Image via Wikipedia

In our world today, it’s likely that you’ve heard of a little website by the name of “Facebook.” And if you haven’t, then you probably have been living under a rock. So with the phenomenon that is the largest social networking platform on the web, we are provided the chance to be more connected than ever before—and although being connected via Facebook allows for convenience, fun and other great opportunities, it unfortunately also fosters the misfortune of encountering individuals who aren’t connected for the same, good intentions as you…

Because the internet creates a place where anonymity is easy to obtain and take advantage of, you never know who you could be interacting with…or who could be checking out every detail of your Facebook profile. So before logging on to post pictures, write on a friend’s wall or “like” the page of your favorite band, be sure to check out the following ways that you can protect yourself on Facebook:

• Limit the personal information you share:- The whole point of social networking is to be social, right? And being social means sharing information with others…but before you get too carried away with the whole concept, stop and remember that once your information hits the internet, there is the chance that anyone in the world can see it. This is why in the “Info” section of your profile, it is best to only stick to the basics—never include your home address, place of employment, phone number, email or any other personally identifying details that would set you apart from the next person.

• Choose your friends wisely:- You’ve probably heard this saying since you were a kid, but no matter what your age, it’s one that should be listened to—especially when it comes to choosing ones on Facebook. Sure, it’s fun to rack up the amount of friends on your account to numbers hovering in the thousands—however, when you don’t actually know the people you are friends with on the internet, you could be asking for trouble. To avoid harassment or trickery from strangers lurking on the web, accept friend requests only from those people who you are acquaintances with in real life. And if anyone makes you feel uncomfortable on Facebook, don’t be afraid to cease all communication, block the person and even consider reporting them to the social network.

• Keep your location undisclosed:- With Facebook you have the opportunity to share with everyone what you are doing, who you are with and exactly what you look like. So think before you use Facebook’s “Check-In” tool, update a status disclosing your location or post a mobile upload of where you are. These bits of information broadcasted on Facebook will give predators or other wrong-doers the information they need to inflict physical harm upon you or burglarize your home when you aren’t there.

• Use your privacy settings:- The creators of Facebook are well aware of the dangers that come with interacting on the internet so they’ve given you the ability to make your Facebook experience as secure as possible with their privacy settings. You can tailor these to meet your personal needs, but it is suggested that you use the highest possible settings to manage your default privacy, what you post, your tags, what gets shared with websites, how you block/report people and how you share all other information.

Joe Morris is a guest post author who shares with us tips for safely using Facebook. In addition, Joe also owns Best Dating Site where he provides tips for safe online dating.

Will Facebook start charging due to the new profile changes?

No.

But don’t let the truth get in the way of a good old-fashioned chain letter, spreading like billy-o across the social network.

IT IS OFFICIAL. IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU. PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON, IF NOT YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED IF YOU DO NOT PAY

It’s poppycock of course. Facebook doesn’t need to charge you to use Facebook, it’s making plenty of money already by allowing advertisers to reach its 800 million users.

It’s far from the first time that Facebook users have been duped by hoaxes and chain letters. For example, earlier this year, messages were spreadingthat because the social network had become too slow the site was considering deleting inactive accounts. Again, totally bogus.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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• ‘Facebook Charging’ Chain Letter Spreads (huffingtonpost.com)
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• Facebook price grid? $9.99 for gold membership? The charging hoax continues to spread (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• Facebook rumor false . (caribnewsnow.wordpress.com)
• No, Facebook Will Not Make You Pay to Get the New Profiles (mashable.com)

Image by TaranRampersad via Flickr

For many, being “unfriended” is a fate worse than death.

But it’s not something you’d know about right away.

In previous versions of Facebook, there was no easy way to see which of your “friends” had decided to sever your relationship on the social network. Sure, you could always go to their profile to check, but that required the effort of remembering who they were.

While “old Facebook” made the online friendship breakup a bit less-in-your-face, the new Facebook Timelinemakes it way easier to see who’s decided to ax your online friendship.

If you’ve already enabled your new profile, you can check it out right now.

Here’s how you can see who’s unfriended you:

First, pick a year from your timeline (any year since you joined will do).

Then, find the “Friends” box for that year. This will tell you how many people you added in this year.

Click on the link that reads something like “Made ___ New Friends.” That link will bring up a new box, showing all the people you were friends with. If an “Add Friend” button appears next to their name, then you are no longer friends.

Granted this goes both ways. The “Add Friend” button will appear next to the people you’ve unfriended, not just the people who have unfriended you. It doesn’t show who ended the relationship.

