If you have been paying any attention on Twitter the last few days you probably saw a bunch of tweets from Twifficiency that looked like this

Once it started I saw these tweets popping up everywhere, as people ran to find out their score, most people not realizing that they were granting the application access to tweet on their behalf (slightly embarrassing for some, extremely embarrassing if you are a google exec).

This got me thinking, how many of you bother to maintain test accounts?  I do maintain test accounts on some networks, Twitter being among them.  I use them for a number of reasons for example when I first used Twitterfeed and later moved to dlvr.it to integrate my blog with Twitter, I wanted to make sure I didn’t spam the twitter stream, related while I did not fall for  Twifficiency yesterday, there is a new Twitter tool practically every day that looks compelling, if it doesn’t come from a trusted source, I always have a (protected) twitter account with no followers to try it out on.

You can not necessarily have a “test” account on all sites, for example the Facebook Terms of Use could possibly prevent you from maintaining a fake account

Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account: 1.        You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. 2.        You will not create more than one personal profile.

I can’t find anything similar in the Twitter Terms of Service, in fact it is common practice for people to have multiple Twitter accounts, and accounts not in any persons actual name.

E-mail accounts – they are certainly easy enough to come by these days, I have a couple I consider throwaways, I use them to register for new sites that pop up that I am interested in but don’t know and trust.  I have seen too many sites do things like e-mail you your password in clear text, or spam your friends, using accounts and passwords that can not  be connected back and have no contacts, protect me if the site turns out to be a fraud or just poorly designed.

Finally  while we are talking about protecting your online security, how many of you go back and review the services you have granted access to Facebook, Twitter or other accounts? For example readtwit a number of people including myself found the service useful, but it did not last

I wonder how many people still have rights granted to Readtwit in their twitter accounts

How do you protect your online interests and your followers? These are some of the steps I take to protect mine, in addition to strong passwords that are not the same on every network, and certainly not the same password as I use for my e-mail addresses.

So as I mentioned this morning I enabled Location History on my Google Latitude Account.  This evening I decided to take a look at what my day looked like, and well it looks something like this Pretty accurate, as you can see I took one route to my office and another one home.  While the history feature is private, looking at this map it really shows that someone could track your movements if they got a hold of the data.   (Just as a side note when viewing your history in Latitude you can also export it to a KML file and share/view the data in Google Earth.) The other piece that I mentioned this morning is you can see there is a large cluster at the bottom of the map, and really there is one at the top too, it is just harder to see as it covers a smaller area.  So apparently there is no way to throttle or control when the application on your phone checks in (well unless you are using the iPhone of course where the only way to check in is to load up the page in the browser since there is no app, and even if there was it would not run in the background).  The instructions for all of the supported devices (Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android) are the same

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

This does not seem to be to be very efficient as last night while I was sleeping and my blackberry was still and plugged in it checked in about 40 times an hour.  I think I like the brightkite model a little better where I have control over where and when I want to be checked in to a location, who can see my location, and the ability to post it out to Twitter or Facebook selectively . I am going to keep location history enabled a few more days out of curiosity, but unless they tweak it a little I don’t see much value in it.

Just caught this press release from IBM announcing “Enterprise Adaptability services”

With Enterprise Adaptability companies can learn how to embed Web 2.0 technologies into the fabric of business operations, allowing employees, partners and customers to communicate, establish new business relationships and make real-time decisions within the context of their everyday work.

Enterprise Adaptability combines industry-leading software from IBM Lotus Software and FileNet with consulting expertise from IBM Global Business Services’ Human Capital Management practice.

So I suppose the software involved is Connections, Quickr, Filenet, and I would guess Atlas would be in there as well. I would guess there is a good market for this business as more organizations look for help in their adoption of Social Networking systems.  I am very interested to see where Social Networking components are embedded in business processes, this is almost the inverse of the Atlantic project which is bringing business processes to the Collaboration tools.  So which way are we going?  Which way should we go?  I suspect over time it will be a little bit of both. IBM Announces Services for Collaboration

Interesting article on the CIA’s use of Social Computing sites and YouTube to gather intelligence.

In keeping with its mandate to gather intelligence, the CIA is watching YouTube. U.S. spies, now under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are looking increasingly online for intelligence; they have become major consumers of social media.

While I doubt they have employees whose exclusive function is watching Youtube, and I suspect some of it is automated, probably an interesting job, which I would expect requires some  language skills as well. Apparently at least the CIA thinks there is intelligence out there 🙂 CIA Monitors YouTube For Intelligence