Posts Tagged ‘social networking’
Social media security problems
Written by Dan Blacharski on March 15, 2010 – 10:38 am -
A Reuters blog today likened social networking to Jurassic Park. While this is probably the first time anybody has connected dinosaur-related themes to Web 3.0 technologies like social networking, in this case it was probably accurate.
The premise of the note was that social media sites are like Michael Crichton’s fictional dinosaur park—really, really cool technology, but not much in the way of security and safety precautions. This is a problem that cannot be ignored any longer. Like the elephant in the room—or in this case, the tyrannosaurus in the room—it’s too big to look the other way, and it’s not going away any time soon. Social media is here to stay, and with something on the order of a third of Internet users taking advantage of it, security managers have to get on with the business of creating a workable policy.
Why should businesses be concerned about social networking sites? It is after all, something that people play with on their own time (or at least, should play with on their own time), and doesn’t really have anything to do with the business. Or does it? The fact is, social networking is no longer just social. There are two factors at work here that warrant attention. First, on the other side of the office, mostly unbeknownst to the IT and security people, the marketing department is making very good use of social networking as a corporate marketing and communications tool. Companies use Twitter to keep customers and partners apprised of new releases, updates, special promotions and other information. They use LinkedIn to meeting other people interested in making deals, and they even use Facebook to make corporate pages meant to drive traffic to the main site. Most corporations now also have blogs, and even interactive forums where customers can participate in discussions with company staff and other customers. Yes, all those things were originally designed “just for fun,” and the creators of these social tools very likely had no idea that their creations would wind up in so many corporate toolboxes. Yet, here they are. Continue reading Social media security problems
Email still king despite pretenders
Written by John P Mello Jr on October 29, 2009 – 5:37 pm -
Email not giving up its crown yet.
Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.
Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.