This feature, however, lies at the core of the new Facebook changes, providing insight into how a person’s life and online relationship change over time. As Mark Zuckerberg said at the f8 keynote, the new profile is really going to give people a chance to put their whole history online.

Whether users regard this as a privacy breach remains to be seen, but it must be noted that these “unfriendings” are only easily available to users looking at their own profiles. If someone else is looking at your “Friends” box from a certain year, they can see that you were friends once, but not the current status of the relationship.

Want to know whats new in Facebook Timeline Click.

Source :- http://www.buzzfeed.com & http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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• HOW TO: Use the New Facebook to See Who Has Unfriended You (mashable.com)
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• See Who Unfriended You on Facebook with New Timeline (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• Use the New Facebook To See Who Unfriends You [Facebook] (gizmodo.com)
• How To Use The New Facebook To See Who Unfriends You (businessinsider.com)
• Unintended Facebook Feature of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)

A hoax is spreading like wildfire on Facebook, claiming that hackers are posting pornographic movies on users’ walls which are invisible to the owners of the wall but are visible to friends and family.

You can imagine how that would be pretty embarrassing if it were true. Fortunately, it’s nonsense.

Here’s what a typical message looks like, spread by a Facebook user who thinks they are warning their friends – but really perpetuating the hoax.

ATTENTION FRIENDS! HACKERS ARE DOING DAMAGE AGAIN ON FACEBOOK! PORNOGRAPHIC MOVIES ARE BEING POSTED ON OUR BEHALF ON THE WALLS OF OUR PROFILES! WE DO NOT SEE THEM, BUT OTHER PEOPLE DO, AS IF IT WERE OUR PUBLICATION! SOMETIME EVEN OUR SUPPOSED Comments APPEARS. IF YOU SEE SUCH A THING IN MY HOMEPAGE, ALERT ME AND DO NOT OPEN IT BECAUSE IT IS A VIRUS! ...COPY AND RE POST THIS MESSAGE

The message is, of course, nonsense and users should not repost the warning.

We have not seen any evidence that hackers are able to post content to a compromised Facebook wall that the owner of the account cannot see.

The fact that the bogus warning tells you that it’s invisible to your eyes just adds to the panic, of course.

Yes, scammers have often posted thumbnails of what appear to be pornographic videos to compromised Facebook users’ walls, but we have never seen any incidents where the post was *invisible* to the user.

Although a hoax is nothing like as bad as a piece of malware squirming its way between users and stealing information, it’s still a nuisance, clogging up communications, increasing the overall level of spam and perhaps leading people to make bad decisions.

There’s an important lesson here – don’t believe everything you read on the internet, and think twice before you pass a story on to your friends.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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• Facebook ‘Girls Must Be Watch Out Of Her mind’ photo-tagging scam – the lessons to learn (blogoholic.in)
• Lady Gaga Death Rumor: A Giant Hoax (blogoholic.in)
• ‘May God always bless..’ Facebook virus hoax spreads (blogoholic.in)
• Invitation Facebook warning spreads Olympic torch virus hoax (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)

Image via CrunchBase

list of 27 female founders who are changing industries, reshaping the public sector, doing good, and helping others, all by using technology in creative new ways.

These women are also active Twitter users who are each worth following for the insights and advice they offer about everything from entrepreneurship and VCs to social media and coding. They include CEOs and CTOs, experienced entrepreneurs and experts, scientists and engineers.

• Rashmi Sinha – CEO and co-founder, SlideShare & Follow her: @Rashmi

• Susan Wu – Co-founder, Ohai, a creator of multiplayer online games. Founding partner at the Obvious Corporation, an “idea incubator” headed by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, as well as former Twitter product chief Jason Goldman.  Follow her: @Sw

• Caterina Fake – Co-founder, photo-sharing service Flickr, recommendation-engine Hunch. Follow her: @Caterina

• Kanchan Koya – Co-Founder, SwitchBiotics, which researches new antibiotics to treat “superbugs” and other infections. Follow her: @KKoya

• Allyson Kapin – Founder, Women Who Tech . Follow her: @WomenWhoTech

• Angela Benton – Founder and publisher, Black Web 2.0. Founder, NewMEAccel, a startup accelerator for companies led by minorities. Follow her: @ABenton

• Alexa Hirschfeld – Co-founder, online invitation service PaperlessPost. Follow her: @AlexaHirschfeld

