoever.

Although this international current affairs blog wasn’t deemed worthy enough to hold membership by the MySpace administrators, one can easily find profiles on MySpace geared towards get-rich quick scams from third-world countries (such as those your junk email filter usually catches), mail order brides from Russia, prostitutes peddling sex for cash, and even one profile which appeared to be someone selling babies from China to couples who couldn’t conceive, and were turned down by adoption agencies.

MySpace executive Van Natta told the Financial Times “the engagement with our users wasn't there.”

Perhaps that’s because those running MySpace did not have a clue as

Image via Wikipedia

to who exactly their users were?

Congratulations to Facebook – a company that takes the time to explore and understand their members and their needs – and a place where Jordan’s Daily – Almost! was welcome from day one. You can check us out on the new champion of the social networking world here.

MySpace may have lost the war, but they are not gone for good. The company is changing direction and trying to reinvent itself to bec

Image via Wikipedia

ome an online music distribution site. It has recently signed agreements with Apple Computer Corp. to run its own iTunes-type of online store, using the computer company’s iLike application.

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Married Flirts Cheat While Social Networking

Regular readers of this blog no doubt follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

These social networking sites provide an invaluable way for people to stay current with their family, friends, business contacts, and personal interests.

I started using Twitter and Facebook earlier this year to prom

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

ote this blog. It is interesting to reflect on these social networking sites every so often, to see how they actually work.

Interesting study came out recently claiming there is a direct link between economic status and social network. The wealthiest and most prosperous of us are on LinkedIn, while those raking in the least amount of income use Myspace.
Facebook and Twitter were used by everyone else. Maybe it is about time I joined LinkedIn . . .

Regardless of what you make and what social networking sites you use, I’ve noticed an interesting, sad, but not surprising phenomenon on these social networking sites.

People use them to escape their personal problems – specifically, people in relationships engage in extremely flirtatious, if not downright sexually suggestive and borderline cheating, types of behavior.

To steal a phrase from American President Barack Obama – let us be clear – many use social networking sites to cheat on their partner.

While on Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook, many married women, some with kids, and some married to the same person for decades – will flirt directly with me – and other men. Naturally, many of these men – most of whom are also married, with kids, and in long-term relationships – will flirt back. I see the messages go back and forth – it’s hard NOT to read some of the highly sexually suggestive posts which appear almost immediately after the person typed them.

Image via CrunchBase

There are many people using these social networking sites like me, who aren’t married – but for those who are – which is the majority of those engaging in this form of online cheating – WOW – get a room!

I’ve seen “tweets” (instant posts on Twitter) about every sort of sexual activity imaginable – usually between two or more people who are married to anyone NOT present in the online dialogue.

Many women have sent me direct tweets, highly suggestive in nature – some directly outright telling me what they’d like to do with me. Going through my records – remember, whatever you post online, stays online forever – I’ve calculated about 75 percent of these flirtatious posts originated from married women, and more than half of those have one or more children – 64 percent to be precise.

I’m not a bad looking dude, though I’m certainly no Adonis – but out of the 150 tweets directly sent to me on average per day -- combining @jordansdaily and Direct Messages (DMs) – 75 of these are flirtatious messages from married women.

Now to be fair, I’m a professional writer that also happens to be somewhat zany, and highly imaginative. So at first when I started getting these messages, I’d send off some equally suggestive, wild post, which couldn’t ever possibly happen. I’d go off on a tangent, making insanely crazy stuff up as I went – I wa

Image via CrunchBase

s just joking around, letting my creative imagination take me and my online readers on a mental journey.

Little did I know I was fueling the fire of the sad, the lonely, and the desperate.

I check my online social networking sites every day, trying to limit my online stay to about an hour. Aside from spending all day at work sitting in front of a computer as reason enough to not want to spend all my free time at home sitting in front of one, psychologists and addiction experts tell us that an hour a day is more than enough time to enjoy the hobby, without it negatively impacting your life – and becoming a true addiction.

However, whenever I happen to check these online sites – again specifically Twitter – there these married women are. For those not on Twitter, the second you send out a response to someone, unless it is a private Direct Message (DM), everyone who is following you sees the response. Just like email, I go onto Twitter to respond to my messages, and in so doing, inadvertently alert all those married flirts that I’m online.

Literally within five-minutes or less of responding to just one or two tweets, on average I receive about five to ten new tweets from these married women.
Often I respond only somewhat joking – “you still here, you never leave” – because truthfully, some of them never have.
The online world provides an escape, a virtual world where they can forget about whatever is wrong in their real lives, and play with real people, who aren’t real to them. They get so involved in this artificial online world, it becomes the only world they want to be a part of, and so they avoid the real world at all costs.

