Being sneaky sneaky on Facebook at work!?

Many employers block Facebook on company computers, and even more monitor their employees’ online activities. For those lucky enough to work for companies that do not censor Internet usage, know that being caught playing FarmVille on company time rarely reflects favorably in yearly performance reviews.

To use Facebook from work without tripping the boss’ radar, follow these tips:

Go Incognito — Turn off Chat

This should be blatantly obvious, but if your boss or any of your coworkers are on your friends list, they will know the moment you sign into Facebook because your name will appear in their chat lists — at least, if they are currently signed into Facebook.

Instead of taking the chance, click the gear symbol at the top of your chat window, then uncheck “Available to Chat” before leaving for work in the morning.

Bypass The Company’s Blocked Website List

Most companies use website blockers that are very easy to thwart. We could teach you how to set up a virtual private network, but in the majority of cases this much effort is unnecessary.

First, try the URL http://www.www.facebook.com/. As this is a subdomain of Facebook.com, some employers will not think to block it. If that does not work, try https://www.facebook.com/. Sometimes the extra “s” will trick the network server into think the site is secure, and thus safe to allow access.

If changing the URL does not work, the next trick to try is a proxy site. Many network administrators block these, but since new ones appear all the time, one of them is sure to work.

One of the most popular is HideMyAss.com, which has a built-in Facebook proxy. If this one is already blocked, a simple Google search will reveal thousands of proxies. Be aware proxies make their money through intrusive advertisements. Expect pop-ups and pop-under ads when using this method.

Hide The Facebook URL From The Network Log

If your company does not block Facebook, but still tracks every site you visit, using a proxy site is still a great way to hide your Facebook activities.

But while proxy sites also offer the advantage of hiding the URLs you visit, there is an even sneakier way to hide the URL. Go to Google Translate, then enter the Facebook URL. Translate it from English to English. The site will appear masked beneath miles of Google URL code in your company’s network log, yet you should have full access to your Facebook account.

Install A Panic Button On Your Browser

If you plan to use Facebook at work, you need a one-click method to hide your activities from plain sight when the boss or a nosy coworker walks by your desk. The  best way to do this is with a browser extension known as a panic button.

Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer all have extensions that work as panic buttons.

Once installed, you can either click the button on your browser or use a shortcut key to hide all of your open browser windows, then restore them when the boss walks away.

Be Careful

The main thing to remember when using Facebook at work is to be careful. If your company has blocked Facebook from its servers, take it as a sign that if you are caught surfing Facebook you will probably face disciplinary action.

Personally, I prefer to surf Facebook from my mobile phone rather than using the server at work.

What are your favorite tricks for hiding your Facebook activity?

For more information...

Guide to Google+ Privacy and Information Control

 Thank you lifehacker!

Google+ is the new social networking kid on the block, and one of the main reasons so many people are interested in the service over Facebook is Google+'s proclaimed focus on protecting users' privacy. Whether you're a new Google+ user or you're already a pro, understanding how to control your information on the site can make you feel much more at ease on the social network. Here's the lowdown on Google+'s privacy controls, including a few of the more buried settings you'll want to know about.

This guide will take you through setting up Google+'s circles with an emphasis on how they work from a privacy perspective, how to control what others can see about you on your profile, your options for selectively sharing posts with others, and some miscellaneous settings you'll want to tweak—like only allowing friends to start Huddles with you.

A note on pseudonymity: Google has taken a strong and, I think, awfully mistaken stance on not allowing people to use Google+ with a pseudonym. While this is definitely a privacy issue, it falls outside of this post's purpose of explaining how to use Google+'s privacy settings. Kee Hinckley, a Consulting CTO for Somewhere.com and Lead Architect at Zinc.tv, has written a compelling and thorough post on the subject, and hopefully Google is listening and will rectify this issue.

Let's go tackle your main Google+ privacy settings and options:

1. Privacy and Your Circles

Circles are Google+'s uber easy way of organizing your contacts. Most of your privacy controls will stem from how you set your circles up, since you can set privacy controls for both individual posts and your profile information with these customized groups. Basically, you create a circle—such as "Family," "Work," "Tech Bloggers," etc.—and drag people you want to share information with or whose posts you want to follow into those groups.

Things you need to know:

• Your circles are private by default. The particular circle groups you set up and which people are in them are only known to you. So you can set up a "Lunatics" circle and put your boss in it and he/she and the rest of the world will be none the wiser.
• Managing who sees which posts can still be tricky with this system.The main issue is that it's important to remember who you've put in which circles. You could, by the way, purposely have placed your boss in both a Lunatics circle and Work circle, so you'll need to remember which circles you've placed her in. You'll need to be careful about selecting the right circles to share posts with (more on that in a bit).

Differences between Google+ circles and Twitter followers or Facebook friends

Lots of people like how intuitive and basic using circles is. It's much more upfront and clearer that Facebook's friends lists (which offer useful way to control your Facebook privacy), but there are also some intricacies to keep in mind about how circles work, especially if you're used to how Twitter and Facebook work:

• As with Twitter, you can follow anyone else's posts on Google+ (like, ahem, Lifehacker writers) by adding him or her to your circles—without that person also having to follow you. It's not a one-to-one friending model like Facebook. In that sense, it's much more like Twitter.
• On the flip side, anyone can add you to his or her circles without your consent; unlike Twitter's "Protect my tweets" option, there's no Google+ setting to require your approval before others can follow you. The onus is on you to choose the right sharing setting for your posts. Even if someone's following you who you'd rather not follow, they'll never see any of your posts as long as you're not posting to the public at large.

