250+ Facebook Groups Hijacked. Reason – To Raise Social Awareness

In my last post Reported about one of the vulnerabilities of Facebook being pointed out by a developer and there is one more coming this week but this time it is being highlighted in a subtle way. A group calling themselves as Control Your Info have hacked or taken over (as explained by the group itself) around 300 Facebook Groups by taking advantage of one of the major design flaw of Facebook. After hacking the Facebook group they are changing the name of the group to Control Your Info (and not any vulgar names). They have posted everything on their website about the way and their intention of doing this.

First of all what’s the flaw all about? Any Facebook user can create Facebook group and the person who created it becomes the admin of the group. If by any chance admin has left the group, anybody can take-over as the admin of the group and do whatever he/she wants to do with that group. Facebook doesn’t have the any sort of mechanism to automatically elect new admin from within the group. Take for example the most active member of the group can be made the new admin (my way of choosing admin). I am little bit skeptical on the capabilities of Facebook testers as this is the basic functionality or may be this is how Facebook intended to have this feature.

Blunders that an employee commits

An employee is satiated with his/her work as it is in line with their needs and interests but due to the competitive nature of the market, the employee opts for a change because of many reasons. This could be a huge blunder if the opportunities attached with are not analyzed.

At the dawn of ones career mistakes do occur as there exists a factor called nervousness that disallows the person to remain calm. During the first interview the employee is unable to answer questions even if he/she knows the answer to it. Another mistake that a fresher does is duplicating another resume hence it is often found that students from same college have the same CV format. Also the job seekers forget to eliminate points that might not be valid for them. For example if you are replicating a CV ideally made for someone in the service industry, it might contain facts like height, weight, etc. But when you are applying for an administration job, these facts are not important.

Most employees change job for an increment but before making this decision one should compare the present work environment with the new. Even if the new job pays you more there are other things that one requires to continue working. One should avoid jumping at every opportunity. Every office has different work culture and adopting a new culture after being familiar with one particular culture for long is difficult.

The role you play at a new venture might be different and difficult from the previous one hence the decision should not be made in haste. Look for the opportunities to diversify when entering a new organization and have an optimistic attitude if the decision has been already made.

Bikramjit Dutta

“Human Resource”-A magazine for the discerning professional

www.humanresource.net.in

Power Of Blog: What A Blogger Can Do?

It is just a matter of one blog post that is changing the whole ecosystem around Social Networks and can go a long way in removing the scams presents in these social networks. It’s a fight of a blogger against the companies who scam on Social Networks like Facebook and Myspace and create a bad user experience. It’s a story of how a blogger may have instigated the process of replacing a CEO from her place. Bloggers are often criticized that they write things out of their limits and create controversy just to gain some traffic. I am not at all disagreeing with this point because there are always some bad elements in any setup but the whole community can’t be blamed for this. People some times over look that journalism is there to regulate things and act as a watch dog. It is there to help people differentiate between a good guy and a not so good guy.


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News Corp. To Block Google. [Yawn...] Good News For Other Online Publishers

Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp. ,one of the largest media empire in the world has said in an interview with the Sky News Australia that they are planning to block Google from accessing its content. News Corp. owns newspapers as influential as The Wall Street Journal, New York Post etc to social network site Myspace.

Rupert said in the interview [video attached]

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it — steal our stories, we say they steal our stories — they just take them”

“That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people..…They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

LinkedIn Boards the Twitter Train

These days, it seems that everyone wants to be pals with Twitter, the microblogging phenom. On the morning of Oct. 21, Microsoft announced a deal for its Bing search engine to search for Twitter updates known as tweets. Just hours later, Google announced a similar deal.

Not to be left out, the professional online networking service LinkedIn on Nov. 10 is announcing its own integration with Twitter. Users of both services will be able to sync some or all of their tweets on Twitter and “network updates” on LinkedIn.

Specifically, users in LinkedIn will be able to check a “tweet this” box near their network update post to Twitter. And while on Twitter, they can add the hashtags “#in” or “#li” to their posts to appear on LinkedIn. Finally, a new app called Tweets will let users put their Twitter streams on their LinkedIn profiles.
here are the details in a blog post from Allen Blue, a LinkedIn cofounder and vice-president of product strategy:

I’m excited to announce that starting today, users can sync their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, allowing them to broadcast LinkedIn status updates on Twitter and vice versa. This allows you to amplify your professional activities on Twitter while keeping them organized and structured on LinkedIn. We think the two go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Watch Biz and Reid come to that inevitable conclusion in the video below!

LinkedIn has always been about your professional identity on the web. The many elements that make up your online professional brand range from your LinkedIn profile to the many professional conversations you’re a part of. Status has proved valuable to our users, from finding jobs to kick-start a global business enterprise.
Now you can amplify those messages by broadcasting them to your audience on Twitter.

