WizGidget

Everybody’s talking about Facebook and Twitter these days.  Both of them refer to what’s become known as “social media.”  Wikipedia defines social media as: “a group of Internet-based applications… that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content…  a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.”  That’s a fancy way of saying they are means of communicating with friends, associates, and potentially customers and the public through the internet. Facebook and Twitter are two forms of social media, but there are many others, each with its own focus — for instance there’s LinkedIn and Plaxo for professionals, Classmates for keeping track of school friends, and many more.

Facebook is popular these days because it’s become somewhat the standard for keeping up with friends and associates. Facebook facilitates connecting with others because it allows your “friends” to see your list of friends.  So for instance, if Mary has Jane in her friend list, and I’m friends with Mary, I can find Jane in Mary’s list of friends and invite her to become my “friend” in Facebook.  Jane must accept the friend request to complete the connection.  Facebook also has the ability to create photo albums, where you can upload whatever photos you want to share with your friends.  Facebook also provides a means of posting whatever’s on your mind either in your “status” or in your “wall.”  The “wall” is like having your own bulletin board where people can post and comment on posts.  The “Wall” and the status are the ways of communicating with your friends — when they check Facebook they’ll see your status updates and wall postings.

There’s lots of other nifty “widgets” that go along with Facebook, for instance, there’s an application that keeps track of your friend’s birthdays.  There’s also one that is an interactive farm simulation called “Farmville” that drives me nuts — and as you know I don’t have far to go.  Several of my friends have drunk the Farmville coolaid.  The problem with Farmville is that when they play Farmville, it posts things on their Facebook account that show up in the status updates.  For instance, “Suzie found a little calf and need help feeding it” or “Jane completed her collection and wants to share a collectable with their friends”.  The reason this drives me nuts is that I have enough on my plate already and don’t need to see the details of my friends’ game-playing.  I want to know what’s significant in their lives; I’m just not convinced Farmville constitutes significance.

You can get a Facebook account for free by going to www.facebook.com, and signing up.  I suggest using a throwaway email account (see the Can the Spam Part III article) for your facebook account.  Also, I recommend that you immediately go through your privacy settings to make sure you’re not publishing stuff that should be private, like your birthdate — month and day are ok; year not so much.

I’ll cover Facebook privacy in a future article. Meantime you can see this and other articles at www.wizgidget.com.

We haven’t discussed spam in awhile, so maybe it’s a good time to revisit that topic.  I described how I’ve cut my spam from a torrent to an occasional drip in the Can the Spam series.  Even so, there’s a need for dealing with the occasional spam that gets through.  As always, you can see this article and comment online at wizgidget.com

Many of the current computer security programs available today have spam filters.  I use CA’s internet security suite which includes a spam filter in addition to the antivirus and antispyware features.  I don’t use that one though, because I was already using an “open source” spam filter called “SpamBayes“.  SpamBayes uses a “bayesian filter” where “bayesian” refers to statistical methods named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes (ca. 1702–1761).  Most spam filters work similarly to SpamBayes in that they have to be “trained” to differentiate spam from good email.  They do this by building a dictionary of words and phrases that have the “look and feel” of spam.  The spam filter is trained by giving it a folder with good messages (usually your inbox) and another folder that contains confirmed spam.  The more messages of each type, the better.  Also, as life goes on and you mark messages as spam that the filter didn’t catch, it “learns” the new spam and gets better and better at catching the spam, and not catching good email.

There’s a couple things that are needed to make this all work well.  One is that it does require diligence: it’s not a set-and-forget kind of thing.  Spouse Ann used to have problems with the SpamBayes not working very well.  The problem was that she was rather sporadic in her email habits — she tended to go through her email only once a week.  Because the forms of incoming spam are always in a flux, that meant that the spam was changing faster than SpamBayes could learn it.  It worked fine for me, but I was going through my email at least daily.

Another potential problem is using the spam filter to delete emails that aren’t really spam.  Let’s say you subscribe to a newsletter, and then you decide you don’t want the newsletter anymore, so you start marking the newsletter as spam instead of doing the better thing and unsubscribing.  Now the filter is being told lots of “normal” words and phrases are spam, which dilutes the real spam words and phrases.  It makes it harder for the filter to reliably distinguish spam from good email.  This can also cause problems for other people depending on your email provider.  AOL, for instance, registers what emails its customers are marking as spam.  If they see too many hits coming from a given internet address (like 173.201.16.100), they start blocking email originating from that server.  Many websites are run on shared hosting servers that use a common address, so if one of them is blocked by AOL, then all of the sites on that server get blocked.