So, on the one hand, Google+'s circles are much simpler to set up and use because they form the basis of this social networking model. On the other, it's like a mishmash of other social networks, so it might be confusing at first.

Although anyone can follow you or add you to their circles, the important thing to remember is that the privacy of your posts is always set by you (more on this below). Google+ has many controls for allowing who can see your profile information and also who can see each individual post.

2. Control What People Know About You From Your Profile

Your Google+ profile page links to your background (occupation, education, places lived, etc.), photos and videos shared, and websites you've "+1'ed" from Google search results. So, after setting up your social groups in circles, editing this Google+ profile page is one of the major ways to control your Google+ privacy.

To edit your profile settings, click on the button that looks like a circle with a silhouette in it, then click the "Edit Profile" button.

Here are the default settings for your profile information:

• Full Name: This is the only required part of your profile, and it's visible to all. Changing your name here will change your name across all Google's services.
• Anyone on the web can also see: Your introduction, profile photo, gender, who are in your circles, who you've added to your circles, and the button to send you an email (but not your actual email address).
• Your circles can see your: introduction, employment, education, places lived, relationship status, looking for, links.
• Locked for only you until you change it: your occupation, home and work contact info.

You can change each of these sections to allow viewing by: the whole world (anyone on the web), extended circles, your circles, just you, or a custom grouping. Each privacy group setting has its own icon (see image at left), so when you look at your profile, you can quickly see which parts are shared to which groups.

So, for example, you can set your introduction to be for anyone on the web, your employment to be visible to anyone you've added to your circles, your contact information to be visible to a custom selection of circles such as friends and family, and your relationship status to be only for you and your significant other to see.

Want to check what your profile looks like to someone else? There's a "View profile as..." input field at the top right of your profile where you can check.

Search visibility. If you don't want your profile to be indexed by Google and it to appear in search results, this is the setting to look for. It's at the bottom of your Profile on the About page. Uncheck "Help others find my profile in search results," which is checked by default.

Who's in your circles/Which circles you are in. While you're at it (editing your profile page), you can also change the visibility of the people in your social network. Look to the left column. Under your circles lists, click on the "Change who is visible here" to control who can see all the people you have in your circles (i.e., who you're following) as well as everyone who has you in their circles (who are following you).

Again, by default, everyone on the web can see who you've added to your circles and who has added you to theirs. This, however, is highly customizable.

You have options to make the world think you're only following a select group or groups of people—excluding other groups from their view or hiding all the people you follow, in fact. And you can hide everyone who's added you to their circles, so no one would know how many people or which people are following you.

Profile photos, email, links. The other sections of the profile page are customizable too: your main photo and series of profile photos, that "send an email" link, and your web links. By default, everyone on the web can see these. If this bothers you, here's where you can change it.

Photos

Profile photos, shared albums from Picasa, photos of you tagged by other Google+ users, and Instant Upload photos all appear here. You can choose not show this tab (it's displayed by default), but even if your photos tab is displayed, only those photos that you share with others will appear here to them.

A strange setting for "People whose tags of you are automatically approved to link to your Profile" is set by default to be allowed for your circles. This setting just means if someone tags you in a photo and you approve it, the photo will be linked to your profile and added here.

Geo-location is not added by default, nor are photos uploaded by the Instant Upload feature of the Google+ Android app.

Videos

This section only has the option to hide or show the tab. You'll need to explicitly share videos here, but the tab is shown by default.

+1's

When you like a page or website by clicking on the +1 button in the search results or on the site, it will show up on your profile page if you have this set to be shared by default. (Note: clicking +1 on comments on a post or stream will not show up on this tab. It will only be shown on that thread.) If you don't want people to see your +1's, uncheck this tab (but this begs the question of why you would click any +1 buttons.)

3. Share Only to Select People Using Circles

After organizing people into groups for sharing and adjusting our profile settings, the next major privacy concern is controlling who can see and share the content you post (which can include a photo, web link, video, and/or map/location).

Groups you can share with: When you share content on the service in your "stream," you can select which Circles or individuals will see that content by adding one or more of these groups:

• Public—visible to everyone who has added you to their circles, and shown on your profile page as well
• Extended Circles—everyone in the Public group above, plus everyone in their circles, like friends of friends in Facebook, but also a bit spammy feeling
• a name of one or more of your Circles
• individual names of people on Google+ (this is how you send a direct message to someone on Google+. Just enter their name as the person you are sharing the post with)

Notes about selecting groups you share with:

• Once you've specified your group and posted your content, you can't change the group it's shared with. For example, once you've set it to Public for all your circle contacts, it will be public to everyone you ever add to your circles. From now on, it seems.
• By default when you create a new post, the circles or people you shared with last will be the ones your next post will be shared with by default. This is convenient if you often share with the same groups or individuals, but it's a good idea to check the "share with" settings for each post.
• Sharing with circles is only inclusive, not exclusive. Currently, you can only select specific groups you want to share your content with; you can't set your post to be shared with everyone except for a specific circle or person. This means if you want to be able to post about your rotten workplace, you can't just create a work circle and create a post that excludes that circle; you'll have to create something like "everyone except for work" to share your work horror stories with. Similarly, if I had, for example, Whitson in my Lifehacker circle and wanted to write something about a secret yet also public birthday surprise for him on Google+ and include everyone except him in on the secret, Google+ would not let me do so.

4. Control Your Information Streams and Posts

Besides specifying which circles can view your posts, there are also other post administration tools at your disposal (see the little triangle to the top right of each post you make): If you get trolls on one of your posts, you can remove them individually or report them to Google. You can disable all commenting (e.g., if this is a group thing and you just want to send a notification to your team). And you can disable resharing. These all need to be done manually for each post to protect them.

