Author Archives: matthew.finnegan

According to research, the human mind cannot handle being friends with a circle larger than 50 people. In additiona, the brain has trouble handling a social network that has grown larger than 150 people. In response to this data, Dave Morin has started a potential competitor to Facebook called Path. Path is limited to 50 friends or less. It is designed for intimate relationships with close friends and family and to create a more intimate, and personal environment that would be more closed than the service provided on Facebook where friends list often break the barriers discovered in the Oxford research.

Morin claims that the smaller size will allow users to feel less self concious about what they post. But will it really? It will surround a particular identity and part of their life, and as such, there will still be a limit on what content is and is not appropriate. While Facebook may cross more spheres, there are many different places (other people’s walls or comments) where you can express yourself without being right out in the open for other people in your social network to see. Just because you are friends exclusively with close friends and family doesn’t mean you’ll feel safe in sharing certain things. Sometimes, in a crowd you can find anonymity.

For those who are worried about their online brand, some bad news. 80% of profiles contain lewd words either posted by users themselves or by their friends. What’s being posted on Facebook can have serious consequences for one’s reputation and even get you fired (the article even references a study that shows 45% of employers reference potential hires on social media sites). Linkdin has risen as a professional alternative to Facebook to create a professional profile to present yourself in a more controlled light. Each social media site presents an opportunity to present yourself in a different way or to create a different brand. Perhaps your Tumblr or Twitter account is different from how you present yourself on Facebook. Splitting your social media networks into specific spheres that present different fronts can be an effective strategy of insulating parts of your life from each other. Be professional and put your best feet forward on Linkdin, but be open and free on Facebook — so long as your profile is set to friends only and you filter your friends carefully. This may be a response to people feeling that their lives are too out in the open or out of their control if aggregated all in one place.

Google, creator of the popular Android operating system, is looking to expand into an “ewallet” service. It makes perfect sense. You have your whole life on your phone – your contacts, e-mail, social media. You can shop and browse online with various services. There are even apps to allow you to coordinate your bills and look at your bank statements on your phone. But why not bundle more into that phone and allow you to purchase things in-store with your phone as a digital credit system? A profit can be made on these transactions, while offering the phone a competitive feature over other options.

This has the potential to greatly increase the data collected about an individual. While this data would normally be stored by a credit card or bank, this begins to aggregate personal spending habits with other information recorded through social media, e-mail or other services. Together, patterns between spending habits and common words or activities online can be worked out, with great potential for earnings through targeted advertising.

Seems as though losing your phone could be far worse than losing your wallet once was.

A teen was interrogated by the Secret Service over a facebook post he made. Perhaps most disconcerning, they came to his school to interrogate him and did so without his mother present. The boy is only 13 years old. The boy made a comment that the president should watch out now that Osama bin Laden has been killed because of the potential of retaliatory strikes. However, his commented was misconstrued by the secret service to be a threat. This leaves us to wonder: does the secret service monitor facebook this cloesly that they can pick up a single comment such as this and track down a “suspect”? Did they not know the boy was 13? Do they have the right to interrogate minors and is there a cut off for when an individual is too young to be a potential “threat”? Is it is possible that facebook, along with other social media websites, work with the government to allow tracking of comments and material posted on their services?

Clearly, we need to watch what we say on the internet. Who knows who will see what we express. But what if we are too young to understand how to filter and express our comments in safe way?

With pressure from the media, government and consumers, companies like Facebook and Google are forced more and more to address privacy concerns (including recent hearings in the Senate with Google). Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that Google is going to simplify it’s privacy controls. They are attempting to make the way in which Android users agree to share their data with Google more transparent. With internet becoming more and more reliant on handsets, and with the Android platform expanding rapidly, this will affect the data shared by millions of current, as well as potential, users. They will revise Google dashboard, a service that allows users to see what data they have shared with Google.

Alarmingly, the article claims that “more data has been collected in the last seven years than all of human history.” With such enormous amounts of data already collected and continuing to be collected at an ever increasing rate, the task of allowing users to manage this data (or for companies to manage the data themselves) seems arduous if not potentially unfeasible. Data collected on a phone may be shared by Google with any number of companies or advertisers, who can then disperse the data even further. There is no system, as of yet, to control this flow of data. There was a time when people were afraid to use their real names on the internet, where they hid behind a wall of anonymity. Today, more information is collected, analysed and used about individual than ever before.