FriendFeed
Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Misc. | 2 Comments
I don’t know about you, but I think I’m over Facebook. It’s too noisy. The time I used to give to Facebook, I now find myself giving to FriendFeed.
What I like is finding people who say/do interesting things online around topics, ideas and interests we have in common and easily following all the ways they express those topics, ideas and interests.
It’s called “FriendFeed” but friendship has little to do with it. Maybe the folks I follow will be “friends” one day based on those common topics, ideas and interests. I hope so. Some already are. But that’s not where it starts. FriendFeed should follow Twitter’s lead and change “friends” to “following” which is a more accurate term. Considering the name of the service, probably won’t happen.
FriendFeed is similar to Plaxo Pulse and at least 10 other services where you input all the places you are and follow others where they’re at (a kind of lifestreaming). As I posted earlier this morning, one can no longer assume that the blog is the center of someone’s online universe. It certainly isn’t mine. It’s just another avenue I use to express myself publicly (read: carefully).
I also post on Web Worker Daily. I share links through Google Reader and Del.icio.us. I post some photos on Flickr and SmugMug. And of course, I tweet. Interested in the same things I’m interested in? Subscribe to me on FriendFeed and you get it all.
FriendFeed is pretty simple. I like that the interface is low-key. It doesn’t trip over itself like Pulse does. It only sends me information I’ve asked for (which is once per day).
It’s not a popularity contest. I love that I can only see how many folks are subscribed to me, and I can’t see how many folks are subscribed to others. Yet I can see who they’re subscribed to. A nice way to discover new voices.
Bottom line is that I’m not that interested in Facebook groups, pokes, games, etc. which makes most of Facebook annoying these days.
I love the “hide” feature (underneath each entry). I prefer to read tweets in Twhirl. I’m starting to appreciate FriendFeed for the other streams. So I set FriendFeed to only show me tweets that have comments/activity in FriendFeed. Cuts down on a lot of the duplicate noise.
Currently, you can only auto-discover fellow FriendFeed users through your address book. I wish there was a way I could pour in the list of folks I already follow in Twitter.
The blog’s stream runs deeper than Twitter
Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Life, Misc. | 1 Comment
Like many, I’ve been more active on Twitter lately than my blog. It’s hard to explain why, for many of the same reasons Twitter is hard to explain in the first place. You either get it, or you don’t.
I was just reading a post from someone who begs folks to “Twitter Less, Blog More.” One of the reasons he gives:
Even if you don’t like to think in abstract terms, there are material reasons to opt to blog something instead of Twittering it. In the long run every backlink and every visitor count. Guess what, every time you Twitter instead of blogging something interesting you are risking to lose visitors and backlinks.
Guess what? That’s exactly the reason I’ll put something on Twitter instead of blogging it. And it’s part of the reason why I don’t publish my Twitter stream here. There are times, more often than not lately, where I just want to be part of the conversation without all the baggage.
I’m still a little blog-shy. Last year, some of this blog’s archives from 2006 were taken out of context, twisted and used against me in a legal case. That’s about as much as I’m going to say about that right now. Rest assured. I do plan to blog the details at some point when I feel it’s safe to do so. If for no other reason than to serve as a warning to other parents fighting for appropriate services for their children.
We often forget that the average person doesn’t see the difference between sites that report news in blog format and personal blogs that react to news in the moment. What I’m writing this minute is how I feel and how I see the world at 7:14 am on Sunday, April 27, 2008. That may change at 7:14 pm tonight, or it may change in a week or month from now. But because I’m blogging this, it will have more permanence than if I put these thoughts on Twitter in between my thoughts on 100 other topics that I may tweet about.
Here, I refuse to go back and edit/delete posts. If it’s clear I’m editing after-the-fact what I posted in the past, how can you trust that I believe what I’m saying right now? I haven’t even removed or edited the posts that were used against me. I’ll say I’ve changed my mind. I won’t change the past to catch up to the present. It’s a losing game.
Yes, I know that with my tweets on the public timeline everything I say there is for the world’s eyes and it can still come back and haunt me later. I’m careful in my tweets, especially as the legal matter referenced above is not resolved. But somehow, 140 characters caught in between completely irrelevant content clearly says “this was in the moment” in a way that a blog post never can.