Some of these women make no bones about their cheating ways – though they probably would never consider this cheating.

One brags about sending these flirtatious tweets while lying in bed, right next to her husband – she sends these messages from her mobile phone. She does this every night. Why her husband never asks her why she’s always texting from bed every night, or who with, probably indicates only part of the problem.

Another woman tells me she’s in the car, while her hubby drives. Another woman tells me she tweets from the kitchen on her laptop, while the husband watches his sports in the living room: “he’ll never get up, not until half-time,” she boasts as she discreetly hides in her kitchen.

If it’s not cheating, why hide? There shouldn’t be any guilt if you aren’t doing anything wrong. Though some of these women are tweeting while their husbands are right next to them – maybe they are flirting with other women online too?

These poor sad, lonely and desperate women. They really must be all of these things – and many more – else why would they seek out sexual attention from complete strangers, often while their husbands are right next to them?

If I was involved with someone and had urges to seek out others for intellectual, sexual, physical or other needs, I’d have a discussion with my partner – or just end the relationship.

It isn’t fair to the other person to constantly spend time away from that person, giving all the attention you should be more than interested in sharing with the person you are married too – instead of some stranger in another country, in some virtual online social networking site, who is really there online, but not really there in the real world. And being there in the real world is what really matters – no matter how popular social networking becomes.

Social networking sites are great for many things. Networking with colleagues, sharing your thoughts, opinions and ideas about the world (such as this blog), learning about new and interesting developments in the world around you, and even making new friends who may become great friends if you actually take the time to meet in the real world.

But social networking sites are also great at distracting us from our problems. They create virtual worlds where we can seemingly interact with others in ways we crave from those in our real lives, but just aren’t getting. And that’s really too bad, because it doesn’t solve the problems we have in the real world – it just makes them harder to confront and deal with.

And dealing with our issues in the real world is the only real way to solve them.

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The Future Now

Yesterday as I was going through my snail-mail, I came across an interesting promotional letter from my telecom provider.

They were advising me that since I subscribed to their home phone service, and digital TV service, that I was receiving a new service completely free – TV Call Waiting.

This new service will display a person’s name and number on my TV screen, as well as on my phones. The feature even allows me to send the call directly to voice-mail simply by hitting a button on my remote control.

Pretty cool tool. It could be annoying, especially if you are glued to the couch watching your favorite shows, but there still is an element of “wow” to this new technological development.

Whether you love it or hate it, the real “wow” factor comes from a little forward-looking thinking. Back in the 1990’s, there was all this talk about the convergence of communications technologies.

The first big convergence brought on by technology was the Internet and the mass media. Television, radio and newspapers were the most popular forms people around the world got their information. As the Internet developed, it became possible to watch live streaming video online, listen to live streaming audio and even to read complete newspapers online – with hyperlinks for additional information. This became known as the media convergence, and many say it sparked a death sen

Image via Wikipedia

tence to for newspapers, because it is far easier and more efficient to watch a video online, than it is to read an entire series of stories in print.

Convergence was the buzz word given to discuss the morphing of television, radio, home theatre systems, phone systems, even your kitchen appliances with computers. Futurists dreamt allowed about a world where you could call home from work, turn on the oven to start your pot roast remotely while checking your messages. Then later that day, you’d arrive home with a nice hot pot roast just waiting for you.

We’ve seen the greatest form of convergence in the mobile telecommunications market. The first cell phones were huge clunkers that often didn’t even have a signal, because cell phone technology was so new and expensive. These days, cell phones are teeny-tiny, and do more than act as phones. Most have cameras in them, some allow you to play music, others allow you to surf the net, send video messages, open Word and other MS-Office documents, you even can use a built-in GPS to tell you where you are, and how to get to where you want to be.

Smart home technology has improved over the years, but it is far from the wild dreams of the futurists back in the 1990’s. But with small technological first-steps, like my telco’s TV Call Display, we’re slowly but steadily moving closer to that automated world.

I’ve had digital cable for years, and as long as I’ve been a subscriber, you can order movies onDemand or Pay-Per-View with a click of a button. Simple point and click, and the movie begins, while the charges appear on my next cable bill.

This two-way form of communications over a cable TV connection was never possible under the older analogue system, and it opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

One day, you will be able to order products the same way you can order movies – just by pressing a button on your remote control. Imagine watching some infomercial late at night, and seeing a fantastic product that you want right then and there. All you have to do is point your remote at the cable box, click the button to order it, confirm your order by entering your PIN code, and wait for your new fangled thing to arrive in the mail.

