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The Reason Google Apps Engine Could be a Competitor to Facebook

Posted on April 9, 2008 by jessestay

The hype is out there and it is real. After the launch of Google Apps Engine, everyone is up in arms as to what exactly it is, and who needs to watch out. The truth is, everyone needs to watch out when Google launches something, since because of tight integration with all of their products, a slight tweak in one product could mean cross-integration between others, making it almost impossible for you to compete as a company because all of the sudden your space is being threatened by the new products.

New, Big OpenSocial Announcements Coming Tonight?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by jessestay

According to Mike Arrington (I know, I said I wanted to boycott TechCrunch but it’s just so dang hard to avoid! I’ll stick to boycotting Crunchgear for now.), Google is having another “Campfire One” event tonight. The last Campfire One event they announced OpenSocial. It was the OpenSocial team that announced the event, and the biggest bloggers and developers in the industry were all there. Mike Arrington thinks this one is going to be the announcement of “BigTable”, Google’s answer to Amazon SimpleDB.

I think otherwise – see my thoughts at OpensocialNow.com.

5 Inspiring Uses for Twitter That Changed the World

Posted on April 5, 2008 by jessestay

I figured after yesterday’s post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, I’d continue the trend, but this time into Twitter territory. Except this time I’d like to try to truly inspire you.

For those unaware with what Twitter is, in a sentence it is a mass communications tool which lets you post the status of what you’re doing, see what others, on a global scale are doing, and track certain terms within those global statuses. All of Twitter works either from the web at Twitter.com, from a desktop (similar to IM chat) client like Twhirl, or even from your cell phone. Not a user of Twitter and want to follow what I’m doing and discussing throughout the day simply via your cell phone? Text “follow JesseStay” to 40404 on your cell phone and you’ll see what I mean. (to turn them off just send “off JesseStay” to 40404)

Here are 5 inspiring uses for Twitter I have seen that in my opinion have in various ways, truly changed the world:

Track Earthquakes — send “track earthquake” to 40404 on your cell phone, or via Twitter if you have an account, and every time anyone mentions an earthquake, you’ll get updates sent right to your cell phone or IM client with what people are experiencing at the time.
This may not seem like much, but a month or so ago, I received an update for this tracked item from a user saying something to the effect of “woah – was that an earthquake?”. Suddenly I was receiving update after update on my cell phone, almost crashing my cell phone quickly showing there was a very noticeable earthquake somewhere in the world. Doing some research on each of the usernames, I quickly found out that there was an earthquake in the U.K. and I was getting updates from every single person in the United Kingdom that was experiencing the earthquake, at the time it happened. A search on USGS did not even show anything when I found out from Twitter. Twitter told me the news first.

Help out in an emergency — I recently just started tracking the term, “911” on Twitter. I get a lot of updates from people talking about the date/event of 9/11, but what if someone was truly in an emergency asking for Twitter followers to dial 911? I could quickly be one of the first “Twitter emergency responders” on the scene to help out. 911 is a fairly common term, but what if collectively we all came up with a “Twitter Emergency Number”? We could use something that is not going to be used elsewhere, like the letter combination, “xzq”, and those following would be able to help out in an emergency. Join the Twitter rescue squad and “track 911”!

Fight Forest Fires — @Rumford (Rodney Rumford, my good buddy from FaceReviews.com) reminded me the other day about the use of Twitter back in the Fires in the L.A./San Diego area. Twitter was used to point out the status of the fires, locate where they were, and collaborate amongst those affected or threatened by the fires. A strong threat to peoples homes and lives quickly became a very personal event to the entire world using Twitter.

Alert others and coordinate during child abductions — recently a young child was abducted and brutally murdered here in Salt Lake City. During the time of the child’s disappearance, I began thinking of suggesting Twitter as a tool to coordinate during the abduction. The abduction could be broadcast worldwide to alert the world in the event the child ventured any further than the home of the child, and at the same time volunteers could easily coordinate via cell phone and computer to track and update what areas had been searched, possible sightings, and more. I can only imagine what it would have been like if Twitter were around during the Elizabeth Smart abduction! One way of helping out in such efforts is to “track amber alert”.