Incoming streams. Posts from people you've added to your circles will appear in your "stream" under their various circle categories.

For people you haven't added to your circles but who are following you, their posts will be shared with you under the "Incoming" link. You can mute posts you're not interested in seeing there (more trouble than it's worth, probably) or add some of those people to your circles.

Blocking people. If there are too many spammy or offensive or just overwhelming posts from some people, you can block them in your circles settings. "Block" here, however, may not work as you might think. As Hinckley describes it:

"Blocking people hides their posts and comments from your stream, and hides your public posts, but not your comments from their stream. It does not hide either posts or comments when viewed directly on a profile or in the posts themselves.

It actually does more to hide them from you, than it does to hide you from them.

Block does not block. It's a mute button, useful for muting over-sharers."

In other words, don't think of blocking a user as actually protecting your privacy.

Your comments on others' posts are public: Note that your comments on other people's threads, if those threads are shared publicly, are public too and indexed by Google (i.e., searchable). Your +1's of any other people's posts are public too, so that's another thing to be mindful of. An individual post will say "Limited" or "Public" next to the timestamp, so you'll have some idea whether it's shared with a circle or with the public at large.

5. Check Other Obscure Privacy Options and Settings

Click on the Google+ Settings gear icon to get to the full set of settings. Under the main Google+ section, you can set your notification settings for things like when someone mentions you in a post or adds you to a circle. By default you'll be notified by email for everything.

At the bottom you can change the default of anyone being able to start a Huddle (group text) with you. (This can be really annoying, as Adam Pash can tell you.)

Your Profile and Privacy tab links to most of the other settings we've already mentioned. It's a convenient one-stop page to jump to all the settings, perhaps, as well as to your main Google Account information and Google's Privacy Center.

One nice thing you don't have to worry about is data retention and an encrypted connection. Google has confirmed Google+ uses only an encrypted SSL connection and that the data you delete from Google+ is deleted from their servers.

A Wish List

As a new service, Google+ has a lot of promise and Google has been responsive so far to many privacy concerns. The privacy controls for the most part are very straightforward, and Google's continuing to tweak them. For example, recently they changed the chat feature in Google+ so that you need to explicitly invite people for them to appear in your chat list (and Google says they're working on removing the restriction of all users in your chat list having access to your email address).

There are still lots of usability and privacy features we'd like to see added to Google+, as evidenced by the many extensions available for making the most of the service and a recent discussion on Google+ privacy (thanks to everyone who joined in). Some of the things fellow Google+ers most wished for were: the ability to exclude specific circles or individuals from posts, adding subcircles for finer control, viewing multiple circles' streams at once, and an easier way to view comments and replies to comments in Google+.

You've taken a tour of Google+'s privacy settings, but this certainly isn't the end of the discussion. So, please feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments. Photo remixed from an original by Michael D Brown / Shutterstock.

APPS: Facebook Places + Available Deals = DealBurner App

 Deals sent to your phone when you checkin - pretty cool...

What do you get when you combine geolocation-based applications, like Facebook Places and foursquare, with services that offer special deals, like Groupon and LivingSocial? If you’re Jason Fertel, you get the opportunity to create an application called DealBurner.

When DealBurner users check in at locations with services such as Facebook Places and foursquare, DealBurner provides text messages highlighting available deals at that location from sources including Groupon, LivingSocial, Tenka, Scoutmob, and other daily deal-type sites.

Fertel told The New York Observer’s Betabeat he became discouraged while working on his startup, group-texting app Freespeech, because “It was hard to be seen amongst the 20 other applications that did the same thing.

On top of that, with Apple and Google and whoever else about to jump in that ring, it just didn’t make sense to continue with it.”

A complaint by WeWork Manager Matt Shampine that he was checking in at an establishment and taking advantage of a foursquare deal, but he was unaware that Scoutmob was offering a better deal, spurred the idea for DealBurner, Fertel told Betabeat.

As long as group discount services are rallying, something like DealBurner makes sense. But what if the market shakes out and there’s only one or two left?  While we’re at it, readers, you think daily deal-type offerings are here to stay?

Did someone call Dr. Drew Pinsky?

Hi! My name is...and I'm Facebook addict... 

How many times a day do you find yourself logging onto Facebook? 5? 10?  500?  Many of us find ourselves powerless over Facebook, logging in at whim without even thinking about it.  But you don’t have to let your Facebook addiction control you!  That’s right—two Facebook addicts, Dan Peguine and Siavosh Arasteh, are fighting back against Facebook addiction with “Facebook Rehab”, a 2-week online rehabilitation program that challenges participants to cut back their Facebook usage.  Could you get by with checking Facebook only two times a day?

Facebook Rehab started out on July 25 as a simple Google Spreadsheet, hosted at http://bit.ly/facebook-rehab.  Dan and Siavosh told me, “We decided it was time to become healthier in our Facebook consumption and do more interesting things with our time.  For the next two weeks we have decided to login to Facebook no more than twice a day (whether mobile or desktop).  We started a public spreadsheet to record our logins and invite our friends to join.”

Anyone can add their name to the spreadsheet and keep track of their daily Facebook usage.  Every time you check your Facebook, make a record of it on the spreadsheet.  If you’re feeling weak, log in to the Google Doc to find and chat with other Facebook Addicts who are trying to cut down.



