The Codebelay Blog

I looked at the Linkedin, Flickr, and Facebook iPhone apps to see how secure they were.

When you log-in your password is safe and protected with SSL:

However, let’s say that you view your list of contacts on the LinkedIn iPhone app:

You’re basically giving away your contacts to the hacker at the cafe who is taking advantage of the fact that you’re using WiFi.

Here’s the scoop on the iPhone Apps.

Your data is not secure with these apps:

Flickr: Password Secure, Data not
Facebook: Password Secure, Data not
Linkedin: Password Secure, Data not

All your data is secure with these apps:

Gmail: Password Secure, Data Secure
Hushmail: Password Secure, Data Secure

Hushmail even has an option to turn off security, but why would you?

Here’s a list of tweets you’ll most likely read at SxSW 2010:

• OMFG, landed! (Ya, you and 12,000 other people.)
• OMFG, I’m @crowdedplace hanging out with my new BFFs @socialmediadouche1 and @socialmediadouche2.
• I’m sick of folks tweeting who they’ll be hanging out with. I don’t care. Turning the twitter fire hose off.
• OMFG, I’m just telling people who I’m hanging out with because my boss needs to know.
• My hotel room is #69. Just bring yourself.
• OMFG, That DM you sent?!!! That actually went public.
• Big line in front of @crowdedplace.
• No line @emptyplace.

I think SxSW Interactive is an awesome event. It’s one of those few tech conferences where if you make a friend there they stay your IRL friend for quite a long time.

Also it’s a great place for making complex deals in a really easy way. Think of the pieces that it takes to launch a major Internet app with mobile, web and video pieces. You can get those stake holders in one place at SxSW, and hammer out a huge deal with 2 days of face time.

Bad things happen:

It only took twitter about 3 days to recover from this.

Is there a faster way?

First let’s look at the current options:

• TweetBackup (NY Times)
• BackUpMyTweets
• If you are popular enough and folks raise a raucous, Twitter will go into the database back-up and restore your account into its pristine set up.

BackupMyTweets required too much info to get it working. No, you cannot have my gmail password.

I’ve tried Tweetbackup and they get kudos for using OAuth to make it easy to back your tweets up.

The 3rd option, begging Twitter, simply can’t scale and will only work for those few elites close to Twitter or popular enough. There isn’t a consumer solution.

How do we solve the problem of social media backup?

The great thing is the problem is:

• technical
• can have the same business model as insurance
• will gain recognition as more snafus happen

Once again, if you haven’t already, use BackUpMyTweets.

Your team will sabotage your career worse than any other nemesis at work, if you let them.

Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself and your company from sabotage:

Who’s popular? Yeah, I know. It sounds like highschool, but like then it’s still in important and socially real factor that’s now kept track of on social media sites.

What is your team’s weakness as perceived by those outside? By the team itself? A good manager can appease the two.

Whose skills are the most respected? Yup you have to get along with this douchebag, if she or he is one. Just create enough space between the two of you.

Any others?

It looks like Open Source will contribute to the building of Cybernetic Life Nodes.
These open source projects are leading the way:

• http://www.leafproject.org/ – vision recognition
• http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/compare.php – voice recognition
• http://rossum.sourceforge.net/ – protocol for sharing code with other robots
• http://www.opencog.org/wiki/The_Open_Cognition_Project - advanced machine cognition
• http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ – robot device interface, outdoor robotic movement
• http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/ – entity resolution, link prediction, social network modeling
• http://www.alicebot.org/about.html - linguistic

The only thing missing is a robotic body to put this stuff in.

It's not easy being virtual.

What could go wrong?

The Bad:

1. Work now requires me to put into my timesheet how long I take for lunch.
2. I missed an appointment on Thursday that was in my facebook events
3. I missed wishing @angmoore Happy Birthday on her Birthday. Happy Birthday, Ang!
4. I missed the Flickr Party which was in my facebook events
5. There’s a lot of side work that I missed from search.twitter.com It’s really a great tool for finding work.
6. I explained to some folks why I hadn’t approved their friend requests or follows in person. That led to interesting conversations.

The Good:

1. I felt a lot more focused
2. There is a shared illusion of connectedness that can prevent you from achieving your dreams. I won’t let that happen to me.
3. I avoided making any embarrassing statements, grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes
4. I enjoyed really focusing on people physically close to me.