Other cool “wow” factor technologies which we may see from these developments include – of all things – home security.

Many people have wireless home security cameras in and around their homes, and can view these cameras from anywhere in the world over the Internet. There was one incident just this past summer, where a lady called police from work, to report a break in at her home, which she was watching live over the Intern

et.

Many automated security systems will alert the police when something isn’t just right. Imagine having all the doors lock on the inside and outside – trapping the intruder until the local law enforcement agents have arrived.

But where convergence has the most impact isn’t on technology, it is on us. Convergence is affecting our socio-economic world in ways unthinkable back in the 1990’s.
Online social networking sites like Facebook an d Twitter make it possible to reconnect with long lost friends and family, or to just meet completely new people in a non-threatening way.

“Texting” has become a socially acceptable form of communications, and “sexting” (sending sexually explicit text messages) has become a big problem for parents with pre-teen and teenage kids.

You no longer have to ever go to the office, just work virtually from home, checking email and logging into the network remotely to do your work.
Smart technologies are already making their way into our lives, just not as quickly as those singing the convergence song back in the 1990’s told us they would.

Technology is constantly changing and converging with. It will be interesting in five and ten-years, looking back, to see how far forward we have come.

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Why Amber Alerts Don’t Work in Our Information Society

You’d have to be living under a large rock not to know the age we live in is the information age.

We’re all “wired” and completely connected everywhere, to everyone, all the time. From cell phones, smart phones, BlackBerrys and other mobile devices ringing at all hours of the day, to always on email, online chat sites, remote access to work and home networks, there is no escaping the world in which we live.

Television and radio broadcast useful - and more often these days useless - information all day and all night as well. And if you miss your favor

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ite broadcast, often you can catch it onDemand, or via a time shifting channel on digital cable or satellite television. Don’t have those, you may not be out of luck, with Podcasting becoming popular, you can download many shows directly to your mobile device.

With all these levels of technology, it is hard to believe that sometimes, no matter what the information, or how noble the intent of the messenger spreading that information, communications breakdown.

Take a recent case, where police in Canada’s largest province failed to issue an Amber Alert for a missing child. An Amber Alert is the new electronic buzz-term to indicate a missing or lost person, usually a child. Police issue these alerts to the media, and instantly all communications channels screech to a halt, screaming a description of who is missing, where they last were seen, who with, and contact information, in the hopes that someone seeing this will help law enforcement find the missing soul.

In big cities, major highway signs will flash the Amber Alert message, as do most major media outlets on their television, radio and Internet feeds. Print media will run the story in the next edition.

And the Internet - ah yes, the ultimate form of instant communication - becomes the equivalent of a broken telephone.

When I was a kid, I remember being amazed when I was given two Styrofoam cups tied together with string, and hearing the other person’s voice in my coffee cup.

The Internet, for all its awe and power in bringing us closer together is the high tech equivalent of those Styrofoam cups and string.

Every time an Amber Alert occurs, people everywhere take it upon themselves to share this information with their online social networks. People, completely unattached to the actual event, repeat the Amber Alert message to their social networks.

Image by bobster855 via Flickr

In theory, the more people who receive the message, the better the chances of a missing person being found.

But as with everything online, the more removed someone is from the actual events as they unfold, the more garbled the message, until very little of the original message exists.

It is all too easy to just copy and paste whatever someone sends you online, and re-send it to all your friends. But have you ever stopped to think whether the message you received was right, wrong, or even out of date?

I’m on a handful of online social networks, and I’ve seen the same Amber Alert repeated several times - and each time the wording of the message was different. In one instance, I received an online message about an Amber Alert, just as I heard on the radio that local law enforcement had cancelled the very same Amber Alert.

Maybe it is my old school journalistic thinking, a remnant left over from when I was a journalist many eons ago, but whenever someone sends me any sort of news bulletin, I always stop to think about the source of that information. Who the hell is this person, why are they sending me this, and how reliab

Image via Wikipedia

le a source for this particular information is the sender?

Needless to say, when I receive an online instant message from someone named “HotBlonde75432” I’m not going to take much notice of a news bulletin from this person, even if it really is an Amber Alert. This person may have directly cut and pasted the information right from a legitimate news outlet’s website, or typed exactly what they read, heard or saw in their local newspaper, radio station, or television broadcast.

