Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

I’m on LinkedIn, and I think it’s a good site for what it does, but I agree with Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook that Facebook‘s moves into professional networking will put a lot of pressure on LinkedIn. His characterization of LinkedIn as a piece of charred bread and as sedentary waterfowl may be overstating it, but Facebook’s threat to overwhelm LinkedIn is real.

Nick’s post was spurred by the launch of the “Networking” choice being listed among the “Looking for” choices in Facebook’s Relationships tab.

(As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m listed as married that the “Random Play” and “Whatever I can get” options aren’t available. If so, I think that’s a great part of the implementation of the Relationships feature enhancement. But why is “Dating” still a choice?)

As Nick points out, Facebook still needs to finish a few steps in making its professional networking features fully functional. Having a way to distinguish family vs. personal vs. professional “friends” and to adjust the level of access they have to your profile will be important. And if Facebook enables us to search not just within our work and geographic networks, but among friends of friends, it will have essentially replicated the key functionality of LinkedIn.

At that point, to build on Nick’s metaphors, LinkedIn may be a Thanksgiving turkey, stuffed with toasty breadcrumbs. He puts it well when he says “LinkedIn has limited messaging features and is essentially a public extension of my Outlook contact list.”

I see LinkedIn as more than that: It’s also a place to publish your professional resume, to possibly have it validated through recommendations from others, and potentially to recruit employees. But even in an economy in which people are expected to have a dozen jobs by age 38, it’s not a site most will visit with any real frequency. Certainly nothing like we do with Facebook.

I go to LinkedIn only when I get a connection request from someone I know. I’m glad to connect in that way, and it doesn’t take long to confirm.

I check Facebook, by contrast, at least twice a day: before I leave for work and in the evening. Because I have Facebook Mobile, I get a text message when someone friends me or sends me a message, so I check in response to those, too…or else just reply through my cell phone.

Just as eBay is “the” place to sell goods by auction on the web because it has the critical mass of sellers and buyers, I believe Facebook will become the all-purpose networking site, both personal and professional. I’m not going to get rid of my LinkedIn profile. It may be useful to me someday, and it doesn’t take much effort to maintain it. But it’s social networking without the social, which will make it difficult to compete with Facebook.

LinkedIn has 14 million total users, which is roughly the number Facebook has added in the last three months. And more than half of Facebook’s 48 million users are going there daily.
Maybe Nick wasn’t overstating Facebook’s threat to LinkedIn. What do you think?
Technorati: LinkedIn, Facebook, Social Networking, Social Networks, professional, networking

This is another installment in the Facebook Business section, which provides background on how Facebook works that is particularly geared for those born before 1982 and who therefore may not be familiar with social networking sites.

Facebook’s News Feed is what you see when you click on the Facebook logo in the upper left corner of the page:

Facebook’s News Feed gives you a slice of life from your friends, including groups they’ve joined or left, applications they’ve added or deleted, notes or other items they’ve posted, status updates, photos they’ve uploaded or in which they have been tagged, and more.

The News Feed isn’t exhaustive; depending on the number of friends you have and their activity levels within Facebook, you may only see something like 1 percent of their actions in your News Feed.

But I have found the News Feed exceptionally helpful for learning about neat and new things on Facebook. For instance, through my friend Jeremiah I learned about the Facebook WordPress application because the fact he had added it was in my News Feed.

So what if some of your friends are hyperactive and are overwhelming your News Feed? You can adjust settings for your feed by clicking the “Preferences” link at the top of your News Feed:

Clicking it brings up this control panel which lets you say “I want to see less from these friends” and “I want to see more from these friends.”

You also can adjust the sliders to see more or less of different story types.

The News Feed is one of the most important ways Facebook connects friends. If you want to be mine, click here.
Technorati: Facebook, Social Networking, News Feed, Business, WordPress

Part of the great appeal of Facebook is that people mostly use their real names instead of creating avatars with psuedonyms. While you can find a dozen George Jetsons and a handful of Mickey Mouses (or is it Mice?) in Facebook, in most cases the names you see are genuine.

