Archive for November, 2007

Social Networks United

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 12, 2007 in news. 0 Comments

Possibly, assuming Facebook accepts this invitation, OpenSocial will unite most of the major players in social networking arena. From the moment Google introduced their OpenSocial platform, where developers can write applications for all participating networks (MySpace is one of them), Facebook was somehow reluctant to join.

Although Facebook is seen as a major competitor for MySpace, there is an opinion that in fact they can co-exist and they are not as similar as they might appear at the first glance.

Being able to develop applications for social networks without worrying about transportability and making them available across the board is a great thing and hopefully Facebook will join Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING on the OpenSocial platform.

Social networks: spicing up with e-commerce

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 12, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

SpiceLarge enterprises start to recognise the power and importance of social networks. Long ago are the days when people paid just an occasional visit to these sites. They become an important part of our everyday lives. People chat, discuss, exchange opinions and recommendations on various subjects. According to a report released recently, social network web sites are more visited than webmail sites.

Apple, Cisco, Nokia and other large enterprises recognise this trend and respond accordingly. Support for social network sites such as YouTube is being extended into mobile devices. Collaboration is even considered to become part of Microsoft Exchange solution.

Even companies that are not directly related to IT business should not ignore the power of social networking. Word of mouth becomes more important when selecting a new product or applying for service. People become more immune to ads and hits and more often chose a product that doesn’t have a surrounding hype, but is recommended by a circle of close friends.

It is also important not to underestimate size of the audience in social networks. Combined size of most popular social networks is over 820 million users. MySpace alone accounts for well over 100 million of them. That is really impressive, so before planning new ad campaign companies should think carefully about the primary targets for it.

Unfortunately this isn’t as easy as paying for TV ads. The situation is much more complicated.

First of all the market is very young and there’s lots to be discovered yet. Old marketing rules apply only partially or do not apply at all. One should also consider the audience of these networks. At the moment the cut-off point is at approximately 35-40 years, meaning that majority of the users are younger than 40.

Is it worth it? Absolutely. Not only it opens new user base, but the sooner you start, the better you will be prepared for the future. And as it looks now, the future is in social networks.

New entry to your agenda: Online Social Networking

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 11, 2007 in social networks. 3 Comments

It’s not news that more and more companies are going to Google you before they even read your CV. That, however, happens after they find out that you’re looking for a new position and after you send them your resume for consideration.

But how are they going to find you or how are you going to find that the company is hiring?

Traditionally this is a job for head hunters, agents that would advertise new positions and seek for potential employees. Before social networking era, the only effective way for them to reach you, was listing open positions on jobsites and hoping that you will visit them and that you’d use right keywords for search.

With social networks becoming so popular things are starting to change. This is a chance for head hunters to start acting rather than reacting. Using social networking tools like LinkedIn or Facebook they can perform searches for expertise their clients are after.

What does it all mean for an IT (or, in fact, any other) specialist?

In short, this all means that if you care about your career, it is no longer enough to do your job and keep updating your CV with new achievements. Although your resume plays important role in selecting you as a potential employee, first it needs to reach someone’s hands in human resource department of the company. As we saw, this happens (usually) through a third party, in our case via a hypothetical headhunter. And if headhunters more and more turn to social networks for their searches, if you’re not in that network you’re basically unreachable for them.

So, when should you start building your social network? Obviously, if you want best results, start preparing long before you actually need to move on. Even if you do not plan to, it’s always a good thing to have a realistic view of the market you’re in. Here’s few point why social networks can benefit for your career:

  • You’d build an “aura” around yourself, which positions you in the market niche. By participating in specialised groups and forums you’ll deliver a clear message about your expertise. A handful of clear and concise answers and participation in discussions about real life problems will deliver much more to your future employers than few ambiguous lines in your resume.
  • You’ll raise your “rank”. The more you participate in discussions and conversations people will start recognising your knowledge and competence (assuming you really know what you’re talking about). If you gave a helpful advice to someone, he might refer his boss to you if they’re after a specialist of your skills.
  • You’ll grow your network of people that you know directly or indirectly. With 200 first degree contacts in LinkedIn, you’ll be looking to have up to 1.2 million contacts in your network. Which means your profile is 1, 2 or 3 steps away from them and will appear in their searches and in fact they will be able to reach you. This means that you might be contacted every now and then regarding new positions.
  • In turn, you will be able to search for open positions and apply for them. In both cases searches will be very narrow and rarely you’ll be contacted regarding positions that are completely unrelated.
  • By participating in various conferences and discussions you’ll be boosting your technical knowledge. And because you’re in a group that has very similar interests you can take advantage of group’s combined wisdom in solving your everyday problems.

To participate efficiently, you need to develop habit of visiting your chosen social networking site on regular basis and actively participating in discussions there. That does not mean that you suddenly need to start writing ten posts a day.

