Tag Archive: Facebook


Social networks are not NEW,

They have just gained a wider audiance due to improvod usability.

USENET or news groups started in 1979 (long before HTTP), where like minded individuals could gather and exchange puclic messages, very much like twitter today.

The big difference, it was mainly a hardcore GEEK world.

Persistence of stupidity

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

FIVE easy steps to permenant residance in the dog box

A while ago i wrote this “four easy steps to permenant residance in the dog box” which goes a bit like this

1. Spend two lots of THREE weeks out of the country on business (Redmond)
2. Miss Mothers Day because you are out of the country on business??
3. Spend another FIVE Days out of the country on business (Barcelona, Tech-ed IT Forum)
4. Miss the wifes birthday, because your are out of the country on business

Now I have fifth one

5. Accept a Facebook friend invite from an EX-Girlfriend

In fact given the effect , it should be number ONE on the list !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Social networking and teenagers

Over the past few days I have seen teenagers using social networking (facebook in this case) in a interesting way.

On Saturday (14th June) morning, a 19 year lad (Karl Hampton) was killed in a car accident. Within hours his friends had created facebook group (R.I.P Karl Hampton) which 4 days later had 270 members and 80 heart felt comments?? on his wall