• Gina Trapani – Founder, LifeHacker. Follow her: @GinaTrapani

• Linda Avey – Co-founder, 23andMe.com, a “genetic testing service that provides information and tools to understand your DNA,” and Curious, Inc. Follow her: @LindaAvey

• Brooke Moreland – Founder, Fashism, a social shopping site that lets users rate each others’ outfits, accessories and style choices. Follow her: @AudraBrookie

• Kaliya Hamlin – An expert on online identity issues and co-founder, Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, Internet Identity Workshop. Follow her: @IdentityWoman

• Carol Realini – Founder, Obopay, which provides mobile payments and banking services. Follow her: @CarolRealini

• Cathy Edwards – Co-founder and CTO, Chomp, a search engine for apps. Follow her: @CathyE

• Jennifer Pahlka – Founder, Code for America, a non-profit organization that aims to help people in the tech industry work with the public sector. Follower her: @PahlkaDot

• Angela Beesley Starling – Co-founder, Wikia, which hosts community sites that any user can create or add to, and member of Wikimedia’s advisory board. Follow her: @Wikiangela

• Katrin Verclas – Co-founder, MobileActive.org, a non-profit that seeks to use mobile technology to promote social change. Follow her: @Katrinskaya

• Ellen Miller – Co-founder and executive director, Sunlight Foundation, an organization that seeks to increase government transparency and accountability using technology. Founder, Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign. Follow her: @EllnMllr

• Laura Fitton – Founder, oneforty, a social media management company. Follow her: @Pistachio

• Cheryl Contee – Co-founder, Fission Strategy, which helps “organizations inspire social good through social media”. Follow her: @Ch3ryl

• Jen Bekman – Founder and CEO, 20×200, an online marketplace for affortable art. Follow her: @JenBee

• Cynthia Padnos – Founding managing director, Illuminate Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in high-tech startups. Follow her: @IlluminateVC

• Sarah Allen – Co-founder and CTO, Mightyverse, an online compendium of translations in numerous different languages. Follow her: @Ultrasaurus

• Stephanie Robesky – Founder and CEO, GrowsUp.com, an online retailer selling items for children and babies. Follow her: @NerdGirl

• Alexis Ringwald – Co-founder, Valence Energy, a startup acquired by Serious Energy that had focused on creating energy management software. Follow her: @AlexisRingwald

• Juliana Rotich – Co-founder, Ushahidi, a non-profit that uses tech to crowdsource and map information from around the world. Follow her: @Afromusing 

• Leah Culver – Co-founder of Convore, an application designed to facilitate real-time group communication. Follow her: @LeahCulver

• Amy Jo Martin – Founder, Digital Royalty, a company that advises athletes, brands and teams, such as Nike and Shaquille O’Neal, on their social media strategies. Follow her: @AmyJoMartin

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Rashmi Sinha

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Image via CrunchBase

LinkedIn offers a slew of helpful tools for landing a job, but making your profile stand out from the millions of others can sometimes seem like a daunting task. As of August 2011, the site boasted over 120 million users and more than 2 million companies worldwide.

If you want to be noticed (and hired!), one thing you should not do is describe yourself the same way everyone else does: In 2010, LinkedIn conducted a study that found the 10 most overused words on users’ profile are “extensive experience,” “innovative,” “motivated,” “results-oriented,” “dynamic,” “proven track record,” “team player,” “fast-paced,” “problem solver,” “entrepreneurial.”

• Use LinkedIn InMaps To Visualize Your Network – If you’re a visual learner, you’ll likely benefit from this color-coded web that maps your LinkedIn connections. Each color represents a different group within your professional world. You can fill in the legend by labeling each color: Red for places you’ve worked, blue for friends and family, green for college, yellow for conferences you attended, and so on. Once your network is laid out for you, you’ll be able to see in which areas you need to focus on building connections. You can also share the map with your connections on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

• Import Contacts – For those who wish to curate a broad network of connections, LinkedIn lets you import contacts from your email address book, be it Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, Gmail, Yahoo!, Aol or Hotmail.

• Utilize The ‘Answers’ Section – LinkedIn’s “Answers” section lets you pose practical question to those in your network and establish new connections with experienced people. You can also send your questions directly to connections via email.
  You can beef up your profile by answering questions left by other users. According to LinkedIn,

  Every time the questioner picks your answer as the best, you gain a point of expertise in the category of the question. The best way you can gain expertise is to answer questions in the areas you know. Experts in each area are recognized on LinkedIn: the more points of expertise you gain, the higher you appear on lists of experts.

