Unsocial Networks 12. April 2009 – 10:49 by Fraser Henderson - ICELE

We all know about the benefits of social networking but what about the pitfalls? The obvious one is distraction – it is estimated that social networks cost UK businesses £6.5 billion a year in lost productivity. That doesn’t mean I’m in favour of blacklisting such sites; instead I would encourage corporations and public bodies to update their IT ‘acceptable use’ policies accordingly.

However, there are more sinister forces at work. The idea of being ‘friends’ with somebody you haven’t met might be good for kudos but can you be confident of their identity? Trust is an old online problem with worryingly few checks and balances in the social networking field.

I’ve observed that people are generally less alert in these environments too – for example, more likely to click a link in a Twitter feed than in an email. I don’t think people realise that social networking accounts are increasingly attractive to scammers and hackers. For example, when Obama’s Twitter account was hacked at the start of the year it offered the perfect springboard for spam.

The nature of the beast is also the problem. Twitter is a prime example – it has an upper character limit so people tend to use short URL generators like TinyURL. This makes it easier to cloak your final destination. Facebook, on the other hand, allows ‘non-certified’ applications to be installed and as a result many have fallen foul to malicious widgets. [Firefox users’ note: there is an excellent add-on called LongURL mobile expander which can be used to reveal the final destination of web redirectors].

An experiment by IT security firm Sophos tested the integrity of Facebook users back in 2007. After setting up a profile in the name of “Freddi Staur” (an anagram of ‘Fraudster’, pictured here), they sent out 200 friend requests and waited to see what would happen. A total of 87 people responded and of these 82 leaked ‘personal’ information such as full dates of birth.

In addition to these findings, Sophos ‘poked’ a further 100 random Facebook users to see if this form of communication would elicit the same response and encourage people to let Freddi access their details. However, just eight people responded, with only five revealing personal information.

With increasing scope for security lapses in eParticipation land, PEP-NET should take note.

Posted in good practice, Trends, Visions | 3 Comments »

Lessons in doing research using social media 10. March 2009 – 11:53 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

As part of my work for TuTech and on my scientific work at the University of Hamburg I use social media tools for research purposes on a daily basis. Tools like Google Trends or Backtype make is possible to take a deep look into what is going on in the Social Web both on an aggregated level (qualitative data) and on a content level (qualitative data). In other words social media tools are not only a great thing to do research ON but also to do research WITH.

Yesterday I started to post tweets on what I have learnt so far about this kind of work using the hashtag (a term linking a post to a certain topic) #socialmediascience. Below you can see my first six tips on how to use social media for research. I will keep on posting these kinds of tips using the hashtag and you can take a look at the full list of them either by searching on Twitter or by following me directly. I also invite everybody to post similar tips using the #socialmediascience hashtag.

• Frist tip: Combine different social media sources to get a complete picture of a topic over time. For example: Google Trends, Backtype, etc.
• Second Tip: URL hacking and scripting makes research on social media much more efficient. #socialmediascience
• Third tip: Google Trends even gives you .csv outputs of the data. Very convenient! #socialmediascience
• 4th tip: Total numbers (of posts etc.) mean almost nothing, because search engine never cover all blogs, Tweets etc. #socialmediascience
• 5th tip: You need to work with specific search terms. The qualitative work to find these is extremely important. #socialmediascience
• 6th tip: Research social media is no exact science (yet). Be bold about this fact and explain the short comings. #socialmediascience

Posted in Tools | No Comments »

Utility computing – websites like power outlets 8. July 2008 – 11:26 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

The vast amount of different websites and services on the web seems to be impossible to categorize. Can we even call something like Google docs a website or is a more a less a piece of software running in a browser (which is an even broader term)? But there is a growing group of website that have distinct properties distinguishing them form the mass. These sites behave more like utilities (water or electricity) than a service – hence the term describing them: utility computing. These perform a simple task very well and provide the tools to others to build on top of it.

A popular and still recent example would be Twitter. This microblogging site gets much more powerful when services build on top of it are used than if one just uses Twitter itself. Examples of these added services are Tweetscan (a search engine tailored to Twitter), Twitterfeed (a tool that allow you to integrate your own RSS-Feeds to Twitter) or Twellow (Yellow pages for Twitter). Another example would be Google Maps – the service in of it self in basic but delivered in a very sophisticated and high performance way. But the additional services and the uses of Google maps by others really make it what it is.

The way this interaction between websites is made possible through so called APIs, short for Application Programming Interface. These are a set of rules which describe how the interactions have to be performed, which kinds of interactions are possible, etc. APIs power many different services on the web and also on local computers. The browser you are using most certainly interacts with your computers operating system through its APIs right now.

As with public utilities this kind of websites develop cottage industries improving and building on what is provided by them. But has these added services highly depend on the utility site there are some consequences. Utility sites have to be highly reliable and cannot change their service to much along the way. On a more technical note the API has to be consistent and well worked out. If a website chooses to go along those lines and the cottage industries takes of there may even be a new kind of business model attached to that (take a look at that idea at Mashable).

There seems to be a general trend to more focussed services on the web which interact among each other to perform more complex tasks. The rise of utility websites is also an indicator for this trends besides for example the discussion about data portability, initiatives like Open Social or apps build on social networking platforms like Facebook.

PS: For the more technical minded readers: I suggest to listen to the FLOSS weekly episode on the ROCKS where later on in the program the developers discuss using utility computing (in this case Amazon S3) to build large cluster computers (e.g. super computers).

Posted in Trends | 2 Comments »

The news of tomorrow – today 28. May 2008 – 17:42 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

No matter if you are a company, a journalist, a politician or a curious citizen – you certainly are interested in knowing which topics will be relevant tomorrow. The reasons for that may vary from the wish to have a competitive advantage to pure interest in a subject.

To reach this goal it seems to be helpful to use a number of tools that make it possible to identify those topics and issues that have not yet reached the awareness of the mainstream. The internet does provide a variety of tools which can help achieving that very well especially if a certain field of interest has to be monitored. I will talk about a few of these tools in this text.

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Posted in Tools | 6 Comments »