My ebay account was hacked
Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments
I’ve been active online since 1988-89 when I got my first Prodigy account. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
I’m still not sure exactly how it happened. I checked my email this morning and this was the most recent message:
Dear [my ebay username],
Your account may have recently been used for fraudulent purposes. For this reason, we have temporarily suspended your account to protect your online security.
If you think that your account may have been tampered with, please contact our Live Help team immediately. To reach the Live Help team:
1. Click the “Live Help” link at the top of most eBay pages. An “eBay Live Help” chat box will open.
2. Click the “Account Security” link. A “Securing Your Account and Reporting Account Theft” Help page will open.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
4. Click the “Live help” link.
…
Right underneath it was another email.
Dear [username],
We have temporarily disabled the automatic payment of your invoices. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ve taken this action to ensure that you’re being charged only for amounts that you actually owe.
If you’re not currently an active seller, then our action should have no effect upon your account and the following information is for your information only.
…
Even after both of these emails, I didn’t immediately believe it was for real. I assumed it was a phish, trying to get me to log in and “verify” my account.
Sure enough, I went to ebay.com in my browser, attempted to login and got a message that my account was suspended for fraudulent activity.
Crap.
I go back to my inbox and see 5 “Your ebay listing is confirmed” for Louis Vitton handbags. All 1-day auctions with Buy It Now prices. Amazingly enough, those listings happened around 5:20 am and the email from ebay advising of “possible unauthorized account use” arrived at 5:46 am. Whatever security measures ebay has in place to detect this kind of thing happening seems to have kicked in quickly. Even so, 2 auctions had buyers.
First thing I did was change the password on my email and PayPal accounts. It doesn’t appear there was any unauthorized activity on either, but it seemed the logical first move. Then I “spoke” to ebay through Live Help to confirm to them that I wasn’t the one who placed the auctions. They reactivated my account, having me set a new password and they cleaned out everything the crooks may have done. I hope. ebay support says that the PayPal account for the auctions wasn’t my PayPal account, which for all I know may have been what tipped off security.
I think I was lucky. Looks like the thieves were looking for the easy score of the “Buy It Now” listing which they could only get from an account with some feedback history. I first registered for ebay in March 1999 and have a 91 100% positive feedback rating. I also don’t use the account that often, another factor that may have made it an easy target.
I would just like to know how it happened. I’m assuming that because I had a relatively weak password (stupid, I know) they somehow guessed in. I don’t use that password anywhere else. In fact, for the last few months I’ve been using the outstanding 1Password to make sure my passwords are strong and not easily guessed for sites that have personal/financial information. I know they didn’t get my login information from a phish, and I don’t think my email has been compromised.
20 years online and this is the first time this has happened to me. I hope it’s the last.
More on the Salesforce/Google calendar sync bug
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Salesforce | 5 Comments
Update: See comments. Appirio fixed the bug and all is well. 
As I mentioned in my previous post, the new Google/Salesforce calendar sync seems to have a bug.
The Appirio Sync For Google Calendar appears to only sync events based on the “Assigned to” field.
When you invite another user to a meeting in Salesforce, the “Assigned to” field remains set to the person who did the inviting….
…even though the event appears on the Salesforce calendar of those folks who were invited (whether they accepted the meeting or not)
That likely explains why I had 8 copies of the same meeting sync to Google calendar, synced to each person who was invited. When I deleted the duplicate instances, the user was erroneously notified the meeting was canceled.
It may also explain why the meeting below is not syncing to Google Calendar. I was invited, accepted, and it appears in my Salesforce calendar. But not in Google calendar.
Carlea hasn’t set up her Google-Salesforce calendar sync yet (I haven’t deployed it to her) but if she did sync, I’d wage money she has multiple copies of the meeting…one for each person she invited.
Now to log a case with Appirio referencing this post. I’m surprised I can’t find a mention of this anywhere else.
Google Apps and Salesforce - Finally! A first look
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 9 Comments
There were rumors for weeks that this was coming. And here it is. Salesforce has finally rolled out its integration with Google Apps. Not just a simple “add email to Salesforce” from Google or “write document from Google Docs,” this is a whole suite of tools and settings to integrate every corner of Google Apps with Salesforce.
The obligatory demo video is below.
Here’s a first look at what it all really means, from the point-of-view of a nonprofit organization that uses Google Apps for email, chat and some documents and Salesforce for the main constituent database, calendar and inter-office task delegation.