But so long as the anything, anyone, anywhere, anytime Internet is just that - I will usually chuckle at the wanna-be journalist’s attempt of spreading the news, mumble something under my breath about “wondering what ever happened to the news business, don’t these people have better things to do with their lives,” and move on.

So much for spreading the message.

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Social Networking Or Socially Absent?

A couple of months ago I launched a new project to drive more readers to this blog. I re-designed the site, added some rich media content, and ventured into the world of social networking.

It wasn’t all that long ago, where the term “networking” either meant a series of computers linked together, or in a more social context, “networking” was getting out to business-related functions to hob-knob with colleagues in your field or work sector.

Back then, networking was limited to professionals, usually involved wearing suits and ties to bland corporate functions, and having to endure h

Image by dpwolf via Flickr

ours of meaningless small talk just to get a business card so you could call them later from the office and really talk shop.

These days, everyone is on the social networking bandwagon - from kidsbarely out of diapers, to seniors looking for their next bingo hall run, and everyone in between.

Social networking is the act of surfing the web for sites which connect you to other people with similar interests, hobbies, employment, or histories. These websites are online communities, where you can share your thoughts, pictures, videos and just about anything else you want too - with complete strangers. The most common social networking sites are Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Prior to trying to tap into the social networks for expansion of this blog, I already used Facebook - it is kind of cool to reconnect with people from your pa

Image via CrunchBase

st, and to keep in touch with others far away. Though I try to keep my Facebook time limited to no more than an hour a day, as it can prove quite addictive - with the ability to chat, play games, or even just poking someone, it can be quite a time sink.

Little did I realize just how much of a time sink social networking could be. I created a Facebook Fan site, joined Twitter, and started using Digg and StumbledUpon to drive readers to this blog.

Previously, to all my new social networking, when I posted a blog, it would take no more than 30-minutes. I could write the thing in about 20-minutes, proof it in about five, and then post it and do one final proof-read in another five-minutes or less.

Image via CrunchBase

Now that I’m using various social networking sites, posting a blog takes over an hour! I still only need about 25-minutes in total to write and proof-read my work, but then it takes forever to market the thing online.

Not that I mind - social networking is very social, which makes it fun. But it is too easy to get caught up in all the social activity. From chatting with strangers about whatever the current topics are, to just finding someone interesting to follow, to trying to make sure you have a good ratio of friends and followers, to filtering out “bots” which just want to sell you crap you don’t need . . .

WHERE DO PEOPLE GET THE TIME FOR ALL OF THIS SOCIAL NETWORKING?

Where indeed?

There are some that seem to live on these social networking sites, they never sleep, eat, and quite possibly have a tube attached to their naughty-bits, so they don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom.

Some people appear to always be on - and I know they aren’t “bots” automatically sending out messages, because I’ve talked with some in real-time, and the conversation was just too real to be a computer algorithm calculating what to send next.

Some of these even have people have multiple accounts on multiple social networking sites, but have many of the same online friends and conversations.

We’ve all heard about the balding middle-aged science fiction computer geek, living in his parent’s basement, spending all of his time online and eating.

Whether that image was ever true, it appears anyone can quickly become a prisoner to the world of online social networking. I’ve encountered men and women that are obviously addicted to the online world - some with high end jobs, and some beautiful women that are probably forever single not because they can’t get a date, but because they never leave their home.

Technology can and does amazing things for humanity. It has closed geographic distances, building a truly global village, as instant communications are now possible with anyone, anywhere in the world at anytime.

But that has also created a technological boogie man of sorts, which allows us to evade and avoid the real world around us, living in the perfect fantasies we create in our online social networks.

Online, it doesn’t matter if you are fit or fat, wealthy or starving poor, have a successful career, or are struggling to find a job. All that you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and a bit of imagination and know-how, and you too can escape reality, and make your own world anyway you want it.

I don’t know about you - but although I enjoy being social online

Image via CrunchBase

, I prefer the real world of life, to that of the artificial world of the web.

Oh I’ll still partake in the online world - it is too pervasive in our culture to avoid, and it has grown readership of this blog, which was the ultimate goal.

However, I don’t want to be that dateless guy, surfing the net and ignoring my real friends in the real world because I’ve become enthralled with some complete stranger that I’ll probably never really meet or really ever know online.

And you never really know - that hot babe halfway ‘round the world that flirts with you online, could very well be your overweight, unemployed next-door neighbor - because anyone can pose as anyone online. Or worse, it could be your boss trying to figure out how far you’ll go online, to see if you’re a normal person with a healthy lifestyle worthy of that promotion, or some sick nut that should actually be let go.

Time to get a life - or at least get back to the life of the living.

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