Amongst the many things that I love, two that I love the best are coffee and bacon.
Now like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup you got your peanut butter in my chocolate ads, here are two great tastes that taste great together in one steaming hot mug. At $7.49 for an 8oz bag Maple Bacon Morning is an expensive cup of joe, but can you really put a price on the genius of merging smoked salted pork with caffeine?
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Loading ...You don’t need to make a grand gesture to deliver a brand experiences. As a matter of fact the best brand experiences are found in the details. Take for example this registration form for the Omni Hotels & Resorts loyalty program and the salutation options. Beyond the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss and Dr options included are Prof, Father, Gov, Judge, Lady, Lord (my favorite), Pres, Chef. It’s a little thing that reinforces what kind of people stay at the Omni. Wouldn’t you want to be one of them?
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Anyone who follows someone on Twitter who cross-posts their Foursquare updates to Twitter knows how annoying it is. If I want to know where you are then I’ll check Foursquare. I’m not following you on Twitter for updates that you are at Starbucks again, unless there’s some value add to your update (like a special, a celebrity sighting or something good and snarky about your visit). Keep it up and I’m liable to unfollow you.
TweetDeck, who just added Foursquare updates (as well as LinkedIn and Buzz), knows how annoying those cross-posts can be and gives you an option to remove them from your All Friends Tweetstream. For now I’m leaving this unchecked, so I don’t potentially miss those snarky comments, but it’s great to know that TweetDeck is giving me the option.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...As I pointed out yesterday, if you are concerned enough about the privacy of your data on Facebook to consider deleting your account then you should make sure that your data is restricted now rather than risk it being open to the public until Quit Facebook Day on May 31. Therefore here are some tips for checking the privacy settings of your account and the accounts of your friends and family.
Yesterday I mentioned the video from The Huffington Post that describes how to fix your privacy settings. For those who would prefer a check list here you go
Now that you’ve tweaked your privacy settings it’s time to check your work. ReclaimPrivacy.org has a great little bookmark that will scan your profile to see how secure your profile is with things like Instant Personalization, how your personal information, contact information, information on your friends, tags and connections can be shared and if friends or applications can share your personal information. The bookmark gives you a score and you can fix some of these issues with the click of a button.
Finally you should dig in an see exactly what of your information on Facebook is being shared with everyone. Here are a few tools to do that. 
The Facebook API browser displays exactly what personal information on Facebook is publicly available through their API. Just paste the ID or alias of any Facebook account and this website will comb through your the Facebook API and display what is there. For example the information publicly available from my profile is limited to education and work history, about the same as is on LinkedIn, and is exactly how I intend it to be. But if you haven’t tweaked your privacy settings you may find embarrassing and personal things being completely public.
Bridging these two options is Profile Watch that scans your profile, gives you a rating for privacy AND shows you what of your personal information is public in a slightly more user friendly interface. Frankly I think that this rating is not that useful when compared with the Reclaim Privacy bookmark that shows what categories of data are private or not, but the display of the data itself is much nicer than in the Facebook API browser and is a good double check.
While I hope that Facebook will address this privacy issue and make understanding what information is public or private and modifying those settings easier, I suspect that it’s going to be some time before they do. Until that time, or May 31, I suggest that you check your privacy settings for yourself and address any privacy issues that you have.
Do you have other suggestions for privacy settings that should be reviewed or tools to check your work? Let me know in the comments.
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So Facebook is pissing you off with their privacy policy and the loss of control of your data and profile and now you are thinking of closing your account. I understand your frustration and while I’m not sure that I’ll be joining you, I won’t try to convince you to stay. I will however leave you with a few thoughts about moving on.
1. Lock up before you go – just because you have decided to leave Facebook on Quit Facebook Day doesn’t mean that someone isn’t casing the joint right now. If you really are concerned about your privacy and data then don’t wait to lock it up. The Huffington Post has a nice video that walks you through setting your Facebook privacy settings. If you haven’t changed your settings yet, or don’t now, then you should ask yourself are you really that concerned in the first place and should you consider other options. Even if you don’t plan to leave check your privacy settings (and the settings of your parents and kids).
2. Don’t lose your keys – remember Facebook Connect? Did you use it to register for any websites? If you delete your Facebook account you will lose access to websites that you registered for with Facebook Connect. Some websites that you registered on (probably most websites) you really don’t care about and you can register again if you need to, but there may be some that would be a pain to lose access to. As far as I can tell there is no easy way to identify the sites you use Facebook connect to register with and then change your registration except by remembering and checking for yourself. If you know a better way let me know in the comments.
3. Clean house – it’s unclear whether deleting your Facebook account is like wiping a hard drive, but based on the cost of memory dropping every day and value of that data, I suspect that it isn’t. Therefore you should assume that any data that you have added to Facebook will remain on their servers despite your deleting your account. I suggest that you start by archiving all of your Facebook data because you probably will want those picture and videos at some later time. You should then delete as much data as you can including photos and videos. Untag yourself in other people’s photos. Delete all information about yourself, delete applications, unfriend everyone, etc. Assume that all data on Facebook will remain when you delete your account so you want to leave your account a blank slate. Finally, you can delete or deactivate your account. Make sure that you know the difference and do what you really want to do with your account.
4. Have a forwarding address -I know that Diaspora* is getting a lot of press right now, but remember that there’s no there , there yet. Diaspora* won’t be ready to move in until the end of the summer. You are in for some time with your online profile sleeping on other people’s couches. In addition, social networks are of little value when the population is small and Diaspora* is likely to be pretty small when it starts. There are a lot of questions about how it will work, how easy it will be to set up and whether it will be much more private than Facebook is so who knows if it will take off. I suggest that you have backup plans for your profile or be prepared to go without.