So doesn’t that increase the likelihood that Facebook users will become victims of identity theft, because your name is “out there” on the internet?

And can you protect yourself?

I’m not convinced that the answer to the first question is “Yes.” I’m fairly certain the second can be answered affirmatively.

Like Naven Johnson, your name is already “out there” if you’re in the phone book. The question is whether identity thieves can piece together enough other information so that a sub-prime lender will grant them credit in your name.

I guess it’s theoretically possible for someone to use information about you that they get on Facebook to open credit card accounts in your name, but a few basic precautions will go a long way toward stopping identity thieves in their browsers:

1. Don’t publish your Social Security number in your Facebook profile. Did I really need to say that? This admonition ranks right up there with the “Do Not Eat” labels on the dessicant packages you find when you open your new electronic equipment, but obviously somebody did ingest them once and now, thanks to our tort system, this is a standard warning. But if you’ve published your Social Security number on your Facebook or MySpace profile, please just deactivate your account immediately and refrain from using the internet. Web 2.0 isn’t for you. Neither is Web 1.0.
2. Don’t get hooked by a phishing scam. I haven’t heard of this actually happening in Facebook, but considering how the crooks have used eBay and various banks as fronts to gather information, I expect it’s only a matter of time before someone starts sending emails like this: “Dear Daniel A. Nimrod: It has come to our attention that someone may be fraudulently using your Facebook account. We need you to verify that you are, in fact, Daniel A. Nimrod. Please click the link below and enter your Social Security number to prove your identity.” Solution: see #1 above.
3. If you choose to show your birthday in Facebook, have it display just the day and not the year. I read some articles in which a computer security expert recommended this, and I decided to take his advice. I still can get birthday greetings on my wall from my Facebook friends next May 15 (or you can just mark your calendar now, so you start saving for my present), but if my year of birth isn’t available, I guess that makes it harder to steal my identity.
4. If you’re really, really concerned that some evil genius might use your Facebook data to steal your identity, maybe you should refrain from mentioning your mother’s maiden name, your favorite pet or your elementary school in your profile. Those are the security questions web sites often use in their “forgot password” functions. I personally think this is a little paranoid, but it would be an additional safeguard.

The most important fact to remember about identity theft is that if someone uses your name and personal information to set up credit card accounts or secure loans for the purposes of stealing money, you don’t owe the money. If you didn’t apply for the loan or credit card, you are not liable. The criminal is. See Dave Ramsey for some good advice on this, including insurance protection you can buy that pays for someone else to go through the hassle of cleaning up the mess.

The other key thing to realize about identity theft is that most perpetrators are relatives; most cases don’t involve a stranger trolling the internet for Social Security numbers.

It’s like the mythical poisoned Halloween candy stories, or the stories of strangers hiding razor blades in apples to maim the mouths of unsuspecting Trick-or-Treaters. As detailed in Made to Stick, the reality was that the only documented cases of Halloween poisoning involved:

• A father whose child accidentally got into his drug stash and overdosed, and who initially claimed the child had eaten poisoned Halloween candy, and
• Another parent who purposely poisoned a child to cash in on a life insurance policy, and who used the same story.

Yet for a couple of generations, kids have been warned not to take candy from strangers, and some hospitals have offered x-ray services to find cleverly inserted needles and razor blades. So cleverly inserted that none have ever been found. The real danger wasn’t from the great mass of strangers, but from a few parents.

Still, it’s probably not a bad idea for parents to carefully examine their kids’ candy stashes two weeks from now, and to sample some of the fare. Especially the Milky Way bars and the Tootsie Rolls. You know, to protect the kids.

And by following these 4 tips to prevent Facebook identity theft, you’ll help keep anonymous strangers from running up credit card debts in your name.

But watch out for your parents.

So what tips did I miss? What other advice would you give people to prevent identity theft?

For related posts on Facebook and other social networking sites, particularly how they can be used for business and professional networking, check out the Facebook Business section.

Technorati: Facebook, Identity Theft, Credit Cards, Dave Ramsey, social networking, MySpace, eBay, Phishing