I’m trying to work out why this irritates me so much: Visit The Insider and you’ll be continually pestered by a popup (for some reason not caught by the pop-up blocker in Firefox) inviting me to install The Insider’s Facebook application. This is the much-touted Facebook Connect – a successor to the disastrous Beacon thing, … Read more
Look at a social networking site lie Yaari and you can see where the social networking phenomenon may fail, simply by abusing the trust of its users. Sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo etc rely on expanding quickly by offering a useful service: trawling your address book to find friends and contacts who use the same service. … Read more
A study of mobile phone data shows that we are extraordinarily consistent about our movements. Mobile phone data, unsurprisingly, provides rich pickings for researchers since we carry one around with us all the time, and, unlike dollar bills, it’s more likely to stick with one person. But some have questioned the ethics of such a … Read more
Research from Purdue University shows that Bluetooth would be a very good way to track travel time. Bluetooth devices give off unique IDs which could be used to measure speed and movement of pedestrians and vehicles. But why stop there? Wouldn’t it be possible to track people via their Bluetooth signal, if you knew one … Read more
I’m puzzled. I can’t understand this quirk in Facebook that means I can’t politely brush off someone requesting my friendship without giving them access to all my friends and a lot of my info. Receive a friend request and you get this message: I have a rule that I don’t make buddies with people I’ve … Read more