• Create And Participate In Polls -LinkedIn’s Poll creator app is a great way to maintain an active voice on the site. You can create polls and surveys for your own profile, participate in other people’s polls and share results with your connections.Writes Jimmy Chen for the LinkedIn Blog:

  Given our professional audience on LinkedIn, we know there are millions of marketers or small businesses who’d not only like to ask questions on the web, but would also like to understand the results with a detailed breakdown. How do CEOs respond to your question? Does age influence the results? Do men and women answer differently? The new LinkedIn Polls results page provides all this information and more.

• Enrich Your Profile With More Applications – LinkedIn has many profile apps users can try out. If you have a professional blog, add the WordPress app, which will push new blog posts to your LinkedIn profile. Similarly, the Tweets app displays your most recent tweets. Another fun app is the Amazon Reading List, which lets you add to your profile the books you’re currently reading and lets you see what others in your network are reading. TripIt shows your connections where you’re traveling and helps you meet up with others abroad.

• Take Advantage Of Student Perks – If you’re a student or recent grad, you can post your extracurricular and work experience in a special section of your LinkedIn profile. You can also include special projects you completed, as well as honors and test scores you received.
  The site’s StudentJobs portal has tons of listings about who’s hiring. Select a field in the dropdown menu (“What kind of job are you looking for?”) and a list of relevant companies that are hiring will fill the page, along with any people in your network who are employed at those companies.

• Download LinkedIn Mobile Apps – LinkedIn’s mobile apps for Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices will keep you in the loop, no matter where you are.

• Check & Follow Company Pages – A company page shows who the company has recently hired. From here, you can view what kind of work experience new hires have, which companies they worked at previously and more. A company’s page will also tell you where employees go next once they’ve moved on.

• See Who’s Viewing Your Profile – Trace who’s been viewing you on LinkedIn and how many times your profile has been viewed in the past few days. The “who’s viewed my profile?” tool will also show you how frequently your profile appears in search results. You can improve this score by adding keywords and phrases that recruiters are looking for.

• Personalize Your Job Search – LinkedIn’s JobsInsider browser toolbar personalizes the jobs posted on widely used job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs. When you open a job posting, JobsInsider shows you the people in your LinkedIn network that work at that hiring company. You can also request an introduction to the hiring manager so you can get your resume directly into the right hands.

• Upgrade Your Account – Though a basic LinkedIn account is free, you may be interested in upgrading to Business Plus, one of the site’s premium options. This upgrade will cost you $25 a month and offers more options, such as a larger pool of searchable profiles and a more complete and detailed list of who has viewed your profile. The other two premium options are geared toward high usage customers and cost $50 a month and $500 a month.

• Create A Custom URL – Using your own name for your LinkedIn profile URL makes you a little easier to find. To customize your URL, visit your profile editor page and click “Edit” next to “Your Public Profile URL.” If someone has already used your name for their own URL, you can try other variations of your name until you find a match.

• Create A Profile In Another Language – If you speak multiple languages, show off your proficiency by creating a profile in another language.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Twitter is in the process of adding new features to its website that will helps you sort and view what users are saying about you and what is important to users within your network.

The changes are coming to the selection of tabbed streams (located under Twitter.com‘s tweet box), which let you isolate specific information from the main realtime tweet stream. Twitter will push more content to your @Mentions stream, which will now be called the @Username tab and will display your personal Twitter handle when it rolls out to your account. The site is also adding a new stream, which will live under a tab titled “Activity.”

The “@Username” tab will give you a look at who’s tweeting about you. When another user favorites one of your tweets, retweets a tweet you’ve posted or mentions your username in a new tweet, you’ll be able to view this activity from your @Username stream. This tab also lets you see when a user starts following you.

The “Activity” tab gives you a look at what else your tweeps are talking about–besides you. It will show tweets your followers are favoriting and retweeting. From here, you can also see when people you follow add new followers.

These features are similar to those offered by Twitter desktop app TweetDeck, which Twitter acquired in May.

TechCrunch calls these new additions “smart” and says that they “will make Twitter feel more alive.”

If the new features haven’t rolled out to your account yet, you can check out screenshots of what they’ll look like (below), courtesy of the Twitter Blog.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Your Twitter stream just got less noisy and more useful (thenextweb.com)
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Image via Wikipedia

Twitter has added a way to flag links within tweets as “possibly sensitive.” The company announced late Thursday that there is a new field in the Twitter streaming API that will show up whenever a tweet contains a link, giving Twitter users the option to be warned before they click links that might be too sensitive for the workplace, or for tender ears and eyes.