Dan and Siavosh have had an overwhelming response to their little Facebook Rehab project and, as a result, are taking things to the next level.  They’ve moved things over to FaceAnonymous.com and are asking fellow Facebook Addicts to sign up to find out when they go live.  The domain name is great because it pops up whenever you start heading to Facebook.com on autopilot, reminding you that you’re trying to cut back.  A little ironic, however, is the fact that you can Like the page and leave a Facebook comment on the FaceAnonymous site…Do those actions count as Facebook checkins?  You’ll have to decide that one for yourself.

Until FaceAnonymous.com goes live, you are welcome to add your name to the Facebook Rehab experiment spreadsheet to start your Facebook rehabilitation now.  How often do you check in to Facebook each day?  Do you think you could benefit from Facebook Rehab?

Voice Tagging...Is this the future?

TAG! YOU'RE IT!

It’s clear that video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have had a huge impact on the news industry. The Pew Internet & Americal Life Project just reported that 71 percent of Americans use video-sharing sites and it’s nearly impossible to find a news organization that doesn’t include video on its website.

But video is so 2010. I recently came across blurts.com, a site still in beta, that lets you tag and share a 30-second audio clip. It was pretty neat. Within minutes of using the site, and without needing any new software or know-how, I recorded a clip wishing my little brother a happy birthday and posted it on Facebook.

After playing around on the site, I started thinking about the untapped potential of voice tagging.

Make content even more interactive

With voice tagging, you can vocally respond to a story or blog post you see online. Don’t just write a comment on the New York Times website — literally say it with a voice tag. Interact with stories, tweets, and more on a whole new level.

If you frequently lurk on a news site, imagine how much more connected you would feel with other commenters if you could hear their voice. You could have a real, albeit very short, debate. Or mabye you don’t feel confident in your writing skills but can orate like no other. Here is yet one more outlet to engage with online content.
(This does, of course, open up another can of worms — does voice tagging “out” or put an end to anonymous commenting?)

A humanizing affect
We all know social media is about connecting but sometimes it feels, well, sterile. We have avatars and handles, but you still don’t really know someone you meet online. Voice tagging adds that human element. They allow you to hear texture, tone and emotion. While a video also does that, the right, short audio snippet can be so much more powerful and evocative than a two minute video.

NPR’s Andy Carvin collected and shared a lot of the tweets about the events and uprisings going on in the Middle East this spring. People a world away had a firsthand account of what was occurring. Just think if the rioters in Egypt had used short voice tags. A short soundtrack for the movements would have been created, adding even more depth to the stories.

In June, there was a flurry of tweets when Saudi Arabia women drove cars to protest a ban on women driving. Personally, I can only imagine what it would have been like to hear the first 30 seconds of one of these women driving.The clips would have been inspiring — hearing the excitement, the fear, the squeal of tires. For someone who has always lived in a country where being able to drive as a woman is taken for granted, it would have been quite moving.


Simpler than making a video 
With a tool like blurts, you can easily record your comment, rant, story, etc. and embed the link. Better yet, you can do it in any language. So anyone with an internet connection could use this system of sharing information. There is no learning curve or training needed.

Google's next phase...PittPatt

Google has purchased PittPatt, a company that develops facial-recognition software. The company started as a research project at the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute. The name is coined from Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition. The software identifies facial structures in photographs and traces them in videos.

As the PittPatt’s homepage states: “We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience.”

“The Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition team has developed innovative technology in the area of pattern recognition and computer vision. We think their research and technology can benefit our users in many ways, and we look forward to working with them,” Google said in a statement about the deal.

According to Washington Post, Google has been treading lightly on facial recognition. However, there are strict concerns about privacy that surround the issue.

Last March, Google denied CNN’s report claiming that the company was working on a venture that would link a person’s face to his or her personal information on Google.

If you are wondering what Google plans to do with the latest acquisition, Chris Gaither, spokesperson for Google, said in a statement, “We’ve said that we won’t add face recognition to our apps or product features unless we have strong privacy protections in place, and that’s still the case.”

So, this new purchase means they are working toward facial recognition in some capacity. Once the hurdle concerning the privacy issue of facial recognition is established, then we will see some interesting apps or products coming from Google.

More information can be found here:

http://www.pittpatt.com/
Google Purchases facial recognition software firm

Flash Mob - Gone Wrong...Facebook Style

Flash mobs organized via Facebook can be fun, but they can also run afoul of the law, as one apparently did in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., Monday afternoon.

The Daily Mail reported that a Victoria’s Secret store within The Shops at Georgetown Park was victimized by a group of men and women who organized the crime by using Facebook and Twitter.

According to the Mail, two men and two women entered the store with two baby strollers at approximately 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and the robbers used a small child to distract the staff, while others grabbed merchandise and fled. The newspaper added that similar incidents have occurred at other stores in the popular shopping area.

Metropolitan Police Department Lieutenant John Hedgecock told Fox News, as reported by the Mail:

They come in and they do it so fast — within a matter of seconds. What happened in this store probably lasted around 20 seconds. They go in, they distract the employees, and they grab the merchandise. They are in and out.
We have some information that they may be using some of the social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to schedule an event, if you will.

And Alex Brown, who works at Riccardi, a store in the same mall, told the Mail:

The people who do it don’t care and sometimes pose. They will stand there and look at the camera in a funny way.

Readers, have you witnessed any Facebook users openly discussing illegal activities — and have you ever reported it?

Facebook Flash Mob article...

Beat the crowd to movie tickets...

Fandango’s summer is proving to be pretty lucrative with 20% of its summer movie ticket sales generated by its mobile applications. This sets Fandango’s record for the most mobile movie tickets sold during a summer movie season ever.

The movie ticket site also sold more mobile tickets for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 than it has for any other movie. Overall, Fandango sold 19% of the Potter finale’s domestic opening weekend box office record of $169 million. If you do the math, Fandango earned some hefty change.

