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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A Computer Whiz, a Bunch of Guys in Blue Suits, and an Apple, and Why They Don’t Get Along

Imagine being rushed to the hospital with a major gash in your arm. Blood is pouring out, to say you’re in a lot of pain doesn’t even come close to reality.

Upon arriving in the emergency room, nurses and doctors rush too your aid. They prop you up, take a look at you, and then inform you they can’t help.

“We’re sorry, you’re just not compatible with our medical practices,” the lead doctor informs you. “You’ll just have to go elsewhere.”

Although slightly exaggerated, that is exactly how the big computer companies treat us when we use “the other guy’s” products and services.

At work, I’ve been asked to find a way to see if I can get a Microsoft Word document to be linked to a Lotus Notes email. Lotus Notes (made by IBM) doesn’t work well with Microsoft-made Word. To complicate matters, my suggesting of having a link to the document stored on a network drive fell flat, because we are moving towards a Microsoft-based SharePoint server (essentially a web portal for data collaboration). We’re trying to move away from using the shared network drives, to encourage use of the web-based SharePoint sites.
SharePoint and Word function like two peas in a pod – they better, they are both made by Microsoft.

Lotus Notes on the other hand, isn’t very SharePoint-friendly – it’s a product from “big blue” IBM.

Ever since ex-Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates (he retired recently) left IBM to start his own company, the two haven’t seen eye-to-eye.

Can’t argue with Bill Gates, he originally was hired by IBM to create an operating system for their personal computers. He invented the IBM Disk Operating System (IBM-DOS), a revolutionary piece of software at the time, but the conservative blue suits at IBM didn’t like it at all.

As the legend goes, they told Bill to get lost.

So he did what any barely twenty-something computer genius would do. He stormed off, creating Microsoft, and used his cool software, wildly engaging intellect, and hatred for everything IBM to destroy any hopes of those suits and ties of having a successful career.

Oh IBM did put up a fight, first using Bill’s IBM-DOS until they came up with their own operating system in the early 1990’s called OS/2 Warp.

But by then it was too late, the real battle lines were being drawn between two completely different platforms – Apple and Microsoft-based Personal Computers. IBM wasn’t even in the game.

OS/2 Warp faded out of existence, much as most of IBM’s products for the home market did. All they really have out in the home market these days are Lexmark Printers – but that’s probably because few know Lexmark is owned by IBM.

These days, Microsoft owns the corporate and home computing markets, as 95 percent of the world’s computers run on the company’s Windows operating system.

Still, the big computer giants use us mere consumers as pawns in their battles for supremacy in the computer world. Apple, IBM and Microsoft products rarely work well – if at all -- with each other.

A friend got a new Apple iPod not all that long ago. Excited, she brought it over to my place to show it off. She plugged it into my computer, where it immediately warned that it was previously used on an Apple Mac-based computer (she’s a ‘Mac-head’), in order to use it on my Microsoft Windows-based computer it would have to be “initialized” (“formatted” in Apple lingo) and her all data would be lost!

Computer music and video files have been interchangeable on both Apple Mac and Windows-PC systems for decades. An MP3 music file on my Microsoft Windows-based PC will play exactly the same as it will on an Apple Mac-based computer.

Not so if you’re using an Apple iPod. The cute multi-colored devices will plug into a PC or a Mac – but you can’t go from one to the other without losing your music, video and other data files.

It’s like our example at the start – you are bleeding to death, but if you’re a PC and you go to a Mac hospital you’ll probably die because they won’t help you.

When will the big computer companies realize the lost revenues they could be earning by working together towards more compatible – not less – technologies?

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What Your Online Name Says About You

What’s in a name? This timeless question has been asked by many a parent, trying to figure out what to call their future son or daughter, a child that just got a cute puppy dog, and now, by me, trying to figure out my home on the worldwide web.

Recently I bought my own name jordanhgreen.com and jordanhgreen.ca – the thought of having to pay money for my own name is fodder for another blog. It wasn’t really hard coming up with a name for my soon-to-be home on the net. Just use what your mother gave you – so I did.

Where the name question came up was, what first-level domain should I use? Do I want to look all slick and professional with a .com? How about being all patriotic by going under Canada’s country-specific first-level domain .ca? I could sound all big and impressive using .net, or .org. Then there is .biz, .info, .name, .pro, there is even a .me – but no .i.

Careful thought is required here, because once something is up on the Internet, even if you take it down yourself, chances are somewhere, someone has a copy floating around on their computer. The shelf life of the online world never expires.
When the Internet was in its infancy, the choices weren’t as vast as they are today. If you were registering a company, you used .com.

Non-profit organizations would use .org, while primary conduits hosting connecting networks to the Internet (such as America Online, and the once all mighty CompuServe) would use .net. Government organizations kept to .gov, and schools used .edu.

And if the choice isn’t enough to throw you, what each category actually means does. Many getting started in television choose .tv for their online presence, but for those in the know, .tv is actually the country-specific domain for the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu. Some in Toronto, Canada have opted for .to showing some hometown pride, but .to is actually the country-specific domain for the Kingdom of Tonga, an archipelago of 169 islands in the South Pacific. Confusion about these things is far and wide -- .si has been used by Hispanic websites for it’s translation of “yes” (which is si in Spanish). But .si actually represents Slovenia.

So, based in Toronto, I could have chosen jordanhgreen.to – but many may think I’m actually in Tuvalu. Wanting to sound big and impressive, I may have gone with jordanhgreen.net, but I’m no AOL.

And then there are these online auctions. People with too much time on their hands spend their entire lives online, buying domain names, so that when you search for yours, you have to purchase it an outrageously inflated price.

I originally was nervous typing in my own name into the WHOIS search engines to find out if my own name was available. I was very lucky, and it was – but I had to think of other alternatives just in case.

The last thing you want your online address to be is something like jordanhgreen985321.com – who’s going to remember that?

Other alternatives I came up with were the short and sweet jhg.com, jordangreen.com and the slick jordanhgreenonline.com.

Sometimes, people – often I think in a drunken stupor – create domains for themselves based on a nickname, or some random thought they have in their mind. Homer Simpson once told someone to email him at chunkylover@aol.com.

Phew! It is like naming a kid or a pet. Only you have to contend with all those who may have taken it already, and are willing to put up a financial fight to keep it.

Like the time a few years ago, when some brainiac registered windows.com and computer giant Microsoft lost the domain bid, so the software company followed-up with a law suit to secure that domain because of their Windows operating system.

Shortly after that, Microsoft tried to copyright the term “windows,” but lucky for those of us with windows in our homes, the judge presiding over the case threw it out.

In the end, I went with obviously the best choice – or at least best in my mind’s eye – jordanhgreen.com and jordanhgreen.ca.

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