Raise awareness for Breast Cancer — one of the most inspiring uses for Twitter I have seen thus far has been during the diagnosis and experiences of Twitter user, @susanreynolds, who was diagnosed with Breast Cancer and Twittered it live to her Twitter follows. She shared her experience, and the pains she went through as they poked, prodded, and even performed surgery on the cancerous areas of her body. She used a bag of Peas to ease the pain, and as a sort of comic relief (and sign of her strong character), posted a picture of herself and the bag of peas.
Quickly a movement of “Peas” spread through Twitter. Everyone began posting peas in their profile pictures in support of her fight with Breast Cancer. A fund was set up in her name, and Twitter users everywhere donated to the fund to raise money for Breast Cancer. Susan Reynolds inspired us all, through just 140 characters or less.

I have quite a few more of these examples I’ll post in a follow-up post, including a great mention by @DrBaher about the Twitter account, @makechange. Are there any inspiring examples you have seen through the use of Twitter?

I’ve Been Guy Kawasaki’d!

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Greetings to all of my new subscribers, thanks to a great post I’ve been working on with Guy Kawasaki over on his blog here:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/04/ten-things-you.html

The post is about 10 things you didn’t know about Facebook – these are all excerpts that you can find bits and pieces about in “I’m On Facebook–Now What???“, with a few additions. I’m really glad Guy put me to task to put this list together. Be sure to purchase one of his books as well!

The story behind this post is both Guy Kawasaki and Chris Pirillo were looking for a way to automatically follow those that follow them on Twitter, so they could better communicate with their fan-base. I decided to take this as an opportunity (as I wanted the same feature for myself), and wrote http://socialtoo.com to do just that for them. They both signed up (see Chris Pirillo’s post here – he mistakingly thought I worked for Twitter), and Guy Kawasaki generously offered to promote the book Jason Alba and I wrote, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???” via his blog. The funny thing is I was actually able to use Guy’s, “I know you would do the same for me…” as Guy thanked me for helping him out.

After my experience with Guy I respect him even more. Without my asking he offered to help me out – this is now my new mantra. When you do good things for others, looking for their needs, in my opinion, regardless of pay it always comes back to you. I will be devoting my time on Sundays to help out charitable causes such as Takes All Types (recently featured here and here), not necessarily because I’m expecting anything out of it, but because I know it helps other people, and just knowingly that always comes around for good on your behalf in the end. Thank you Guy for your sincere promotion of my book in your article!

If you’re looking for Facebook consulting, or have an external application outside, or inside a social network you would like to consider including as part of SocialOptimize’s community of Social Applications, please contact me at the links on the right – I promise I will get back to you!

New to this blog? Be sure to subscribe here!

SocialOptimize Announces the "We’re Protestant" Facebook App

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Yesterday’s announcement of the Catholic vs. Protestant App on Facebook, if you didn’t try to install it, was intended to be just an April Fools joke. I’m proud to announce a new App however which isn’t a joke. I’d like to announce that we’re now launching a new compliment to SocialOptimize‘s “Holy Rolls” line of religious community applications. I’m titling the app, “We’re Protestant“, in harmony with the current Apps, “We’re Baptist“, and “We’re Catholic“. “We’re Catholic” is currently the largest group of organized Catholics on Facebook at near 45,000 users. It is my hope that “We’re Protestant” will even further exceed that with a much larger American following.

Are you Protestant? This App is intended to be your App, and should entitle you to identify yourself as a Protestant to all your friends on Facebook. We’ll continue to work to give you more ways to live your religion on Facebook and other social networks and share that with your friends. Currently, you can pick your favorite verses from the King James version of the bible, display those verses randomly on your profile, as well as list other friends who have added the application and are Protestant. Some future considerations will allow you to track churches you’ve attended and friends from those churches, as well as sending Prayers to others.

We will also be working on some complimentary applications that fit well with almost anyone who is religious. While the “Catholic vs. Protestant” App was intended to just be an April Fools joke, I think there is strong potential to enable peaceful discussion between religions, and on the other hand, allow you to test your knowledge within your own religion and compare it with others in yours and other religions to see which religions know most about their own faith. You should see that, and a few other similar apps in coming months.

