netkritter Rotating Header Image

Facebook gets creepier – I mean, more aggressive about linking people together

Dec 8th, 2009
by nk.
2 comments

Have you been paying attention lately to the little things Facebook is doing on your behalf? Have you noticed the helpful suggestions on the right side of the page, reminding you that you haven’t talked to so-and-so in ages and you really should send them a message? Have you noticed the plaintive little messages that so-and-so only has 16 friends, can’t you please suggest some people he or she might know?

It’s not enough to provide a platform for us to connect, now the site wants to play cruise director.

I was talking with a coworker today who asked if I had noticed some other things, some of which I had and some I hadn’t. My coworker said that people she barely knows are getting messages stating that she wants to connect with them – messages she hadn’t sent. I haven’t personally observed this, so I don’t know if this is actually Facebook, or some third-party entity at work, but if anything like that is really happening that’s way too assertive.

Here’s one I discovered myself. If someone posts a picture that has me in it, and tags me, that photo will show up not only in their photo gallery, but also in mine. Get that? Someone else posts a photo, and it shows up in my gallery just because they tagged it with my name on it.

What could possibly go wrong here?

What if you deliberately kept your photo gallery empty because you didn’t want strangers seeing pictures of you online? What if someone posts a picture that isn’t even of you, but tags you in it as a joke? There it is, in your gallery. And finally, worse-case scenario. What if somebody Photoshops a picture of you, to be funny, or embarrassing, or even lewd? There it is, in your photo gallery, even though you had nothing to do with it. And here comes  Mr. Corporate Recruiter, considering you for a position with his company and checking your background, and he sees the silly image your “friend”  posted, sitting right there in the middle of your photo gallery.

There’s probably a way to go into your privacy settings and prevent all these dire scenarios, I still need to check. But if so, that’s in keeping with recent FB practice – let’s go ahead and make the change and force the users to adjust their settings if they don’t like what we’re doing.

Posted in: Uncategorized.
Tagged: ·

Space elevators looking more and more feasible

Nov 8th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of space elevators. When you first hear about it, it sounds ridiculous, but then when you look a little more deeply into how it would be done and how much energy it would save in moving objects into orbit, the question becomes “Why aren’t we already doing this?”

Well, there are a few minor technical details to work out. But scientists around the world are working at it. This article contains the prediction that we will see this happen in our lifetimes.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/11/05/space.elevator/index.html

Posted in: Seen on the Web.
Tagged: ·

Farewell to Geocities

Oct 26th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

That clunky but lovable monument to beginning-level Web design, Geocities, is going by the wayside. That’s a name that hasn’t been heard often in the last several years, but anyone who was doing anything on the Web in its early years knows about this service and has probably created something on it. Back before the much slicker interfaces and tools of MySpace and Facebook were available, this was how the average do-it-yourselfer created a Web presence. Its passing is evidence that the Web has undergone radical change since the ’90s. Do-it-yourselfers these days are posting on self-hosted Wordpress blogs, or perhaps Blogger or LiveJournal or even a powerful CMS like Drupal or Joomla. Others are making do with profiles on social networking sites. People who do Web work professionally now specialize in a small number of aspects of the rapidly growing field, and it takes more and more people to create a site sophisticated enough to compete. The era of the very basic, static HTML site is over.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/26/geocities.closing/index.html

Posted in: News & Events.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Ten signs your organization is dysfunctional

Oct 26th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

Interesting video. Does anything in the list sound familiar?

http://ej4.com/content/ten-symptoms.aspx

Posted in: Business, Seen on the Web.
Tagged:

Urgent distress call sent to Facebook friends. Phone broken? No, they used the phone to send it

Sep 16th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

Two Aussie girls got lost in a storm drain. Solution? Post an update on Facebook via mobile phone. The thought of using the phone to call Australia’s version of 911 apparently never occurred to them.

Fortunately, it worked — this time. But what if none of their friends had been logged in at that time? What if their friends thought it was a gag?

One could argue that emergency services around the world need to adjust to the times and incorporate tools like Facebook and Twitter into their channels of communication. That’s probably true. But still. They had a phone

. Social media sites are great and they enhance our lives, but there is a time and a place for everything, and that was the time to employ a fantastic invention commonly known as the phone call.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/07/2678945.htm

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/08/trapped-girls-update-facebook-instead-of-calling-cops/

Posted in: Humor, Internet behavior, Social media.
Tagged: ·

Coolest use of Google Maps EVER: Online Monopoly

Sep 7th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

Now this is a clever idea. Google and Hasbro have teamed up together to bring you Monopoly, only using the REAL WORLD on Google Maps!

This is one of those things Netkritter is afraid to try, for fear of getting sucked into an incurable addiction.

http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/monopoly-google-maps/

Posted in: Games.
Tagged: ·

Photographs that are actually paintings! Can you tell?

Sep 5th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

I was eventually able to tell, after much staring, that most of these were painted images. But there are a few that I found indistinguishable from photography. Incredibly talented artists  at work. Check it out!

http://www.thetoyzone.com/2009/blog/10-awesome-images-that-are-actually-paintings/

Posted in: Seen on the Web.
Tagged:

Most detailed image ever created of a molecule clearly shows bonds between atoms

Aug 30th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

Say hello to pentacene, the first molecule ever to pose for a close-up!

The image was captured by IBM using an atomic force microscope. Ah yes, the good old atomic force microscope. I’ve used them many times!

Scientists have captured images of molecules before, but never in such amazing detail. In this one, you can even see the atomic bonds. The lines are the bonds between the 22 atoms, which are at the connecting points.

Read the article in the Daily Mail.

Posted in: Seen on the Web.
Tagged: · ·

Follower Monitor bot on Twitter: If you unfollow, they WILL know

Aug 28th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

I used Tweepular to rid myself of a bunch of accounts that weren’t returning my follow on Twitter. I shook them off like the fleas they are! The service works great.

Then I happened to check @netkritter, and discovered that a Twitter account called Follower Monitor was notifying many of them that @netkritter had dropped them.

So I looked it up. It’s a bot followed by more than 24,000 people, and that’s all it does. When someone who’s following it gets unfollowed by someone else, it sends them a message alerting them to this disaster.

How incredibly creepy, I thought. There is absolutely nothing we can do online without somebody watching.

And then I immediately hit the Follow button.

Posted in: Social media.
Tagged: · · ·

Quote from NYT: 'It's not your Facebook profile. It's Facebook's profile about you'

Aug 28th, 2009
by nk.
No comments yet

The New York Times has an article that expresses much of the sentiment I’ve been forming about Facebook over the last several months. It says there is a small but growing group of people who are leaving the site after putting some thought into its implications. To summarize this sentiment in one sentence: commercializing the intimate details of people’s lives is distasteful.

The quote is from one Leif Harmsen, described by the article as an anti-FB crusader. Don’t look up his web site while you’re eating lunch, but that is a perceptive quote.

I’m not planning to abandon the site, but I am limiting the amount of time I spend on it and the information I post on it. For me, it’s mainly become a quick way to send a message to people for whom I’ve forgotten the phone number or email address.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html

Posted in: Business, Privacy online, Social media.
Tagged: · ·

← Earlier Posts

Bad Behavior has blocked 650 access attempts in the last 7 days.