Sign Me Out (iOS)…

 

Sign me out is simply a lovely little iPhone app that lets you check if your Gmail and Facebook are signed in anywhere you don’t want them to be.

Don’t pretend you’ve never walked away from a computer leaving yourself vulnerable to the odd “frape” here and there, well it could be worse that if someone more malicious comes across your open account. Or in my case, hacks it.

If you find yourself logged in from other locations, one click of the big red button and that potentially unauthorized user is disconnected.

Any account you add to Sign Me Out will give you a count of the accounts activity and on clicking into that account you can gain even more details, remotely logging that account out even.

yes you can do this from your browser with Gmail anyway, but the point of this app is that you can do it anywhere.

If you buy the $1 full version of the app, you can add as many accounts as you want. If you just want to give it a try or only need to use one account, the free lite version will work just fine for you.

Check it Here : Sign Me Out / Lite ($1 / Free)

Facebook Scams…

 

Is Facebook a scammer’s Paradise?

Every day you come into contact with a new scam, survey or fake application on Facebook with bum links from scammers hoping to profit from your itchy clicking finger and it’s getting worse. So are the scammers just getting smarter or is Facebook getting lazy?

According to Sophos Threat Report 2011, the top three scams on Facebook are:

Likejacking Worms: Scammers set up a page with an intriguing title that draws the user in such as “Look what happens when this girl’s boss see’s her latest Facebook post!” Requiring you to like the page where there’s merely an empty space helps scammers profit from the sheer volume of traffic.

Survey Scams: Similar to the worms, you’re promised a juicy story or photo in return for you completing a quick survey. Guess what? You just added to another scammer’s commission. And on top of that, you’ve just spread this scam around to all your friends.

Fake Applications: this is one that’s taking hold quite a bit lately, applications with Promises of options like seeing who viewed your profile. This Can’t Happen! Welcome to another scammers paradise that you get to share with all your friends, again. Yay!

Sophos is one of the world’s leading internet security providers, providing information on how to secure your Facebook from potential threats.

Whilst the volume of scams seems to be increasing constantly, Facebook claims that their effort and effectiveness to combat this have increased proportionately, successfully suing some scammers in the process.

But Scammers are getting smarter and you can see a new scam sweeping yours or your friends Facebook or your friends every day making Facebook eerily reminiscent of the my time on MySpace; when you had everyone under the sun tell you they were lonely and wont you click their page to meet them?

Will Facebook ever be able to completely remove this trend of scams or will scammers continue to draw the crowds? Here’s an idea, think before you “like” and continue to add to these peoples growing revenue.

The full report can be read free online at http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-threat-report-2011-wpna.pdf

RockMelt Web Browser…

Ok, so simply put RockMelt is another Web Browser, but it’s not just any Web Browser, in its own little ways, its unique. Based upon the Google Chromium Source (it looks like Google Chrome), RockMelt is what Social Networking addicts have been looking for.
It seamlessly integrates with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to shout to the world your every status, update and tweet simply. It even hosts your Facebook chat list on the left hand side at all times allowing you to keep in constant contact with your friends no matter what site you’re on.
Here’s a quick intro to the Browser by its founder:

You definitely get the Google Chrome feel off of its interface, but this isn’t in anyway a bad thing, especially considering Chromes growing popularity. Good news: RockMelt is also available on Mac’s, [sorry Linux user, not your chance yet.] RockMelt has all the Google chrome features allowing you use extensions plus its own Facebook and twitter components.
The sad part, RockMelt is only available under invitation as its still in Beta testing, but you can get an invite off someone that already uses RockMelt, I have 3 to give away at the moment, or you can connect via Facebook and wait for your invite there.

That being said, I consider this a negative, RockMelt should think about growing its social networking experience and growing beyond just Facebook and Twitter.
But apart from that, RockMelt is pretty fantastic if not ridiculously distracting, building itself upon one of my favourite browsers and then adding extensions that just make things that little bit easier, particularly if you find yourself signing up to a lot of RSS feeds too.
I don’t know if RockMelt will become one of my more prominent browsers but I’m willing to give it a try, it is still in Beta testing after all. Given the chance to grow this could become huge, so give it a go, see how it suits your Social Networking Addiction.

RockMelt does so much more than I mentioned, the full tutorial can be found on the browser after you’ve installed it, Enjoy testing it out and it can be found here:
If you want me to Hook you up with a invitation, comment below or else connect and sign up to receive and invite view Facebook from their Website: I’d like to thank Brian W. for pointing towards this browser and for his invite into the world of RockMelt.

Frequently Remove “Friends” for Clutter-Free Social Networking…

 

For most of us, Facebook and Twitter are an unmanageable mess of status updates, random questionnaires, and all round pointless posts, but what if you actually wanted to use social networking without getting information overload, here are a few tips.