Mobile clearly plays an important role in movie ticket sales. Based on these numbers, we will see more mobile apps for a variety of platforms.

Fandango must have seen the increase mobile sales coming because the company redesigned its mobile site in the spring of 2011, just ahead of the summer movie season. Designed specifically for consumers on the go, the mobile site allows filmgoers to browse through movies playing in their area, conduct a quick local search for movies that start within the hour by using the “Go Now” button and securely purchase tickets.
Another nifty feature added to the site is moviegoers can option to go paperless at select theaters with Mobile Ticket. This feature generates a unique bar-coded ticket on one’s phone, which can be scanned by the ticket taker to enter the movie theater.

Fandango is among the top 5 m-commerce sites, based on unique visitors in the mobile shopping category, according to Nielsen. To date, Fandango apps have been downloaded more than 18 million times. Both Fandango’s mobile and tablet apps won three 2011 Webby awards.

Nielsen reports that 2011 will be the “tipping point” for smartphone usage, predicting that half of all mobile phone users will own smartphones.

Fandango Mobile article available here...

Have the chops to beat out Obama in 2012? Prove It!

Love it or hate the idea, meet the man responsible for the double rainbow guy running for President.

A new Facebook app from Votocracy makes it possible for anyone to run as a candidate for President through its new app and a $99 filing fee. Their mantra? More voices and more choices.

Who are some of the 377 candidates to date who have decided to throw their hat in the virtual ring? The enthusiastic double rainbow Internet guy, a cat — the first animal to jump in the race — and a female oil rig worker. Thus, the company’s mantra is “more voices, more choices.”

The Votocracy system calls for a primary in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia that mirrors the actual presidential primary calendar in the U.S. Here’s the twist. Every vote will actually count, so instead of using the primary process to eliminate candidates as the primaries move forward , the process will actually add candidates, since people can vote for more than one candidate.

When there are 51 winners at the state level, the company hopes to initiate an American Idol style competition on TV along with Facebook-based contests the site will use to spur engagement.

We spoke to Votocracy chief executive officer Bryan Lee, who’s background includes executive positions at both Sony and Microsoft, about the genesis of the app and new features to look for on the horizon.

Are you marketing to the average citizen or could candidates at the city or state level use this app?

Yes, and everything in between. There are a few actual political candidates that, due to FEC regulations, we can’t discuss right now.

People are dissatisfied. These are people who don’t have a background in politics but have a lot of energy. Votocracy offers a vehicle to express themselves.

We want the tone initially to be very open and welcoming, more in the Jon Stewart vain than Wolf Blitzer or Sean Hannity.

There are a couple ways that a local city or council person could tackle Votocracy. It’s a great way to get notoriety on a big scale. Our suite of services offers an outstanding social media solution for someone in the political space.

What are some of the interactive elements unique to Votocracy?

Interaction is a two-way street. It’s not a simple broadcast of ideas that mirrors what a candidate already says in a speech or an interview. Voters participate. They find candidates, share links, can check out a candidate video that can go viral.

One of our design principles is engagement, which is a stark contrast to the more traditional presidential candidates. The app helps candidates harness emotions that turns into a dialogue.

How is Votocracy’s Facebook approach different from that of a more traditional presidential candidate?

It’s a distinction at the most fundamental level. The current crop of Democrat and Republican candidates are selling their own product. They want you to stay on their team.

Votocracy enables a voter to start with one candidate, but then also allows them to look here for one they might like better.

Most traditional political candidates today are fundamentally following a broadcast model, which isn’t social media.

We hope to launch town halls of the 21st century. Voters can jump in at any time, on any topic, add a poll and anyone can jump in at any time.

We also will plan competitions, some silly along the way. During March Madness, we may have head-to-head videos where Tom can take on Jane on a particular topic, sort of like a  bracketology competition.
So engaging and interactive.

Given your entertainment ties, will you try to get actors or celebrities involved to add “star power?”

At this point we want to sit back and let people come to us more naturally. Some famous people might jump on board, which would be a nice. We welcome them all.

Can you describe the TV deal you have in the works?

I can’t talk about partners or platforms, but I can talk about the vision, which is, “What would it mean to create a real and viable alternative candidate?” We worked backward from that goal. We knew we needed notoriety and the ability to find other people who like what you have to say.

We realized we started describing American Idol. Through several weeks of TV exposure, one person emerges. It’s the same thing in music so why can’t there be the same thing in leadership. We’ve made it so that the only people suitable to run in our country are professional politicians.

Personally, I’d prefer someone like Steve Jobs run for president. That’s someone who can actually turn this country around. Why are they always former governors or senators?

What do you think the current crop of presidential candidates from the two main political parties can learn from your app?

It enables listening, connecting, enabling dialogue allowing different ways to filter the conversation.  A lot of politicians use social media as an alternative broadcast, using Facebook to reinforce what they already say in the press or in a speech.

How long did it take you to develop this app?

Facebook is a wonderful platform to get up and running quickly. We bolted two functionalities together to make an even richer experience. We think our offering is a more interesting product, with video, the ability to find people of like minds through polls, and eventually donations.
We started talking over beers around Thanksgiving and went public June 1 so about 7.5 weeks to develop.

What will future enhancements look like?

Last night, we added a new feature that includes both a poll combined with enabling wall comments. So it simulates a back and forth conversation.

One feature we offer is a  simple matchmaking service around polls.  If someone has answered 30 polls, for example, we might identify Joe from Indiana who has also answered 29 of those polls.

Votocracy is like a social media navigator for voters, almost like a political dating service.

Why did you start Votocracy?

