Category: Facebook
Facebook recently launched "Facebook Places". Depending on your settings any "friend" can find out where you are when you log in or comment. This is supposed to allow you to 'see' people who are nearby.
In addition, you or ANY friend can TAG you at an event and enayone who is checked in nearby among your "friends" can see your position highlighted
It gives the actual address & map location of where you are as you use Facebook. These days you can never really know who your "friends" are.
This is not just an invasion of privacy but can have severe concequences
to you personally, especially if you add "friends" you dont really know.
To remove this go to top right menu "Account", then choose "Account settings", click "Notifications", scroll down to "Places" and uncheck the 2 boxes 'Tags me at a Place' & 'Comments on my visits to Places' THEN click 'Save Changes'.
Now go back to the menu "Account", then choose "Privacy Settings", click "Customise settings" (it will be in blue). Scroll down to the section "Things I share" Unclick ENABLE in 'Include me in "People Here Now" after I check in... Visible to friends and people checked in nearby'
Continue scrolling down to the next section "Things others share" and select DISABLED to the label 'Friends can check me in to Places'
Dont want someone knowing more or less EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE when you are posting... or even have your "friends" tagging where you are!
That sets a dangerous leak of information, especially for you younger ones and females...You all be careful now and thanks for the heads up Cindy PS The DEFAULT settings is that this is enabled.
wP
As I mentioned in the last site update, anonymous comments are no longer permitted - but since so many people come through Facebook it was necessary to allow Facebook users to login to comment. They may now do so through the 'Connect with Facebook' button that appears in the block on the left where you log in. If you can't see it, you're either not logged in or are blind.
Users on the site can also use their Facebook profile to login to the site as well - it will reconcile the two if the same email address is used. This means that if you do, you won't have a duplicate account.
More stuff in the works for KnowTnT.com when Drupal 7 is released. ;-)
Over last weekend and this week, I've been in discussion with someone who claimed that there was a libelous comment on the site - one which they found potentially damaging. Of course, it was posted anonymously - and I had to take pains to explain the difference between a comment and a blog. Still, it would seem that Trinidad and Tobago is coming up to speed on Internet culture despite itself.
After some due diligence, I removed the offending comment. This required making sure that the person claiming libel was an actual human being. It involved speaking with lawyers. Ultimately, there was little of a case that could be brought against the site despite some aggressive posturing - but in my unwritten philosophy there is a need to be fair. And in being fair, it becomes necessary for people to face their accusers. And in this, the site has not permitted for that mainly because I left anonymous comments open until they were abused.
They've been abused. Anonymous commenting on the site is now no longer available.
While this may be an inconvenience for some (though not the people who think Facebook is the Internet and think their comments aren't worth putting on the site itself), it is necessary. And one of the things I plan to have working on the site within the next month or two is the Facebook connection between the site and Facebook so that people can log in to this site with their Facebook IDs. The problem in the past with this has been the interface that Facebook provides apparently changing.
But for now, no more comment cowards will be permitted.
I was doing some house-cleaning of my facebook profile - getting rid of groups and apps that weren't needed - and discovered something funnycurious (as they say in T&T - yes, foreigner, it means strange). The number of members of the COP, PNM and UNC groups on facebook - 3,400, 2,900 & 880 respectively - is way less, even in total, than the 11,500 folks who joined the group 2 million against $2million flag!! In other words, more folks behooved themselves to click on the Join button for a group against our Hon. Sports Minister's over-compensating 'legacy flag' than for all three political parties combined. I had to ask myself: are we Trinis more likely to be *against* something than *for* the opposite?
If the answer to this is yes - we're more likely to be against something - then that places some of our behaviours in interesting light.
When the West Indies cricket team plays against Australia, we aren't backing our boys - we really bad-minding Australia. When folks became fans of Keith Rowley on facebook in recent days, it wasn't because they supported what he stands for - it's more to register their hatred for what he stood against.
All these years when our social-scientists presumed we voted along racial lines, it wasn't because we supported our own - it's more that we feared those who weren't. It surely couldn't be because every single voter read the parties' manifestoes from cover to cover and made a deliberate decision to support the policies of the party they voted for. Heck, I'd be surprised if most of the voters even knew who their party's representative for the area was - they just went in and looked for the party's symbol to place their X. {Read more}
Two newspaper articles cover the same thing:
While it is unclear why a mother would leave a child in a running vehicle for any length of time, the word did apparently get out through a Blackberry. How Facebook was specifically involved remains unclear.
The discrepancy in the reporting between the Trinidad Express and Trinidad Guardian is worth exploring.