  • Try to keep your activity to everyday read and once a week write.
  • No need to sign-up to more than one (or two, if you’re really active) social networking sites, as you’d loose track of what’s and where happening.
  • In discussions, post only constructive answers. Thinking that you are being interviewed helps to filter out unnecessary emotions and also forces not to post without the necessity.
  • When building your social network do not limit yourself to only people that you know very well. If you get an invite from someone working in your organization and if you at least exchanged few direct (or mailing list) emails, just accept it. Accepting invitations to connect from people you worked in previous companies and even if you don’t know them very well still acceptable. You gain at least one thing: you get “indirect” access to that company’s social network.
  • If you participate in discussion boards outside the social network, try looking up people that you talk to there. Chances are that they also are users of the same social networking site. Invite them.
  • Same applies to your business contacts. If you visit a booth in an expo and after some interesting discussion you exchange business cards with someone, don’t immediately put it in you drawer when you get back. Lookup that person and if (s)he is on the same network - invite.
  • Keep it professional as much as possible. Informalities are allowed, it’s “social” network at the end of the day, but always keep in mind that your actions are public and this is what your potential employers are going to see.

These are just guidelines, obviously. And you need to develop your own habits and tactics that suite you the best. But participation in social network life should become art of your daily activities. Don’t let it to take it much of your time, though. Companies are recognising the threat as employees are wasting more their times on these sites during the office hours and start blocking them. Try limiting yourself to an hour per day, 30 mins at lunch time and 30 mins at home.It’s very easy to slip this into your dayly agenda and you’ll start seeing the benefits soon.

UserRank

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 9, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

To start with I’d like to share with you a link to link about interesting and relatively recent initiative by Six Apart and Google to open up the social graph. With the same people who engineered OpenId on board this is the place to watch.

Another article by Brad summarises what Google will probably attempt to archive in social networks.

Will the world be a better place with information about social contacts as accessible as a phone number? Will our trust to individual companies like Facebook and LinkedIn extend to the entire community? Will we have to exploit some Google UserRank hacks to increase our popularity?

With our social environment pretty much shaping and defining personal identity the importance and impact of global and open social graph cannot be overstated.

Let’s turn this page in the humanity history book and see where will it take us!

Security of (and in) the Social Networks

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 9, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

SecuritySocial networks becoming ever so popular and attracting more and more new users, that security becomes an issue and number one priority. There are many different aspects when talking about security in social networks, however three main areas must be identified:

  1. Security of the social network web sites
  2. User privacy
  3. Security of user’s relatives

Web site security is more of an operational issue of the owners of these sites and there’s not much a regular user can do to improve it. However, one should keep in mind few important points when registering and using social networking web sites.

First of all keep in mind the nature of these sites. Most of them are following “release early, release often” paradigm to keep themselves in front of others and compete efficiently. New features and site improvements are released as soon as possible, sometimes without thorough security testing. Which in most of the cases is acceptable, users report errors, developers fixes them and life goes on. Or does it? As we can see, there are numerous successful attempts to break into social network sites. Let’s face it, these sites attract million of users, therefore it makes it “interesting” to hack into them.

So when registering to social networking web sites, do not use your primary email address (and definitely not the one you use for your e-banking). Same applies for account password. It’s best to have “email/login/password” combination dedicated just for social networking.

Another thing to keep in mind is the secret question. One of the most popular ones is your mother maiden name. Which in most of the cases is what your bank has as well. So keep that in mind, and try using something different. In opposite to passwords, which are normally kept encrypted and even site owners cannot retrieve them, answers to security questions are kept in plain text or are easy to decrypt.

It wouldn’t be fair to put misleading birthrates and other personal information as it would go against all social networking ideas, but try exposing yourself as little as possible, especially in the informational areas that overlap with online shopping sites and e-banking.

User privacy is a very subjective matter. By user privacy here I do not mean private data that allows malicious users gaining access to financial and other information. To be clear, here I am not referring to emails, birthdates, usual secret questions, etc. User privacy here is everything else, such as friends, favorite meals, eye colour, visited locations and similar information. Now, what is and what is not considered as private is completely up to the user. Someone might be very sensitive to complete strangers seeing their holiday locations and pictures, whilst for others it might be one of the reasons they joined social networking site.

As a general rule, before posting your data online make sure it cannot be used against you to cause you any harm. Now, this might be very tricky. For example, your e-bank has a secret question “Best friends name” and you (after reading previous paragraph) carefully selected something different. And the next thing you do, you list all your best friends on Facebook.

Losses caused by identity theft are humongous, so be cautious when you post your details online.

Security of your relatives is usually overlooked by security advisers. Everyone advises to take extra care when publishing your personal/private information online, but hardly ever mentions that in fact you could cause harm to others by posting your private information. Coming back to the example with e-bank secret question being “Best friends name”. You carefully choose different secret question when you register on social network web site, you also take extra care not to emphasize the fact that a person is your closest friend. That’s OK. However your best friend so much likes you that (s)he puts yourself on the top of the list in his/her friends list…

Same principle applies when you talk about your job. However tempting, try keeping it low profile. Even indirect references can cause serious harm to the company you are working for. And not to mention numerous copy-paste accidents, that happen when working with multiple open windows, and chatting/blogging while working at the same time. Forbidding social network sites in the office might sound as an extreme measure, but fortunately security departments start recognising the threat.