Nuggets of Wisdom:

1. I didn’t miss twittering unless I was at a party or bar where I didn’t know anyone.
2. Twitter’s search is Foucault’s panopticon.
3. It’s what you don’t do on Facebook that gets you hired.

If it’s the thought that counts, think about how site diversification has helped out the Gawker Media and Nick Denton these past 6 months.

This set of graphs says it all:

Happy Holidays!

This is now my fourth blog post on Codebelay, and I’ve already given you the tools to open yourself up to social networking online, via your cell phone, and through the old fashioned (but not yet extinct) newspaper and magazine, so you may now be asking yourself how to obtain the monies to fund the new social you. Social networking is a great start to getting out there, meeting new people, and making new connections, but when it’s a new job you want, simple social networking isn’t always enough. You need a more focused kind of networking, but you needn’t sacrifice your social life. Why not mix a little business with pleasure?

The key to any kind of networking is to be constantly aware, always looking. People can (and do) get job tips going to the dentist office or while shopping at the grocery store, they just need to keep an ear out and keep themselves open. So why not put yourself where the right people are clustered together in order to raise your chances?

So where do we find these places? I did say we are mixing business with pleasure, so here’s my suggestion: the local happy hour. You can easily do a search with Yelp or Citysearch for bars located in the same area as the place you would like to be working. Across the street and around the corner are good bets for places people like to head to after a hard day’s work.

In San Francisco, one bar that was given four out of five stars on Yelp and scored number ten on Unthirsty’s Top Ten Happy Hours in San Francisco is the Irish Bank Bar & Restaurant, located near the city’s Financial District in the Nob Hill neighborhood. With moderate prices and a boastfully authentic Irish atmosphere, the Irish Bank is sure to offer an enjoyable evening.

Mars Bar & Restaurant, which made number four on Unthirsty’s Top Ten list, is located in the South of Market district and touts itself as “the perfect place to end your workday.” A lot of reviewers on Yelp, where it averages another four out of five stars, would seem to agree. Their happy hours runs from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening, Monday through Friday. Happy hour dining is offered from five in the evening until eight Monday through Thursday, and four to nine PM on Fridays.

Another San Francisco bar that scored highly on Yelp and Citysearch is Jade Bar. Citysearch awarded Jade Bar best happy hour in both 2007 and 2008, and lists its specialty as an after-work bar. And as more than one reviewer pointed out, it is difficult to beat a two dollar drink special here in the city. Happy hour is Tuesday through Thursday, five in the evening to seven-thirty, and runs all night on Sunday. (What a way to start the week!)

The tech types might want to head down to South Bay and Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina located in Santa Clara not far off US 101. One happy customer described it as having “free food, cheap drinks, and is an after-work place for the tech types.” Go on, make friends. Pedro’s scored four and a half stars out of five over at Citysearch. Pedro’s happy hour runs from four in the afternoon to seven at night, and features one dollar off margaritas (they won best margarita in Silicon Valley in 2005 on Citysearch) among other drink specials.

Also found not too far from US 101 in Sunnyvale is another bar that has been described as being full of “tech-professional types,” the Faultline Brewing Company Restaurant. Moderately priced, Faultline offers something I have yet to see in other bars out here in California: a duck pond. (And if you know of any, please comment and tell me how to find them. Many thanks!) In 2006 and 2007, Faultline was voted as having the Best Beer Selection in Silicon Valley on Citysearch. The wine list also seems more than adequate, which you can look over for yourself on their website. You may also check out their full food menu and a listing of their ales and lagers, as well as “meet” the brewmaster.

Now, I’m not saying that it is a good idea to go pester people in their downtime for a job, but it certainly can’t hurt to make yourself a familiar face while enjoying a nice, relaxing, inexpensive drink, can it? Make some conversation, meet some new friends, listen in one the latest gossip, and who knows? You just might find that one diamond in the rough tidbit of information that could lead you to the next job of your dreams. Good luck! And happy drinking.

If you like to gamble, race cars, assemble jigsaw puzzles, go fishing, play pinball and paper dolls, all while chatting with your friends, have I got a site for you! If you haven’t heard of Gaia Online yet, you will again soon. According to an article on GigaOM posted in April of 2007, Gaia’s formidably diverse forums are “second only to Yahoo in popularity,” and this was over a year ago.