The greatest feature of this launch is what we did behind the scenes. Now, the Holy Rolls suite of community applications on Facebook and other social networks is a complete, consolidated, code base. With just a simple change to the database we can now quickly, and easily launch more community apps. Expect to see We’re Jewish, We’re Islam, and maybe even We’re FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) soon. Even bigger news is that we can now expand this to more than just religion – imagine a “We’re Snowboarders” app, a “We’re Quilters” app, and others. If you currently run a website outside Facebook and would like to bring your community inside of Facebook, or have an existing Facebook App you’d like to integrate into our platform please talk to me. We are truly at the cusp of a huge group of niche communities we can bring together and include common functionality – contact me if you’d like to join or compliment what we’re doing!

Are you Protestant? Add “We’re Protestant!” here:

http://apps.facebook.com/wereprotestant/

Facebook Gives Developers a Way to Combat Spam 2.0 With

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Facebook seems to have been on a role lately in adding new FBML tags. They are certainly keeping me busy while I finish up the final phases of “FBML Essentials“. Ironically in short duration after I posted my Spam 2.0 article, Facebook seems, based on a new post to the developers wiki, to be providing a new way to combat your Application from being maliciously used by adding the ability to add “Captchas”, or graphics with manipulated text in them to re-enter in a text box provided in the captcha. These Captchas traditionally are ways to ensure only real humans are using your software.

What is interesting is normally you would think having a Facebook profile would be enough to prove it is a real human using the Application. Within the application a developer in normal FBML can always check to see that it is a logged-in Facebook user using the application, or someone accessing the application in an unauthenticated state. Facebook is going one step further with this however – there’s nothing stopping a Facebook account from being hijacked as we mentioned earlier, and using that account to run a malicious Facebook app for a day or two before Facebook catches it and either steal your data or Spam other users. That’s what I’m assuming the launch of this tag is for.

The tag works like this – it is to be contained in any tagset, and can contain one optional attribute, “showall” which allows you to always display the captcha on the App regardless if they passed the captcha before or not, or only display it to those that have not yet been verified. The code would look like this (from the developers wiki):

Upon submit, the user would be taken back to the callback url for your application, and the additional parameter, “fb_sig_captcha_grade=1” will be passed to your application assuming the user passed the Captcha. If they did not pass, it will be set to 0. The end result captcha when render seems to look like any other captcha box on Facebook, which it seems they are using the Recaptcha format which gives back to Archive.org’s book transcription and archiving project. So regardless of whether you really need a captcha or not, you can be comfortable your app is giving back to a good cause. The captcha looks like this (also from the Facebook developer’s wiki):

The Emergence of "Spam 2.0"

Posted on March 31, 2008 by jessestay

My recent blog post on the possible “Facebook Worm” seems to be making an effect in security circles. Within 24 hours I quickly got this e-mail from Zango making sure their name was not associated with it:

Hello Jesse,

I am writing to you about the above entitled post. I first want to clarify that we (Zango) had no involvement with the “Secret Crush” Facebook widget. Matt Hines of InfoWorld clarified that in a blog post in January. You should take a look at: http://weblog.infoworld.com/zeroda)y/archives/2008/01/zango_strikes_b.html.

Mr. Hines’ blog post was spurred by our thorough investigation, which began with a blog post (http://blog.zango.com/PermaLink,guid,94c0e12c-c69e-484f-81b8-b8b58953d71b.aspx) and ended with another post (http://blog.zango.com/PermaLink,guid,b148693d-dbb7-48b9-a102-af336768a424.aspx) and press release (http://www.easyir.com/easyir/prssrel.do?easyirid=83181A68A6B07C97&version=live&prid=345840&releasejsp=release_21).

So to answer your question: Since Zango was not inovlved, we are not associated in any way with Secret Crush. Now, could Secret Crush be doing dubious things? Very possible. Have you contacted Facebook to let them know? If not, I will do just that, as we’ve had some contact with them.

I hope that you’ll revised your post in some way and, as always, am available to discuss further, etc.