Dissatisfaction. People are saying that our choices are down to the lesser of the evils. The general feeling no matter which direction you lean politically, very few people are satisfied with where we’re sitting.

Readers, would you support a candidate on Votocracy?

Run for president! - More information here....

facebook security fails again, surprised!? What's next...

Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy controls have sprung another leak.

This time it’s their Videos feature, which lets users share brief clips with their friends and family (Videos launched back in 2007 and Facebook now serves billions of views each month). Of course, videos are often sensitive — even more so than photos — but Facebook’s privacy controls let you restrict who has access to each clip that you’ve uploaded.

Unfortunately, those controls haven’t been working as they should: for the last week it’s been possible to see a full listing of your friends’ Facebook videos, including the name, thumbnail, description, and people tagged in each clip — regardless of whether or not you were supposed to have access to the videos.

Clicking on the thumbnail to a video that was supposed to be private would yield a “This video either has been removed from Facebook or is not visible due to privacy settings” message, so you couldn’t watch it. But in some cases an incriminating thumbnail or lewd title could be enough to get someone into a trouble. And even if a video description didn’t show anything incriminating, it could lead to some awkward questions: “So, why can’t I see your Holiday Bash 2010 video…?”

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed that the site has now fixed the glitch, and that it was live for just over a week. And to be clear, this only affected videos shared by your Facebook friends — you couldn’t view descriptions of videos shared by people you don’t know.
Here’s an example of what a video thumbnail looks like:

This is only the latest in a long string of Facebook privacy holes, which have run the gamut from sending messages to the wrong people to vulnerability to XSS attacks on partner sites.

Facebook is obviously very complex and engineers are constantly pushing changes to its code, but given how much personal information users upload to the site (and that’s only going to increase), it’s imperative that they lock down these holes. Google+ may be making a lot of headlines, but Facebook’s biggest threat right now is negative perception around privacy and trust, and these bugs don’t help.

Thank you techcrunch!

What's next!?

**This just in** - More Americans Are On Facebook Than Have A Passport...

Most shocking statistic: 50% of all Americans are on Facebook (155 million) while only 37% of Americans have a passport (115 million). To its credit, the Facebook on-boarding process is a lot more streamlined...

Don't get fired over Facebook usage...

Facebook users: Watch your language. We repeat: Watch your language. Your Facebook wall could cost you employment opportunities — if you don’t use any of the privacy settings, that is.
Reputation-management outfit Reppler expanded on a startup we’ve previously covered, Social Intelligence, which performs Internet background checks on job candidates, by doing a little research of its own.
After analyzing some 20,000 Facebook profiles, Reppler found that:

• 12 percent contained derogatory language on their walls;
• The same applies for 17 percent of users under 35, while dropping to 5 percent for users over 35; and
• 38 percent of users who had derogatory language on their walls had used the offending terms themselves, while 81 percent were “victimized” by friends’ postings.

Further results....

Ready to ride the waves of social media!?

When people ask what the next big thing in social media will be, they’re usually looking for an ascendant platform that will supplant Facebook the way Facebook supplanted MySpace or they’re expecting a feature set, such as geo-location or group messaging. But what if it’s not a network or a tool? What if it’s an application?
“Internal social media is the second wave … the future of work is in communities,” said Cisco’s Andrew Warden at this week’s Corporate Social Media Summit.
Warden gave the crowd four reasons to start looking at internal social tools:

• The next wave of employees will expect it. The current workforce has members of every generation who love social tools, as well as those who loathe them. But the next generation of workers will have no such divide, Warden argued. These workers will have grown up with these tools and will expect to use them as part of their internal work communications, because that’s how they’ve always communicated. Failing to have an internal social media system in place would alienate these workers and keep them from fully contributing to the company, Warden said.
• The workforce is increasingly global. Global deals, branch offices and telework are going to become more common for companies of every stripe and if you want remote teams to work together and stay engaged with their mission, you need to give them tools to work collaboratively, just as if they were all in the office together, Warden noted. Social tools also make 24-hour operations and complex global deals easier on employees, by allowing work to pass easily between time zones, thus empowering work/life balance without a loss of continuity.
• It can make management easier. By watching internal social communications between employees, managers can figure out where their workers are spending the most time, where their pain points are and what resources are needed to enhance performance, Warden noted.
• A strong corporate culture may depend on it. The focus of social media so far as been on external branding — communicating your vision and values to your customers. But what about your employees? Do they understand the company’s vision? Do they share it? Feel like they’re a part of it? Live it out everyday in their work? Warden notes that internal branding allows your company strategy to permeate the corporate culture, instead of working against it.

Of course, embracing internal social media will bring me fresh challenges, he notes. The technology is still evolving — Cisco decided to build their own internal tools rather than go with an outside vendor.  Training is key, particularly since broad guidelines such as “don’t do anything stupid” can mean radically different things to workers of different generations. And not every department will embrace such tools with the same vigor, possibly creating the need for incentive programs, he noted. All the more reason to get started now — before the next generation of workers shows up.

For more information....

Netflix - Sorry iPhone, Android is catching up...

Back in May Netflix became available for a select number of Android devices. Today we learned that the number of Android devices that can run Netflix has expanded from five to twenty two.

Included in the list of devices that can support Netflix is one tablet running Honeycomb, the Lenovo IdeaPad, which was just announced today. Most of the latest phones from Motorola are on the list, in addition to the latest Samsung phones. The support for the additional devices is provided via an update to the Netflix Android app that was released to the Android Market today.

I think support for the Lenovo IdeaPad is particularly important because tablets are better for watching movies than smartphones. Netflix is one of a group of “must have” apps that a tablet must have in order to be really viable in the market.