Once lumped in with websites like Neopets, Gaia is now popularly being compared to Facebook and MySpace. But while Facebook and MySpace (among others) encourage users to post actual photos of themselves, at Gaia, users create their own images, and continue to re-create them every sixty seconds if they wish, through the use of avatars (the “paper dolls” mentioned above). Only a small fraction of users include pictures of themselves in their profiles and signatures, which I see as a huge plus in a world where anonymity would seem to be the safest route.

However, having a unique, nearly fully customizable avatar represent you in the forums and world of Gaia offers users the chance to have a face and personality that other message boards and online forums do not. Most Gaians keep their avatars largely consistent (same eyes, same hairstyles, but with a few costume changes), making Gaia’s users recognizable to each other, just as people are in real life.

Sure, Gaia likes to tag itself as “the world’s fastest growing online world hangout for teens,” but to me this seems like wishful thinking, and not because Gaia isn’t growing quickly (it is!), but because out of the ten people I briefly surveyed, only one of them was under the age of twenty, and only two had never before heard of Gaia.

Back when Gaia first started in 2003, it was largely a hangout for anime fans and gamers to find each other, chat, and share links. Founder Derek Liu probably best explained Gaia’s growth when he was interviewed in the site’s early days: “It seems that the growth of Gaia relied mainly on the word of mouth from our users.” And boy, did users talk. Gaia’s popularity as an online forum spread quickly, and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Survey says that the current largest draw for Gaia, however, is its games.

Gaia’s website currently offers its users Cards (blackjack or 21), Slots (slot machines), Rally (a car racing game), Jigsaw (puzzles), Word Bump (for word geeks like myself), Fishing (I hope this doesn’t need explanation), Pinball (see note for Fishing), and Electric Love Factory (“fast paced puzzle action” according to the site). Many of these games allow users to “share a room” and play the games not necessarily together, but at least in a single window where they can see each other’s avatars and chat, an option that my two Gaia-uninitiated said would be a draw for them. As one twenty-one year old young lady put it, “it makes it fun to communicate with others while gaming.” The other (this one twenty-two) agreed, adding, “That sounds cool.” The latter also said that she would probably post in the forums, while the former did not think she would use that feature.

Gaia’s latest foray into online gaming has to be its most ambitious draw of all time, that being into the world of MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) with the recently released zOMG!, brought to us at last by the hardest working team I’ve ever seen. (If the juvenile, netspeak title is a turn-off to you, you are not alone. Many Gaians prefer the original title of the project, Battle, and still commonly refer to it as such.)

For someone who has dumped untold amounts into other MMOs, like World of Warcraft and its expansion the Burning Crusade, the largest perquisite Gaia’s MMO offers is that it is technically 100% free. For those impatient folk with expendable income (you know who you are), Gaia offers something called Gaia cash that may be purchased with real money. Five dollars gets you 500 GC, which can then be exchanged for items used in the game (though I, personally, have yet to see a reason anyone would do so given the high level of drops in the game of those very same items).

Like the rest of Gaia, the MMO is, well, cute. Perhaps the biggest turn-off to older potential users is the site’s overall cartoonish appearance, but then, that can also be a draw to the right people. (The cool ones.) But don’t let the cute stop you from trying out an enjoyable little MMO that really costs you nothing more than your time to play. How many of you play Ragnarok Online and/or Maple Story? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

But the best thing about Gaia isn’t the games or the avatars, but the community created by both. Let me briefly share with you my little story. I joined Gaia just after it first started in 2003, and met one of my now closest friends in the writing forums. She lives in California. I lived in Michigan. At Anime Expo in 2007, I attended a gathering of Gaians where I met another user who is now not only a dear friend, but one of my roommates. In fact, four of my five roommates have accounts on Gaia, and I now reside in California. It was through Gaia that I made these connections across-country that eventually made me decide to relocate.

I guess what I am saying here really boils down to this. If you spend time on the internet visiting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, go to gaming sites like Yahoo! Games or Games.com, or are too poor to support your MMO habit any longer, you should definitely give Gaia Online a try. You never know where it might take you.

Are you sitting alone at your PC or Mac reading this blog? That’s okay. I forgive you. In an age of overtime, job transfers, and clawing your way up the corporate ladder, no one seems to have enough free time any more for leisure activities like going out, having a drink, or, most importantly meeting new people to do these things with. But believe it or not, with the aid of modern (and not so modern) technology, we can squeeze even this into our hectic lives.