Jimmy Kimmel suggested a National Unfriend Day that was to take place on November 17th, but just because that's come and gone, doesn’t mean your social media doesn’t need some winter cleaning.

Less is a hell of a lot more when it comes to social networking, particularly when you’re trying to find the right mixture of personal and open communication between friends, family, followers and just plain old strangers. By cutting down the number of people you’re following through Facebook and Twitter along with many other sites you can help distil the information you’re getting, making everything easier to read.

To make it easier on you, Facebook has simplified the process of quickly removing friends. Under for the Friends tab, clicking "Edit" will show you a small list of recently updated friends. Using the drop down you can filter out friends by "All Friends", "Recent", etc. Having a broad look across your social graph, you can quickly setup filters to defriend people you've lost contact with.

Here are a few simple mental filters to help you figure out who you should be unfriending.

• Do you wish this person a Happy Birthday?
• Have you seen this person in the last year?
• Does this person update constantly?
• Does this person post an original thought or is everything recycled form somewhere or something else, e.g. links, quotes, lyrics?

Facebook may limit its third party apps for getting stats on the people you follow but Twitter is open to everyone from ManageFlitter, Nest Unclutterer to SocialToo.

Just a few methods for filtering out a lot of the unwarranted, unwanted information from your social networking sites. But if you want something to help you organise them all, check out Digsby as mentioned in a previous post.

Digsby (for Social Networking)…

 

“Full Description

A multiprotocol Im Client that lets you manage all your IM, email, and social network accounts from one easy-to-use application. For IM, it brings all your buddies into one merged contact list with support for AIM, MSN, Facebook Chat, Yahoo, ICQ, GTalk, and Jabber. For email, it offers notifications of new emails with message previews, as well as, the ability to perform actions such as "Mark as Read" and "Delete" right from the notification with support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, POP, and IMAP. For social networks, it provides a newsfeed of events on the network and the ability to set status with support for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.”

That's Digsby, technically speaking.

 

The Pro’s

You can access your msn, your Facebook, your twitter, all your email accounts and you can even use it for Facebook chat and all you have to do is sign in once for access to everything.

You can set up notifications for anything, if Facebook is updated you’ll know, same goes for twitter and any other site you’ve got it connected to, including your email.

You can post right to your Facebook or twitter without having to open up your browser.

It updates often, usually feeding off suggestions from its users via twitter.

 

The Con’s

Few and far between, the only negative thing’s I can say about Digsby is that when you’re installing it, it tries to push a lot of add-ons your way. This may be how they keep it free but be sure you cancel installing these when installing Digsby.

Apart from that it can sometimes get a little sluggish, but that is more when you’re running too many other programs.

Apart from this, Digsby is one the greatest pieces of free software if you like everything you use bundled into one neat little package, we’re just waiting for a Mac and Linux release.

Get Digsby Here

How to Prevent Yourself from Being Drunk and on Facebook…

Finding an image that’s both appropriate and amusing to coincide with this post is difficult if not impossible, so I decided to leave it at that. If you care to type Drunk and on Facebook into Google, you’ll understand.

If you’ve found that you get drunk and use technology for inappropriate things, like messaging your ex, insulting your employer, insulting anyone, or even just posting something really, really embarrassing, then it’s just too bad I post this after the weekend.

The Social Media Sobriety Test comes from a security company known as Web root, and  its a plugin for Firefox with the tagline “Nothing good happens online after 1 a.m.”

It’s simple, download the plugin, customize the setting for a bunch of sites, not just Facebook, but everything MySpace from Tumblr too, Gmail and Hotmail also.

Set the hours you think you’ll more than likely be intoxicated and within reach of your computer and if you sign into any of the set sites, you’ll be tested to gain access.

Now when testing this I was sober and I failed it, but typing the alphabet backwards can be as difficult as saying it backwards.

Judging from the never-ending supply of Internet drunken hilarity,  or even just websites such as Texts from Last Night I would dub a plugin like this a necessity for anyone who blacks out their online antics.

Unfortunately this plugin is only available for Firefox at the moment, and isn’t available on mobile devices, so if you are drunk and online without this plugin, have some common sense.

NB: Links are highlighted Orange

Sick of Facebook Being Everywhere?

Facebook is everywhere, and will inevitably remain everywhere for an extended period of time, but if like me, you are getting tired of all the Facebook “like” buttons and widgets on every single website well then there is a simple method to remove them, if you run Google Chrome. A simple extension.

Not much more to it than installing the extension, reloading the page and poof, they’re gone! No more Facebook Buttons everywhere.

Facebook Disconnect [Google Chrome Extensions]

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I am currently looking for the best way to to emulate this in Firefox and will update if I find such an add-on.