 Further information...

Jobless Claims Rise, AGAIN

Initial jobless claims by the newly unemployed rose to 418,000 last week, an increase of 10,000 from the prior week’s revised figure of 408,000.

The four-week moving average fell to 421,250.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a much smaller rise, to just 410,000.
For the week ended July 2, the most recent week data were available, 7.3 million Americans—down from 8.4 million a year prior—were receiving some form of unemployment. That includes 3.1 million out-of-work Americans who had exhausted their regular state benefits and were receiving emergency extended benefits from the federal government.

For more information...

Google+ VS Facebook comparison - The winner is...

Apple MAC OSX Lion! More than 250 new features...

This Is What You’ll Find In Mac OS 10.7 Lion

Apple's newest iteration of their desktop operating system is out today, and we've been playing around with it to check out the newest features in OS X. Here's how it turned out.
You can see all the features in action in the video above. It's a bit Apple-cheesy, but it actually does a pretty good job of demonstrating how the new OS works. Here are our impressions on how they actually feel in action.

The Big Features

Lion boasts 250 new features, but there are a few that stand out from all the others, designed to make your life a lot easier. Here are the biggest changes in Lion, and how they feel when you use them.

Mission Control

Exposé, Spaces and Dashboard are have all been combined into one view called Mission Control, and it's actually pretty nice. Instead of spreading out all your windows, Exposé separates them by application, which makes it a bit less overwhelming when you have a lot of apps open at once. You can quick look windows for a closer peek before opening them entirely, as well as spread out windows from a specific application with a multitouch gesture.
When you enter Mission Control, you'll also see your spaces spread across the top of the screen. You can drag windows to and from spaces easily from this view, and go into any of your spaces with a click of your mouse. It's really nice that both features are now available with one hotkey; the whole interface is really nice for managing your desktops. The Dashboard is up there as well, but it's the same as it always was: isolated and kind of useless. Nothing exciting there.

Launchpad

One of the most underrated features in Lion is Launchpad, the iOS-style application launcher. You can still browse applications in the Finder, but if you hit the Launchpad icon in your dock, it presents them in a nicer way. That's pretty much it. Folders show up in typical iOS style, and you can fit more icons and scroll around less (since it's full screen).
I must say, Launchpad originally seemed like the stupidest feature in Lion, but it's growing on me a little. It's a better way to launch applications than the Finder or the Start Menu, especially since you can access it instantaneously with a nice four-finger multitouch gesture. That said, if you use Quicksilver, you will never use Launchpad. Ever. But it's nice to have a better app launcher built-in to the operating system for the non-QS users.

Auto-Save and Version Control

One of our favorite new features is automatic saving of all your working documents, complete with built-in version control. You've probably heard the phrase "save early and save often", and you might have even been unlucky enough to deal with the consequences of not saving early and often in the past. Lion will do away with that stress by automatically saving files for you as you're working on them, so if something catastrophic happens, most of your work will be recoverable.
The really cool part of this feature is that every time it saves, it saves a new version of the file. So, if you make a change you don't like, you can revert to one of your older saves. Just hit a button and the app will enter a Time-Machine like view of the file's history. Seriously, it's almost exactly like Time Machine, which we've all come to know as one of the best OS X features in the past few years. It's great that they've made it even more useful.

Full size

Resume

Lion's also added session saving to all the apps on your system, which is great. When you shut down your computer, you can choose to save your session, so when you turn your computer back on, it restores all your windows, exactly as they were when you shut down. Of course, if you're on a MacBook, you can always achieve a very similar result by just closing the lid of your computer, but it's nice to have this feature for desktops, too (and if you dual-boot, it's fantastic, since you can reboot and pick up rigth where you left off). Similarly, when you quit an app, it will resume to the same state you left it when you restart it, which is new and convenient for both laptop and desktop users.

Full-Screen Apps

Lion makes a big deal out of full-screening your apps. Nearly everything is full-screenable. Some of the apps are just maximized versions of the window, while others act a lot more like an iOS app in full screen mode. In Preview, for example, you can full screen a PDF or group of images and flip through them with multitouch swipe gestures, just like you would on an iPad. It's pretty neat if you want a distraction-free environment, but like some of Lion's other features, it seems like it's trying to be iOS for no reason. I'm not sure why I would want to do this on a desktop or laptop computer. It seems to me that if I were reading something leisurely enough that I wasn't paying attention to anything else, I'd actually be doing it on iOS instead of my computer in the first place. It looks good, though.

AirDrop

AirDrop is a cool new feature of the Finder that makes it really simple to share files between computers. Before, this was a somewhat confusing and frustrating process: you had to deal with network configurations, public folders, passwords, and other nonsense. Now, you just open up Finder, see all the nearby computers with AirDrop enabled, and you can send files just by dragging them onto a computer's icon. AirDrop will create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network between the two computers and transfer the files for you—fantastic for less tech-savvy users that don't know how to share files with someone sitting next to them.

Full Disk Encryption

FileVault can now encrypt an entire disk, which is more secure than its current implementation. It even asks you if you want to encrypt your drive as soon as you install OS X—which we've learned is one of the only ways to keep an SSD secure. And, seeing that Apple's really starting to push SSD usage, it's nice to know they're thinking about it (incedentally, Lion also contains TRIM support, to keep those SSDs running in tip-top shape).

Reading List

Reading List is like having Instapaper built into your web browser, letting you save web pages to read later. It isn't quite as awesome as Instapaper, in our opinion, but again, it's built-in, which is nice for those that don't necessarily know it's a feature that they want. Reading List will also sync with Mobile Safari in iOS5, which is what really makes it worthwhile.

