We all knew it was coming. Below is the full text:
From: Manager Stephan Goldman
To: [incorrect email address]
Date: Thursday, January 07, 2010 9:02:10 AM
Subject: MySpace Password Reset Confirmation!
Hey [incorrect username] ,
Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed.
You can find your new password in attached document.
Thanks,
Your MySpace.
Attached was a file called “MySpace_document_49792.zip” that recipients would be advised to not touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. Whatever’s in that ZIP file, you don’t want it. Trust me on this.
Once again, social networking sites are never going to email you a new password, and in general aren’t going to email you files at all.
Who the heck is “Manager Stephan Goldman?”
Anyway, delete this garbage if you receive it, okay?
Ok I know I shouldn’t be angry but I JUST CAN’T HELP IT! Ok so I was on Facebook and I kept seeing this guy Logan Huffman. So I checked out his page. I was like ok we have three mutal friends that’s interesting. Then something told me that these mutal friends personally knew him. I went over to go check to see if his name would pop up on IMDB.com and guess freaking what… IT DID!
Ok so whats the problem you ask me? Well the fact that HE’S FROM MY HOMETOWN and he’s YOUNGER THAN ME TOO! AAAAGGGGHHHH (oh I forgot to mention he’s an actor) IDK why but this makes me extermely mad and angry!!!! I guess its cause I’m like “Why isn’t that me?” “Why am I not living my dreams?” “WHY DAMM IT WHY?” Seeing the fact that he’s a couple months younger than me, on a hit t.v. show and prolly graduate the same year (class of 08 baby!) I did from my hometown hits really really reeeeeeaaaallllly hard. Now I’m sad. (its this Coldplay music)
I just want to pack all my stuff and leave. Even though I have no money nor car how will I be able to get there? Hitchhike? NO way thats too dangerous… fun but how do I know I’ll even end up in Cali. I guess I just have to be patient and go with my original plan… which is to wait till July when I have enough save up, finished all my NYRs and have a car.
Man do you guys feel my pain? Has there ever been a time when you’re like “Man that should be me?”. If so I feel you. It will be our time soon. Who knows maybe when you finally get to your dream you’ll be so successful at it that the wait was well worth it. God please let that be me.
Well I’m done with my jealous rant until my next steps,
DreamChaser.
Once again, if you haven’t read William Deresiewicz’ article “Faux Friendship,” I highly recommend it.
I recall my first year of grad school being crazy enough without the complications of electronic social networking. As if I didn’t have enough reasons to feel old in my early twenties, on my first day I had a student abbreviate a discussion with me into another language (“Hey. Can we convo? LOL. Sorry, I like to abbrev.”), and soon after I felt the outward pressure of dealing with virtual friends—hereafter referred to as “friendeds.” After much prodding from my peers, I finally opted to give Facebook a shot, but only if I could assure that I could have all the privacy I wanted, and more. I resolved to only “friend” people that I had actual face-to-face interactions with, but my interactions on Facebook were limited until I discovered my personal Holy Grail: ultra-paranoid privacy settings. Thanks to the setting which removed my searchability on Facebook, I was free to happily enjoy all Facebook had to offer from the confines of my virtual cloaking device.
As the years have gone by, however, the ever-widening user base has had some undesirable results. While Facebook features (Facebook chat, applications, video, etc.) have consistently expanded, I’ve always had my private little wall that prevented “that one creepy guy from the coffee shop who I really never want to talk to” or “that obnoxious girl from my sophomore physics class,” or “my high school graduating class” from attempting to “friend” me. Sure, you can always ignore the friend requests, but can’t they just not know I’m there? Regardless, I’m proud to say that I’m still app-fee and I have resisted the urge to upload video or engage in real-time chat. I also was completely invisible to all but those I actually wanted to communicate with. What’s nice, is that I have had that choice.
You can run, but you can't hide. At least not anymore.
As of December 10th, I can still opt out of search results, but I have no means to opt out of being “friended” by “friends of friends” if they happen to see my picture or name in a group or wall post. “But they’re your friends’ friends,” Facebook says. “Why wouldn’t you want them to be your friend?” Well, if you’ve got one Facebook acquaintance that’s “friended” all of Northwest Ohio—and we all have got at least one who has—then that opens you up to all of Northwest Ohio as a “friend of a friend.” My real friends’ friends are not mine, so why on Earth would the Grand High Facebook council assume that I want to have the friendeds of my friendeds be able to see me? Facebook friendeds of friendeds are exponentially further away from being actual friends. Sure, there might be some that are, but does that make it worth opening me up to all of the friends of a guy a met once at a conference in New York?
The painful truth is that social networks like Facebook and MySpace have the power to dictate social privacy trends. What makes Facebook different from myspace is its respect of privacy, which has steadily eroded with every new app. Every “feature” which enables users to share more establishes a new trend which eventually becomes a standard. Not only do these new features presuppose that people want to share as much as possible, they actually encourage people to make public things that they would have never considered to display in the past. As much as I hypocritically condemn the self-important web 2.0, whether or not you want to share pictures of yourself doing a keg-stand in a unitard isn’t my business. However, you make it my business by giving all of them access to me.
I notice that every time I type “friend,” it means less and less until the word is almost meaningless. I wonder if having 1,283 “friends” on Facebook has the same effect on actual friendship?
