We recently had the privilege of hosting Terrence Shaw, managing partner at Wirevibe and Kerstin Deppe, COO at Patricia Seybold Group at our LightThread office to discuss social media and online security concerns. Terrence is known for creating fun and informative interviews that are posted regularly at his Wirevibe blog. He typically hosts these interviews at local watering holes in the KC and Dallas areas so we were excited when he asked us if we would like to host one at our place. Even better he asked me if I would like to be part of the interview and share my experience with social media and how I address the growing concern of online personal security risk. When I found out that Kerstin would be sharing the couch with me I would have paid Terrence to participate.
You will notice in the interview I make the analogy that online isn’t all that different from offline when discussing female security vulnerabilities. I think this is an important point as it can become all too easy to forget the number of eyes watching your updates, pictures, status, and comments when online. You have a similar situation when you are consumed about your shopping list as you walk in to the store and forget there could be “bad” people hanging out in parking lots. The answer to minimize the risk is the same for both offline and online…be aware, pay attention to your surroundings, and prepare for the unexpected.
A few tips:
In the offline world – Keep your head up and look for people just “hanging out.” Look under your car and in your backseat before entering the vehicle. Have your keys held so you can poke someone in the eye. Take a self-defense lesson or two so you can defend yourself if needed.
In the online world – Know who your friends, followers, and connections are online. Read profiles and look at a person’s online activity before accepting their invite. Understand the applications you are using and how to block people, hide your updates from non-followers, and who to notify regarding security concerns.
At the end of the day, vigilant observation and preparation can keep you safe so practice them always.
Facebook announced today that it had acquired FriendFeed. Multiple sources carried the news after Technorati broke it, minutes before Facebook made its own announcement. Largely believed to be an acquisition for talent, the 12 members of the Friendfeed team include founder Bret Taylor the creator of Google Maps and Paul Buchheit, who developed Gmail. Facebook indicated that the four Friendfeed founders would all serve as senior executives in their product and engineering departments.
Articles have already been written about what FriendFeed brings to Facebook, including public profiles, conversations that involve people you don’t know, aggregated content from multiple sites and real time information. Whether some of these features will continue to be supported if Friendfeed is fully incorporated into Facebook or not remains to be seen. Without question the biggest impact of this acquisition might be on Twitter. Past analysis has shown that a majority of the content that Friendfeed aggregates is from Twitter. Given Twitter’s very recent and very public snubbing of an acquisition offer from Facebook, is this simply the first volley in a capabilities war where Facebook will use its superior financial funding position to acquire companies that have advanced Twitter-like features so that they can eventually eliminate Twitter’s dominate position in microblogging?
But it’s not as though Facebook should be worried. With over 250 million users against Twitter’s 4-5 million, adding Friendfeed, a site that reached over 1 million visits earlier this year, will not make an appreciable difference in the lead it already enjoys. In Facebook’s and Friendfeed’s press releases, in addition to talent, shared platform and work culture philosophies were cited as reasons for the acquisition. But what might be good for these two companies might not be good for Friendfeed users.
Most of the feedback was negative when the deal was announced. Indeed Friendfeed oftentimes seemed to be a haven for social media practitioners. Prominent members of that community, including Robert Scoble, are avid users and as one commenter stated on Bret Taylor’s feed, “Uh, well that’s the end of that.”
Friendfeed now joins Pownce as yet another Twitter-like social media service that was hyped by the “social mediarati” only to be acquired by another company with different designs on the industry.
We recently had the privilege of hosting Terrence Shaw, managing partner at Wirevibe and Kerstin Deppe, COO at Patricia Seybold Group at our LightThread office to discuss social media and online security concerns. Terrence is known for creating fun and informative interviews that are posted regularly at his Wirevibe blog. He typically hosts these interviews at local watering holes in the KC and Dallas areas so we were excited when he asked us if we would like to host one at our place. Even better he asked me if I would like to be part of the interview and share my experience with social media and how I address the growing concern of online personal security risk. When I found out that Kerstin would be sharing the couch with me I would have paid Terrence to participate.
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