The new feature is not functional yet, but Twitter was informing developers that it was just added and is now in the testing phase. According to Twitter representative Taylor Singletary, “In the future, we’ll have a family of additional API methods & fields for handling end-user ‘media settings’ and possibly sensitive content.”

According to Gizmodo, Twitter reps say the company doesn’t intend to censor material. But according to Twitter’s media policy document, the company will “remove media that might be considered sensitive such as nudity, violence, or medical procedures.”

In the announcement, Singletary encouraged those who were curious about how this capability would ultimately be used to read that media policy document.

To us, this seems like a feature that’s long overdue, giving users the ability to control the kind of content they or their children are exposed to, letting them use Twitter without fear of being unpleasantly surprised when they click on an inappropriate link.

Source :- http://mashable.com

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Facebook users can now let their friends know when they are expecting a child, complete with due date and chosen baby name, the social networking blog Inside Facebook discovered Wednesday.

Users have been able to add family members with Facebook accounts to their profiles since December 2010, when Facebook last gave profile designs a major facelift. In February 2011 Facebook made further changes by inserting an option for a “civil union” and “domestic partnership,” and now they have added an “Expected: child” field as well.

Here is what your new option to announce an expected child on Facebook looks like:

To add this information to your profile, click on your profile, then “Edit Settings,” followed by “Friends and Family.” From the drop-down menu listing different relations, you can choose “Expected: Child” from other options such as “Daughter,” “Father,” or “Cousin: Female.”

Though Inside Facebook reported that Facebook had been allowing them to tag friends as their expected children, that glitch appears to have disappeared. A user can, however, still enter her friend’s names as her “Expected: Child,” though that person’s profile information will not be synced.

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This post is part of a new series from HuffPostTech, Socialized, that will profile a different social startup–from apps to services to websites–every day. Want to be featured on the site? Email us about your startup, which should have a social media component and be less than two years old, at socialized@huffingtonpost.com.

Do you ever feel like you don’t know the “friends” you’ve amassed through your various social networking accounts? Wish there were an easier way to get to know them all? There’s a simple solution: just ask.

What it is: Part social network, part question-and-answer service, Formspring is designed to bring web-savvy people closer together by providing a platform that allows for more intimate interactions than you might find in blog comments or Facebook wall posts.

When you go out for a cup of coffee with a new friend, you might ask questions about where she grew up or what her favorite season is, questions that will grant some insight into her personality. Though they seem to flow naturally in the real world, such questions can be hard to formulate online, according to Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh.

“We all want to share things about ourselves with people,” Olonoh told The Huffington Post, “but sometimes it’s hard to come up with something to say when you’re looking at an empty box.”

Formspring aims to transform that “empty box,” found on any blog or Facebook wall, by encouraging users to ask “What do I want to know?” rather than “What do I want to say?”

How it works: Users can link a Formspring account with blogging accounts like Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger, as well as social network accounts like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

Connecting via Facebook, for example, will kick-start your Formspring experience by letting you automatically follow Facebook friends who already have Formspring profiles. You can also invite Facebook friends to join you on Formspring.

Questions are directed to a user’s private inbox, where the user can pick and choose which questions to answer. Users can ask questions anonymously if they like, but Olonoh said that a username is stamped onto 80 percent of all Formspring questions.

When a user responds to a message from his inbox, both the question and answer appear on his public wall, where posts appear in a Twitter-like stream. Other users can visit his wall and read his responses to learn more about him.

A user’s profile displays basic information (name, location, website) that might prompt queries from a visitor. Questions can be personal (“What was your first job?”) or just for fun (“Jello or pudding?”)–whatever engages users.

The site also boasts simple privacy settings and easy access to “safe posting” guidelines.

Why you’d use it: According to Olonoh, Formspring exists as a service apart from question-and-answer sites, such as Quora, where users tend to seek factual answers from practical questions. Instead, Formspring is more of a socialization network, where users come to get better acquainted.

“We don’t really see ourselves in the Q&A space,” Olonoh said. “Quora users, for example, are trying to get to the right answer. But Formspring is more personal. It’s among friends.”

Formspring’s verified celebrity clientele, including comedienne Margaret Cho and singer Enrique Iglesias, have found the service to be an effective forum to connect with fans.

How to get it: Signing up for a Formspring account is as easy as visiting Formspring.me and creating a username and password. The site then asks if you’d like to connect your new account with any existing blog or social networking accounts. From there, you can start asking and answering questions.

Currently, the service is available only on the web. Though several third-party apps have made a stripped-down version available to mobile customers, Formspring hopes to launch a more robust app of its own later this year.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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