5. Consider a pied a terre – Facebook may have betrayed you enough that you no longer want to make it your primary residence anymore, but you could keep a “foot on the ground.” Lifehacker has instructions for how to create a minimal Facebook account for communication between you and your friends. This option is a pretty good one for letting you dip into the Facebook network when you need to, but keep your personal data intact.
Regardless of whether you are planning to leave Facebook or not I suggest that you check your privacy settings and consider your options. Facebook could go the way of Detroit and we’ll all be moving on soon enough.
Photo Credit: “Moving-Sign” by Enigma
Thanks to @livimauri for instigating the post
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Remember when you were a kid with a few coins, not enough to go see Star Wars again or the latest knock off that was trying to fleece you of your hard earned lawn mowing or car washing bucks? So you schlep down to the corner store or 7-11 looking for some way to satisfy the hole being burned in your pocket by those quarters and dimes. Gum or candy might do it, but comic books were better. You could re-read them (Bazooka Joe is the only gum that came with reading material and even at 7 I knew those jokes were tired and old), you could share them so that for the price of one you got access to hundreds from your friends Michael Specter, Michael Sharkey and Judd Young (I know you weren’t friends with them, but I’m sure that you had friends of your own back then and can insert their names). Then there was the post reading analysis and fantasy play and finally there was swapping (2 Scooby Doos for a Swamp Thing?). Now the same can all be said about Star Wars trading cards, which I was really into and still have a pretty good size collection of, but I was also game for a Star Wars comic book to see what Han Solo was up to between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Personally I wasn’t into the super hero’s so much. I liked the super natural tales and teams like the Avengers, the Defenders, and the X-Men.
I write all this because today, May 1, 2010 is Free Comic Book Day, an event held every year to celebrate comic books and drive Gen X’ers like me who have drifted away from comic books, aside from re-reading Watchmen and watching just about every Marvel-derived film in the last 10 years, back to the comic book shop dragging our bewildered sons and daughters with us.
Go, support your local comic book shop (finding a participating store is easy), check out the merchandise, get a hit of the sense memory from the smell of the news print, pick up your free book and buy a second or third so that you can do some swapping and maybe even a pack of Star Wars trading cards if they still make them. I hope that they do and that they haven’t gotten rid of the bad gum that came with them like Topps did with the baseball cards. Talk about a sense memory.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...My BlackBerry died again on Wednesday so while I await a real replacement I’m rocking this beat up
BlackBerry 8700. I tried adding a few apps to help with Social Networking, but the old gal’s not having any of it (and since I’ll be handing her back on Monday I’m not jumping through any hoops to make it work) so any updates will need to be performed via the mobile web.
Consider it an experiment and I’ll let you know how it goes.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I used to be very active on Yelp. I hadn’t added any new reviews in a while, but yesterday I wanted to give a little love to the taco stand where I’ve been getting lunch lately so I added a review and while I was there thought that I’d update my friend list. I go to the friend page and these are the options I get:
Yup, it’s all email based. I can add email addresses or link with my Windows, Yahoo, AOL (people still have AOL email accounts?) and finally GMail, but there is no option for connecting with other social networks. I have a lot of friends on Twitter and Facebook that I would be very happy to connect with on Yelp as well, but I don’t have many of their email addresses. I could get them if I needed them, but it would take some digging and I’m not going to put in that effort for Yelp.
Limiting the means of connecting with your existing social graph to email is going to be a significantly limiting factor leaving many potential connections unlinked. All those folks I met at SXSWi and who I’m following on Twitter are probably on Yelp and posting reviews that would be useful to me and drive me back to Yelp, but without a way to merge these social graphs the opportunity is lost. In addition those connections from other social networks are more likely to engage with another social network than the general population in your and my address book.
My takeaway in 140 characters: Help members import existing connections to a new network with multiple ways to reconnect; Twitter, Facebook & email
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...This weekend I was accused (lightly) of pontificating so instead today I’m asking a bunch of questions in the hope of getting some answers about iAds.
How is an iAd different from an app?I’ve barely scratched the surface with questions about what the restrictions of this platform are and how far it can be pushed. I’m also sure that the answers to these questions will generate event more. If you have answers or more questions of your own, add them in the comments.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...It is really spring in New England. Not the dark, rainy, miserable season where blossoms and crocuses are beaten by cold, heavy rain till they are quickly lost and then rapidly followed by 80 degree full on summer. This year it is like the springs of my youth in Washington, DC where buds and tulips last. Where there is sun and days in the 50s and 60s and you can feel the promise of warmer weather on the way. This year it’s a real payback for those months of winter that we suffer through in Cambridge.
For the last two weeks I’ve endured a little IT winter of my own (not caused by our IT crew who have been patient and very helpful during my double crisis). Due to a virus on my laptop and a loose plug on my BlackBerry I’ve lost over 50 tabs in Firefox and more than 100 bookmarked stories in Viigo (as IT crises go pretty minor, but hear me out).
Those 50 tabs and 100 bookmarks, they represent 150 actions that I meant to take “someday.” Websites I meant to read. Ideas I meant to blog about Links I meant to share. But honestly would I have done that or was I just waiting for something like this to come along and clear my plate? Based on the age of some of those bookmarks and my past history, I suspect the latter.
So I’m not mourning those lost links. I now have a lighter browser full of opportunity. Those bookmarks? Most were too outdated for blogging, if they were really necessary then I will search out the information when the need arises and I now have a lot of freed up memory on my smartphone. Those digital losses are like last fall’s dead leaves that no longer clutter my yard so that the new spring grass looks inviting.
Loss is a part of life in the real world and online. And so is spring.
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