The Apps

The interface is pretty much what you've come to expect from OS X. There are a few changes here and there (it looks like Apple's really going through with these monochrome icons they gave us in iTunes 10), but it won't shock you right off the bat—at least until you start opening up OS X's built-in apps. Here's how the new apps look and feel.

Mail

The new version of Mail looks much more like the iPad app than the old version, which makes it a bit easier to browse through your messages. You can show and hide the traditional inbox and folder sidebar with the click of a button, but not have it taking up space all the time. Threading support is still a little off sometimes, but it contains a new Gmail-like conversation view that is fantastic (not to mention quite pretty). It's also beefed up its search function, making it really easy to perform more complicated searches with plain English.

iCal

Like Mail, iCal has been revamped to look a little bit more like its iPad counterpart. The Week and Month views will look familiar, but the new Day view is great. It provides a schedule for your day on the right, along with a rundown of your upcoming events for the next few days on the left. You can also view your to-do list (now called a list of "Reminders") in a separate pane, like you could before. It also has a few brand-new features, like a "heat map" that tells you when you're usually the most free during the week, which is pretty useful (and cool). All this has been wrapped in a more lifelike "leather" look, which is interesting, to say the least.

Address Book

Address Book has a new interface that's very book-like, but otherwise not that different from before. Like iCal, it has a more "real life" appearance, getting rid of the title bar, the status bar, and the traditional "pane" view. For all intents and purposes it works the same as it used to, with the exception of a few small features like iPhoto Faces integration.

Finder

Finder doesn't look all that different than it used to, but it has a few tiny tweaks in it that are kind of nice. For example, the window toolbar in the Finder now has an "Arrange by" option, letting you quickly choose the arrangement of your icons in a given folder. You can also access these options via the right-click contextual menu. It also has a new "All My Files" function that gathers all of your documents, pictures, contacts, and other types of files in one window and sorts them by file type. It seems a little weird at first, especially since we have Spotlight (it keeps reminding me of The Onion's MacBook Wheel parody). If you think about it though, it could come in handy if, say, you were looking for a certain PDF file on your system somewhere but you had no idea what it was called. Again, though, most of the time Spotlight's probably a faster file finder than this.
Finder also has some really nice usability tweaks, though, like collapsing icons together when you drag and drop a large number of files, or keeping two files with the same file name instead of making you delete one.

Other Interface Tweaks

Apart from the big stuff, there are little pieces of iOS all over this version of Lion. From the small things, like being able to turn off your dock lights, to bigger things like momentum scrolling. In fact, not only do you have momentum scrolling, but you have iOS-style scrollbars that scroll the opposite direction that they used to. That is, if you're used to two-finger scrolling on a trackpad, it's now backwards by default: Instead of dragging your fingers down on the trackpad to scroll down, you drag your fingers up, like you would to flick up or down on the iPhone or iPad. It's pretty off-putting at first. You can change this setting in System Preferences, but once again, it's something iOS-like that translates kind of oddly to the desktop, since you aren't actually touching the screen.
There are other small things, too. You can resize windows from anywhere, now, not just the corner. "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" has become a preference pane, more like iOS, and popups now fade in with a nice little animation. When you drag and drop files, they group together in a nice neat little icon, which is a bit easier to manage. You can even triple-click on a word to look it up in the dictionary or on Wikipedia, which is a pretty sweet little feature. Many of these additions are quite nice, while some of them are head-scratchers. For more info on all the tiny features, you can check out Apple's full list of features in Lion, or try it out for yourself.

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These aren't the only features in Lion (there are 250 of them, after all), but these are some of the ones we think are the most compelling. Hopefully, though, this gives you a more in-depth view of what's in store for the new version of OS X. Got any thoughts, rants, loves, or hates about the new OS? Let's talk about it in the comments.

Do employees have Social Media Rights!?

Something to think about:

Takeaways

• Companies that don’t have a social media policy are tempting fate.
• “Ready, fire, aim” should not be your first reaction to online criticism from an employee. Stop, take a breath, and realize that terminating the employee may come back to bite you.
• If the online statement is directed at, or even accessible to, the employee’s co-workers, and it pertains at all to the employee’s superiors or conditions of employment, it may very well be something that the NLRB considers federally protected “concerted activity.”
• Instead of punishing the employee, consider working with them to resolve the problem they’re complaining about.
• Realize that a lot of the conversation happening online now is the same thing that used to happen around the water cooler. It may be more accessible now, but the same type of criticism has probably already been made offline. Negative opinions are inevitable, and sometimes the best response is simply to laugh them off.
• Always consult your legal counsel before making a decision that could potentially expose you to liability.

 For more information on the article....

The Social Network Rivalry has been announced! - Tulalip!!

http://socialtimes.com/microsoft-launching-a-social-network-called-tulalip_b70723

Seinfeld: Why do they call it Ovaltine? The mug is round...

Seinfeld is back:

http://jerryseinfeld.com/

Twitter:

@SeinTime

The Internet is ruining our memory...FACT!

The Results are in:

"The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. "

For more information: NYTimes

Further information:  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745#aff-2

 

Let's talk about FREE shrinkage, I mean, photobooth shrinkage...cool new app for iPhone/iPad

http://popbooth.com/

Does your pet have a social media profile page? Well, it should...

http://socialtimes.com/1-in-10-pets-own-a-profile-page-on-the-internet_b70558

Google is taking over the world. Are you ready for the ride!? - LATEST App!!

http://socialtimes.com/google-photovine-video-teaser-invitation-request-available_b70342

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Don't you just want to snug up and cuddle with Google?