Keeping Your Kids Safe on Facebook

Here’s a good video by Christine Plich on how to keep your kids safe on Facebook.

Personalize Your Facebook URL

Tomorrow if you haven’t heard, you will be able to have a customized URL for your Facebook account. According to the Facebook blog, on Saturday June 13 at 12:01 am you can start your search.

What does this mean? Right now if you try to direct a friend to your Facebook page, it’s one long nasty, unmemorable website address that makes no sense. In the past, Facebook users had obtain the profile.to service to create free memorable link to their profile. Now you’ll be able to say go to http://www.facebook.com/sally.jones or something of that nature.

Are you going to get your name right away?

Alerts… Too Many Alerts? Control it.

If you a social networkaholic then you need to try AlertThingy. This application sits on your desktop, like an instant messaging (IM) program, but instead of getting IMs you get real-time updates from your Twitter, Facebook, etc… accounts. Your friends alerts can now be followed without even opening your web browser or mobile phone. Get their updates straight to this free application that not only works on a Mac but PC.

Tips if you decide to install it:

• Turn off the “show pop-up notification” option if you are following lots of people
• Create groups of people you follow the most
• Organizing alerts by showing all, those directed at you or ones you mark “very interesting” is easy

Try the Social Desktop Program.
http://www.alertthingy.com/

Pixelpipe: Post Anything, Anywhere

A few months back, Leading Hands talked about the evolution of social media tools with the advent of Hellotxt. Now, another tool hoping to achieve the same calibur of use called Pixelpipe. Given the constantly growing number of micro-blogging, photo sharing, and video hosting sites, it is getting harder and harder to keep all these accounts updated. One of our favorite applications to post media files to a variety of services is Pixelpipe. Pixelpipe takes care of the distribution of your files, so that you can simultaneously post a picture to flickr and Facebook, and send a message…

http://pixelpipe.com

Social Networking Surpasses Email

A recent Nielsen report proclaims the declining use of email and the emergence of social networking. Neilsen breaks down their activities of the Internet into five categories: search, software, blogging, email and portals. Blogging aka microblogging/social networking (Facebook and Twiiter) is now the fourth most popular activity on the web.

86% use search like Google, 85% explore portals like Yahoo, 76% use software like Turbotax, 66% blog like on Facebook and 65% write email as with Hotmail. This study was based on a worldwide study with Europe and the United States as majority users. Another surprising fact is one in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites.

Are you in shock over this statistic or does this reflect your online activity?
http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090309.pdf

10 Signs You’re Addicted to Facebook

Ten signs you are becoming addicted to Twitter, Facebook, etc…

1. You prefer to reply to Facebook instead of taking out trash
2. You check it when you wake up
3. You use your mobile app to update status
4. You contemplated giving it up for Lent
5. You can’t decide if you like Facebook or Twitter better so you respond to all separately
6. You think email is outdated form of communication
7. You can’t remember last time you called someone
8. You check it in middle of night
9. You monitor flux of messages all day while at work
10. You have more than one screen name for the same service

Suggestion: Get FriendFeed to get daily archives of Twitter, Facebook, etc… to get your life back.

Do you agree with these points?

Facebook, The Class Reunion Killer?

As the years go by, reunions seem to creep up faster than they should. Now with Internet technology, you can surf Facebook and connect with old high school friends like no tomorrow, but what does this all mean?

Now with Facebook, you can see what the person looks like, what they do for a profession and even see what their kids look like. So, I ask you, is Facebook a reunion killer? Does it take the surprise out of a reunion or make it stronger because you know more about a person? Do you really want to go to a reunion now if you know everything about someone before you arrive? Is it going to cause less to talk about or more to talk about?

Is Facebook, the class reunion killer?

Carrier Pigeon is Slang for Email?

I was listening to NPR the other day and during a segment they kept saying to contact them by Twitter or Carrier Pigeon. I dismissed the discussion, but it did stick in my crow. Then today I received a call from a friend asking me if I knew anything about that new social networking community called “Carrier Pigeon”. I was stumped. After further research I discovered that this term “Carrier Pigeon” connotates an emerging slang term for email.

For years “Snail Mail” has been slang for the United States Post Office mail service, so now I guess it seems appropriate to poke fun of email because social networking sites like Twitter are the hip form of electronic communication. The carrier pigeon is obviously faster than a snail, so it has that going for it. But what does it say for the remaining electronic forms of communication that haven’t been tagged with a nickname yet?

Nicknames for modes of electronic communication

• snail mail = post office
• email = carrier pigeon
• twitter = pony express?
• text messaging = smoke signal?
• instant messaging = semaphore?

What do you think? Do you use Twitter, Facebook to communicate more than email? Is email a dying breed as the most popular online mode of communication?

Thanks to Ralph Solonitz for the illustration.

Breast Feeding Pics Banned on Facebook

I recently saw on Facebook that a group of breast feeding mothers are protesting the social networking site’s policy of no nude photos. It seems as though Facebook has made this group of 111,580 moms take down photos of breast feeding their children.

Facebook stated that they were one of the first social networking websites and this rule has been in place since its conception. Their policy is to remove pictures featuring nudity regardless of their context.

What do you think? Do you think Facebook should let moms post these pictures on their Facebook page or is Facebook right to make them take it down?