Let’s start with the obvious: computers. Not only can you check your email alerts from the comfort of your own cubicle, but there are online dating sites for everything from your own personal geekdom (SweetOnGeeks.com) to body type (LargeAndLovely.com) to any of the major religions on earth (JDate.com, ChristianSingles.com, and BuddhistOnlineDating.com just to name a few). Literally any kind of matchmaking site can be found with the right search engine. Even typing “flying spaghetti monster dating” into Google lands you a few interesting results.

Evenamong online matchmaking sites there is great variety. At a site like Plenty of Fish, users are encouraged to not only fill out profiles but actively post in the site’s forums, which range in topic from relationship and dating issues to science and philosophy. (There are even a few active anime threads for the geek in you.) OKCupid offers its users a variety of fun tests and quizzes, and awards badges, such as “more
independent,” “less old-fashioned,” and “more political,” that are displayed on a user’s profile, and can be used as conversation starters as well as a rudimentary screening process of a user’s personality. Both if these sites are free to use, as are countless others, so do not be dissuaded from joining the online dating phenomenon due to lack of funds.

Sellingyourself through online personals sites is not the only way to meet people through the internet, however. Couples are meeting and hooking up every day by posting on forums, joining newsgroups, exploring 3D virtual worlds (such as Second Life and Entropia Universe), and yes, even playing online games like World of Warcraft can help find you a mate. At least one young gamer proposed to his lovely lady at BlizzCon 2008, much to the delight and cheers of fellow congoers. (The happy couple originally met as rivals posting on RPGamer.com.)

Basically, by being active online as you would be in real life had you the time (or in some cases adequate self-confidence), you can meet a wide range of people, many of whom you would not even have the opportunity to meet offline. The internet doesn’t just offer new ways to meet people, but ways to meet new kinds of people.

But the internet isn’t your only avenue to a new and interesting social life. Due in large part to the high success rate of people meeting online, the more traditional print form of the personal ad is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and should not be overlooked by the less computer savvy. Responding to an ad over the phone, though perhaps more daunting than email, forces a connection much sooner than digital communication, and gauging another person’s reactions and emotions is much easier through hearing his or her voice than reading words on a screen. It also forces you to maintain a conversation, while email sits in your inbox awaiting your attention.

Printed personal ads offer just as much versatility as their online counterparts. Most newspapers across the country offer a personals section, which allows you to look locally, but there are also specialty magazines for various interests and religions that also run personal ads.

Personal ads also, much like Twitter over LiveJournal, force you to be short, sweet, and if you can manage it, clever in hopes of catching that special stranger’s eye. Anyone glancing through a personal ads sheet can attest to the creativity used by many of its users, but this should by no means be a deterrent to the feint of heart. Personal ads are just another tool in your arsenal.

In this on-the-go world, another old technology has come back to haunt us: the phone. More to the point, the rather passé telephone has been replaced by the more modern cell phone and text messaging. Yes, this includes the dating scene. For over fifteen years the Canadian company Teligence has offered social networking over the phone through services like Livelinks, Interactive Male, Fonochat, and a number of others.

Now, sites like Match.com are getting into the phone business, too, with services like Match.com Mobile. Many sites are now combining online and offline options. Prime examples are Crush or Flush and Zogo, both of which users can access using their cell phones or PCs.

Crush or Flush allows you to look at pictures and miniature profiles of singles in your area. If you like what you see, you “crush” them and hopefully make contact. If not, you “flush” them and move on. (People will not be notified if they are ever flushed, so you may surf guilt-free.)

Zogo is perhaps the only totally free dating service for your cell phone (though this doesn’t mean your cell phone service provider won’t add on their own fees, depending on your terms of service). After searching through available profiles, you may add people to your favorites list, or invite them to talk to you. If you both agree to talk (via semi-anonymous text messaging provided by Zogo), you each receive a call from a third number to secure the anonymity of your phone number.

Crush or Flush, Zogo, and their fellow SMS dating services are perhaps even handier than online-only sites, such as those listed in the above paragraphs, given that cell phones are more portable and get wider reception than even a laptop. Double bonus if your cell gets internet!

Much like e-trading has done for the casual investor, modern technology adds far more than serendipity and well-intentioned coupled-up friends to our dating arsenal. Much as we might sometimes wish it otherwise, there really are no longer excuses for not meeting people other than our own apathy.