“This information is name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. The overwhelming majority of people who use Facebook already make most or all of this information available to everyone. We’ve found that most people who do limit access just want to avoid being found in searches or prevent contact from strangers.”
-Facebook Blog
There’s a new fake email message making its way around the web the last few months. This time, it targets Facebook users.
The messages all have something to do with your Facebook password, using subject lines such as “Password Reset Confirmation Email.” They contain an attachment that is supposed to be your new password, but is actually a pretty nasty Trojan horse program that opens your computer up to a variety of attacks. One of these programs is known as Bredolab, and it’s just bad news all around. Below is the text of an example message from “The Facebook Team:”
Hey,
Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients your password has been changed. You can find your new password in attached document.
Thanks
The Facebook Team
There are other fake Facebook messages that try to lure victims with a “New Login System” message and contain a disguised link. In this case, it seems to be a pretty standard password-stealing attempt, but given the amount of malware that can be spread and the fraud that can be committed with a hacked Facebook account, it could lead to much worse problems than someone just messing with your Facebook page.
Facebook is never going to send you an email message with your password as an attachment. In fact, they’re never going to send you an attachment at all. If you get one of these messages, hold your cursor over the link (DO NOT CLICK) and you’ll see that the message actually takes you to a non-Facebook website (most likely hosted overseas).
Furthermore, Facebook isn’t going to “confirm” your request for a password reset unless you’ve actually requested it, and any links contained in these messages will be hosted at Facebook.com, not a website with just an IP address (numbers separated by periods, as in ”123.45.678.90″), and not a website hosted overseas.
Once again, a new threat just goes to reinforce the old rules of thumb: never open an attachment in an email message you weren’t expecting, and never click on links in an unsolicited email message without verifying first that the message is legitimate.
What is the deal with Facebook and Twitter lately? It seems like they’ve both been targets of an awful lot of phishing, fraud and malware activity these past few months.
Both sites have astounding numbers of users—I recently heard that if Facebook was a country, it would be the fourth most populous in the world, just behind the U.S.—so I imagine it has to do with the sheer numbers involved. When you’ve got over 300 million potential victims, even a 0.1% success rate (1 in 1,000) is a pretty large number of people.
I don’t get it, to be honest, but it’s here, and it’s happening, and I guess I have to deal with it now.
It started off as a decision. And I should have heeded the warnings. But, no, I didn’t, and now I’m stuck dealing with something I shouldn’t have to. It should have been resolved a while ago, and if I had done what my gut was telling me, I wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. But… ta da?
I’ve done it over the phone. Over text. Over Facebook message. No, it’s not what you think it is. Gutter brain, get off my blog. It’s an argument, something very real that I’ll have to deal with tomorrow.
As a leader, I guess you have several things you have to deal with.
Stability. You can’t say one thing and then say another.
Balance. You have to keep your cool.
Firmness. You have to agree fully with everything you’re saying, even if it’s 2AM and you’re seeing llamas outside your window.
Some people don’t quite get that, and I don’t see why they should lead. I’ve been a follower in the past, and I know what I like and don’t like from a leader. They’re the same things that make an argument (discussion, debate, etc.) win. If you look like you aren’t at your wit’s end with something, you’ll be fine with it. Right?
I have a feeling what I’m doing tomorrow will work. I’m still unsure, though, about how I’m going to present it. Carefully, check. But I get kind of passionate about arguments. And with two coming at me right in the face tomorrow, what am I supposed to do?
Let’s take it as it comes, I guess. It’s better than worrying about it now.
Online social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter really went to work in 2009.
Previously the domain of college kids, geeks and garage bands, social networking caught the interest of businesses last year. That trend is only heating up for 2010.
One Rochester company, MLT Group Advertising & Marketing, is adding social media planning to its menu of print, video and Web design services as the calendar flips into a new decade.
“These days when people out there are looking for a product or service, their first stop is the Web,” says MLT Founder Mike Pruett.
And businesses are starting to notice. According to the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” by StrongMail, businesses surveyed cited e-mail marketing, social media, and search engine optimization as their top three priorities for the coming year.
Pruett pointed out Pepsi-Cola recently announced its decision to forgo its usually multi-million dollar TV commercial slots during this year’s Super Bowl and use part of that money for online marketing.
“The larger companies are starting to get it,” he says.
But is social media really something that a small business in Rochester or Byron needs to have to be in the game?
“If you are a business that sells directly to consumers, probably. If your target market, extends beyond the local area, definitely,” says Alan DeKeyrel, owner of Corporate Web Services, Inc. “If you sell to businesses and stay mainly in a small area, it might not be a big help. However, it can’t hurt to be there.”
DeKeyrel, a long-time technology expert, started marketing himself in 2009 as someone who can speak to business groups about social media trends. As such, he has a speaking engagement in Salt Lake City, Utah in early 2010.
While setting up a Twitter or a Facebook account is free and relatively simple, Pruett of MLT says it is what a business does with those accounts that really matters.
“A lot of people can teach you about social media; what we do is help you develop it and actually walk you through it every step of the way,” he said.
It is another path to reach potential customers, especially young people, says DeKeyrel.
“These days they are a lot smarter than in past. They don’t want to be sold to,” he said.
Pruett agrees, but stresses that he believes companies need to have a variety of ways to reach their markets to be successful.
“Is it going to replace TV, radio and newspapers? No. It is not the magic bullet. It’s another tool,” he said.
(its this Coldplay music)
Online social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter really went to work in 2009.