How does LinkedIn work with Twitter?

It will take a few hours to roll out the feature to everyone (so be patient!), but with today's launch, we're making that two-way communication between your status updates and tweets a breeze to set up. Here's how it works:

1. On LinkedIn

Want to share a status message about an industry-specific article you’ve just read with a broader audience? Or how about letting people view your Twitter account name on your profile? Begin by joining your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in just a few clicks. All you need to do is click the Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and follow a few simple steps.

Clicking through the setup process will allow you to specify the Twitter account that you’d like to sync and/or display on your LinkedIn profile.

2. On Twitter

As you travel across the web, you’ll often find articles or reports that would be useful to share with your LinkedIn connections. Now you can share from anywhere. As part of the setup process, you can choose to either send all your tweets or select tweets from Twitter back to LinkedIn as a status update.

If you pick the latter, don’t forget to add the #li or #in hashtag to every relevant tweet you’d like to send back to LinkedIn.

So go ahead and get started. Join your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts today to add a new dimension to your professional conversation.

In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC?

Facebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée to the future of the social Web as each strive to host, what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others, refer to as our personal social operating system (OS).

What Windows is to PCs and OS X is to Macs, Facebook and Twitter are to our social architecture and enterprise. Certainly there’s a David and Goliath element here depending on which company you immediately view as Microsoft or Apple. However, Mac and Windows are simply operating systems, not networks per se, and that’s where the metaphor of an OS breaks down. Either way, there is the perception that there is a competition between Facebook and Twitter for your attention and your network.

Why? At the very least, Twitter and Facebook combine the elements of productivity and interactivity, combining a social OS, a global network, and a platform for open development.

The fabric of our online activity stems from a sophisticated social framework that facilitates the exchange of information and sustains professional, conversational, and contextual connections. Facebook and Twitter, like Windows and Mac, allow us to interact cross platform, while hosting dedicated applications that support our engagement, productivity, and communication.

As much attention as we pay to this mythical clash between Facebook and Twitter, the truth is that it’s not unprecedented to maintain identities in more than one ecosystem. For example, I use both Mac and Windows-based systems, I use both Facebook and Twitter. Yet according to new data from Hitwise, it appears that the epic battle between the two perceived leaders in Social Media is one-sided—or perhaps better stated, dominated.

As of October 2009, Facebook accounts for 6 percent of all U.S. Internet visits while Twitter represents only 0.14 percent. In fact, visits to Twitter.com peaked at .20 percent between June and July 2009 and has slowly lost attention in the interim, a point TechCrunch has noted as well. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, co-founder Evan Williams acknowledged the slowdown in traffic to Twitter.com in the U.S., for now, but he also stated that they are in the process of finalizing new features that will reverse the downward trend. Williams also reminded us Twitter continues to recognize growth in both mobile and abroad.

And, for those who take solace in the hope that traffic is migrating from Twitter.com to mobile clients, there is some truth to the theory. However, new visitors count for everything and Twitter needs to do a better job capturing new users and holding their interests after they register. The company needs to look further than its resident celebrities to attract and sustain traffic.

For the time being, regardless of numbers, Facebook and Twitter serve a purpose, and thus, remain the Mac and PC in the lives of many. And, until the day that I am forced or compelled to pledge allegiance to one or the other, I will continue to cultivate relationships across multiple landscapes and suggest that you do the same.

But which one’s the Mac and which one’s the PC?

How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession

Last night we wrote about the lead generation scams within social gaming networks. This is a guest post by Dennis Yu, the CEO of BlitzLocal, a privately held 50 person advertising agency in Denver, Colorado, specializing in local search engine marketing for franchises and professional service firms via Google and Facebook. BlitzLocal is no longer in the business of spam, but they do specialize in Facebook advertising and are now using the platform they’ve developed to run campaigns for big brands and small businesses. Dennis writes a blog at dennis-yu.com

Did you know how Mark Zuckerberg supported Facebook in the early days, before he got venture funding? Casino ads. And how about those advertisers who were making over $100,000 a day selling Acai Berry and other weight loss products – they are friends of mine, pioneers of new advertising channels. You see those ads saying “Inbox (5). Nick, someone in San Francisco has a crush on you!” (with your name, profile picture, and city in the ad). I generated millions of dollars from these offers on Facebook – I am not proud of it, but it was very lucrative.

I will walk you through how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks – the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you’re reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is?

In June 2007, Facebook opened up their application developer platform so that anyone could build games on top of the social network. By having access to user data, game developers could instantly make engaging, viral games. Rate who is hottest among your friends, share quizzes, race cars, grow vegetables, and so forth – all with a click of a button. Users in one click gave the game permission to access their profile data and they didn’t think twice about it.