While assisting someone with some information, I came across this data regarding Facebook usage in Trinidad and Tobago. Apparently, there are 266,920 Facebook users in Trinidad and Tobago - a figure which puts Trinidad and Tobago at number 77 of the global ranking.
Given that Alexa reports that the top visited site in Trinidad and Tobago is Facebook - higher than even Google and other search engines - it can be said that the users online on Facebook, numbering 266,920 users, are the core active users of the Internet in Trinidad and Tobago.
But what does that really mean? What sort of use do you think Facebook has within Trinidad and Tobago? Is it just a replacement for Solitaire in offices, or is there something more important going on?
(Seriously, I'd like to know what you think).
The most visited site from Trinidad and Tobago remains Facebook - and now the first documented Facebook related assault has come:
...Court prosecutor Sgt Dianne Boxhill told the magistrate the alleged incident occurred after “a message” was posted on Internet social network, Facebook. According to the prosecutor, the accused confronted Arneaud on Charlotte Street, and she was allegedly stabbed about the body with a knife...
Not that Facebook has much to do with the stabbing other than a form of communication. Even so, when people can communicate more frequently the only control over what is communicated belongs to those communicating.
Don't stab your Facebook friends. Or enemies, for that matter.
I'd heard some rumblings beforehand about Criminals Soon To Be Posted On Facebook but didn't write of it because I don't like to write about rumors. But there it is, voiced by Acting Police Commissioner James Philbert on Tuesday. I'd tried to change a few minds on it but didn't get a chance to talk to anyone who was actually making decisions - so I'll outline why I think it is good and bad.
First, the good:
- Facebook is the most visited site from Trinidad and Tobago, so posting such information there is better than nothing on the Internet.
Now the bad:
- As the Guardian article I linked to indicates, Facebook is a 'privately-owned, social-networking Web site'. It's also what we social media pros call a walled garden. And because it is a walled garden, its efficacy for disseminating information is decreased by the walls of the garden.
So, what did I suggest? I suggested a Flickr Professional account (at $25 US per year) that would allow, with proper tagging, such criminals to have their photos up and also be found through mainstream search engines. Coupled with a rather simple implementation of a content management system, such as used here at KnowTnT.com, this could be a powerful tool for fighting crime. No, I wasn't looking for business. They could do it themselves, I'd just like to see it done right.
That said, it is good to see that social media is being seen as a tool for fighting crime in Trinidad and Tobago. I just wish that they chose a more effective path. And they can still do it. The option is always there.
In the heels of my last post about Facebook being a walled garden, I decided to play around a little last night. The muse was Karel McIntosh's post on Caribbean Celebrities on Twitter.
Of course, I had to make it amusing just to make it interesting for myself and so I went off looking for V.S. Naipaul on Twitter. After all, that idea seems so outrageous that I doubt anyone ever checked. Unsurprisingly, he's not tweeting - at least as V.S. Naipaul. Had I found him on Twitter I probably would have gone into shock.
140 characters just doesn't seem like something he'd be too awfully interested in expressing himself in.
So I poked around a bit more. I checked Flickr for images of V.S. Naipaul, and that netted a fair amount of images of the Nobel Laureate. That also netted the image you see above. Georgia Popplewell over at CaribbeanFreeRadio.com was kind enough not only to post the image, but to make it available through a Creative Commons license - so that I can share it with you. {Read more}
Facebook is a very popular social networking tool in Trinidad and Tobago - in fact, it's the most viewed website from Trinidad and Tobago. It's a great way to keep in touch with friends - I use it myself. I have nothing against it. But, people, it's not the Internet.
Yesterday, one of my acquaintances on Facebook posted a link to some pictures of another one of their acquaintances that showed the living conditions of the Chinese workers who protested last week because of poor living conditions, amongst other things. The photos were good, though I must admit that I've seen people living under worse conditions within Trinidad and Tobago. Even so, I can't share these images with you because they're on Facebook - not where they could be visible by everyone.
Like a broken record/scratched CD, I once again pointed out that the images would be better off on a photo sharing site like Flickr (I'm partial to Flickr because I've been using it for years. There are others!). And the response I got was, "He doesn't know how to upload them to Flickr. Do you want to upload them?"
I bit back my first and second responses because Flickr's sole purpose is for people to upload pictures. I'm supposed to be an old man compared to the generation coming up: I'm supposed to be the one complaining that I don't know how to do things. What's wrong with you children? Get with it!
Registering a free account on Flickr couldn't be easier; uploading the images can be (arguably) easier than dealing with Facebook's uploading of images. What it boils down to is that (1) he didn't know better and (2) he was uncomfortable with a website which is remarkably simpler than Facebook. I can do nothing about the second but I can address the first. {Read more}
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