Caught by fake Facebook account

I got caught out by a "friend" with a fake Facebook account the other day. Normally I avoid this because I look at friend requests to decide if the person seems believable.

• Does the information seem consistent? Someone from Australia who went to a Pakistani university and lives as an Iraqi goat herder raises questions
• Do they have a history? A lot of fake accounts only go back a few days
• Why should they know me? Although they mostly fail the history test I've had a few friend requests from US soldiers in Afghanistan.
• Why should I believe a new account for an old friend is genuine?Some possibilities
  • A new photo that wasn't on the old account is good.
  • Has the old account continued posting?
  • Failing which a private message to the old account can be enlightening.

In this case I couldn't even remember accepting a "friend" request from this person, but suddenly a private message quickly followed by a photo of their manhood. This was my first on Facebook and it took me a to realise what I was looking at. Instantly unfriended and blocked, but ????

Alec Ross Twitter Diplomat

Article in the NZ Herald by Chris Barton based on a phone interview with Alec Ross who will be here for the Project Revolution Digital and Social Media Conference at AUT next week.

Interesting quotes on use of Twitter and facebook for what he sees as "good" social protest and Wikileaks for what he sees as "bad" social protest.

"It's not just about being able to establish connectivity where a government has taken down the networks, or about getting around censorship, it's also about keeping people safe, Governments have the ability to intercept personal communications and geolocate people, so what we try to do is help keep activists safe at the technical level."

Article at NZ Herald

Police upset burglary victim used Facebook to name and shame

The victim of a housebreaking who lost "two laptops, containing vital information for work and business" and would have lost much more had she not arrived home when she did managed to find out who the culprits were and outed them on Facebook has been criticised by Inspector Ed Van Den Broek, area tactical response manager, Rotorua police:

"But don't post people's names in the social media sites, and make sure you call police if you see anything suspicious or you find out any information that may lead to criminals being apprehended by phoning the police or Crimestoppers helpline"

Of course, if the police and the courts did their jobs and got professional housebreakers off the streets we wouldn't need to take "vigilante action" which in any case (at least in my mind) is something a lot stronger than naming someone on Failbook.

More at NZ Herald

Why Google needs Buzz to be relevant

Google makes its income by selling relevant adverts, originally just on its search pages and that's probably still the major income, but increasingly on its other services so it needs real people to visit it to show them the adverts. Allfacebook.com recently published an article "Facebook Now Responsible For Majority Of Web Portal Traffic" where they point out that

15% of Web traffic to Yahoo, MSN and AOL in Dec 2009 originated from Facebook and MySpace. That 15% was split 13% for Facebook and 2% for MySpace. Surprisingly, Google only provided 7% of traffic, and were even beat out by eBay with 7.61%.

And go on to discuss that with search engines becoming less relevant they need to take on social networking to survive.

Where can we go on this? Firstly, 15% isn't a majority, and portals are ways of finding things (news, links, etc) and not the things themselves, so a good search engine should bypass them and go direct to the full news article, or web page, but I can see why this is bad for Google, as it means people aren't searching on Google for what they want and finding adverts.

There's a certain irony in this. Before Google, to find a site on a topic we relied on reputable directories and links from authority sites. Early search engines were pretty useless as they just counted how well stuffed with keywords the page's meta data and contents were and low quality advertising sites learned to play the system and the search engines were pretty useless. I can remember having to go to page 10 or 20 of results to find what I was after.

Google's pagerank algorithm cut through this, as by counting links from authority sites to rank the importance of pages and if you couldn't find what you were looking for by page 2 of Google you probably weren't going to find it so you revised your search. It worked because at the heart of it, all Google was doing was automating the job previously performed by authority sites and reputable directories.

The owners of low quality sites, of course, learned to game Google and an arms race has been going on ever since. In a way Google has lost as, if you try and search for something on Google you are now usually presented with a large number of relatively low quality advertising or retailer sites. Services like Blogspot and places like Facebook return the web to the ordinary person and individuals find their pool of personally trusted authority sites. Google can use the data created by links from and to blogs, Facebook pages, etc to assign page ranking and, as they show actual visitor traffic by real people, Google Toolbar, Google Adsense and Google Analytics must be godsends to them.

Blogspot (and other blogging services), Facebook, Twitter etc are now all heavily spammed, but real people choose who they follow and when, so depending on how much data it can get from them Google can analyse which social media pages give a degree of "real" authority. Like Google reader and their other services Buzz is entirely on their services, Google knows what's in my Google Reader and they know what's on my Google Buzz page, they must be pretty sure by now that I'm a real person and they have a fair idea of my sphere of interest, so they can rate the links I make and use that as one tiny data point in the calculation of the importance of web sites. Aggregate that over millions of users and Google gains valuable insight into the importance of sites as seen by social media users.

Done well, Buzz will help Google in its arms race to keep search relevant and so keep traffic coming. The owners of commercial websites will, of course, try to work out how to game the new system and I assume that SEO (Search Engine Optimization [sic]) practitioners are industriously trying to work out exactly how to do that right now.