Thanks,

SJS

Steve Stratz

Director of Public Relations

Zango

The following day, I received an e-mail from the security company, Fortinet, asking if they could publish a security advisory on the threat. They mentioned they didn’t think it was necessarily a “worm”, per se, but rather what they call “Spam 2.0”. This brings to question, are we in a new age of Spam? Now, instead of hijacking a person’s e-mail account and sending out spam messages over SMTP e-mail, spammers are now hijacking your Facebook and other social accounts, and posting their links and messages on your walls, and statuses.

The question now becomes, is it still related to the Secret Crush application? I find it hard to believe with the problems they had in the past, and with them posting “totally hooked on the crush calculator” within the user’s status message that they wouldn’t have some involvement, but then again, the spammer could just be using a hijacked application at the same time they are using the hijacked user’s account. As Fortinet mentions, this has been happening on Myspace for quite some time now – it is only recently that we’re starting to see the same on Facebook.

The advantage these social networks have over traditional e-mail to combat spam is that your account requires a password to hijack. If you keep a good alpha-numeric, non-dictionary-based password, spammers can’t exist! You can read more from the Fortinet article here:

http://www.fortiguardcenter.com/advisory/FGA-2008-08.html

Also, PC Magazine’s blog wrote on it recently:

http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2008/03/facebook_worm.php

Are We Seeing the First Facebook "Worm"?

Posted on March 25, 2008 by jessestay

Today I received some interesting wall posts that claimed to be from my Aunt. The first looked like the following:

hey do me a favor and try the new crush calculator, don’t worry its not some annoying facebook application that makes you invite all your friends, the crush calc works with your mobile phone and it uses a special scientific way to find the person near you that has a crush on you, guess what? it actually worked, for me and 4 friends, yes this is for real you gotta see this, try it right now and see for yourself, its too crazy. http://www.fkgcp.com

The second looked like this:

i finally found the best source out there for all the latest ringtines for my phone at http://www.vyzxw.com they dont sound bad like the ones from my actual phone company, these are 100 times better and they have thousands and thousands of ringers to choose from and when you use them the first time you get 20 free ringtones. stop paying so much for your ringtones,don’t be a sucker, get them from my place, http://www.vyzxw.com

I checked with my Aunt, and she thinks someone may have stolen her password and hijacked her account to send out those messages to all her friends. My brother got a few of these posted to his wall as well from her Account. I also noticed that her status was changed to, “totally hooked on the crush calculator”.

Then, I did some research on Google for “crush calculator” and came up with this article on CNet. It appears that there used to be an Application on Facebook called “Secret Crush” that would install Spyware on peoples’ computers. Facebook quickly removed the application, but it appears they may be retaliating.

Doing a search for “crush calculator” on Facebook reveals a few groups users on Facebook have set up to apologize to their friends for someone hacking into their account and sending messages to all their friends about the “Crush Calculator”.

So, this could be a few things:

Could the Zango application have been installed on these users and they are now using that retrieved Facebook data to hack into users’ accounts, scrape the Wall, and post to all of their friends’ walls?

People related to “Secret Crush” are retaliating, finding easy passwords, and hacking accounts to send messages to all the friends of a user and get those users to go to the sites listed above.

Third-party hackers are getting paid to hack into these accounts and send out messages.

This could truly be one of the first “Social Worms”, instead of circling the internet, following your list of friends and their friends, spreading as it harvests information from those profiles for more damage in other areas.

It’s also very interesting that since I was now known to this “hacker”, or “worm”, whichever it may be, I am now for some reason getting lots of spam Skype messages. The only place I really list this in the open is on my Facebook profile, which is only visible to my Facebook friends. Could they have harvested my information as well? A social worm is truly dangerous!

There is nothing stopping one of these applications from collecting a bunch of user data and sending messages out to each of the friends of the users that added the application. Facebook does track this and puts a quick end to them, but just like any other application you install on your computer, you have to be careful of the Applications you install on your Facebook account! Verify that you know the sending user well, and ask them their experiences first.

Most of all, check your passwords! Be sure you always have a strong password for your Facebook login, and this probably won’t happen to you. Have any of you experienced similar issues?