Tag Archives: Social Media

Culture, Social Media

The other perspective – Social Media – Part 1

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Have you realized below points when you don’t find people interested in your social media posts and activities? Its not always lack of interest or dislike that causes someone to be un-interested in your posts.

  • Is your post showing up on their activity feed or wall?
  • Are your interests and likes similar?
  • Does the other person have time for social media?
  • Is the other person active on social media? Is s/he searching for things completely different from you?
  • All social media runs on algorithms, optimizations and matching – is the algorithm correctly able to decipher where your & other person’s interests are?
  • Many people have profiles which are not exactly what they really are – either for interest of their privacy or other reasons causing more mis-match to happen
  • We get to see more and more of what we tend to like and follow, post and so on which may not be exactly in agreement with your network
  • Mathematically the permutations & combinations for even a network of 1,000 people connected to one person with 10s of likes and posts / activities per person builds such a vast set of events which is not humanely possible to track for one person
  • Probability of we seeing something that other person in our network wants us to see is very low
  • Before we judge why people have not been in touch with us, do realize some of the points above. Larger your social network in terms of physical world & virtual world – lower the chances of you observing activities, posts, likes and more from individuals in your network that they want you to see unless the matching algorithms are intuitive
  • These are some of the reasons why we keep seeing warnings about why we should not be judgemental about things on social media
  • Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Internet, Social Media

My journey on Social Media & Internet

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Internet is the greatest enabler of work and education in human history as per me and the opportunities it opens up in terms of what we can study, learn and work on are amazing. My suggestion to all youngsters in school, college and who recently have started their career in terms of job / startups is to use this enabler in a positive sense to collaborate, learn, absorb knowledge, fuel creativity and build their own ecosystem especially with professional networks like LinkedIn.

I got introduced to computers in standard 4th, 5th, 6th at Air-force School, Gwalior, MP, India. After that stint in LOGO programming building basic shapes & creating rudimentary BASIC language programs in computer labs there was a slow down in terms of access to computers when I moved to my home state. Then again in 1999 I got a HP desktop computer with dial-up modem and good features for that time with an internet connection (ICENET was the first private ISP in Gujarat at that time). Dial up modem would support me for accessing internet at slow speeds and I got introduced to the online world. I never looked back or logged off since then.

Things I have had access to over time:

  1. ICQ
  2. Yahoo Messenger & Portal
  3. Yahoo Search followed Google Search
  4. Many tutorials, free websites to build web pages which got me freelance contracts for building product pages for few people followed by building my own basic websites and learning CPanel, Web programming & Databases along with DNS and basics of computer networks
  5. Experts-Exchange.com, ASP, upcoming PHP, VB – I got exposure to all of these in early days of 1999/2000/01/02
  6. Local portals of Gujarat and so on
  7. Exploring Linux (Red Hat Fedora) and trying to configure Conexant modem on it (I failed at it)
  8. Exploring IETF, IEEE, CSI, AIMA, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, News Portals, MSN, etc. as they came onto the scene
  9. Then came onto the scene – Gmail and I was among the first few to use Gmail in India via invitation followed by YouTube, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on all the while going through Dot Com Bubble and 2008/9 recession
  10. Post this Coursera, NPTEL, MIT OCW, AWS and so many more sources / portals / websites / apps / universities / products

All the while, my focus was on learning around software, management & engineering. Based on that passion and unending desire to learn, I could succeed in teaching as well as software industry with help of internet and my network. Big thank you to all who have helped / interacted with me over the years directly or indirectly via their work / websites and artifacts over internet.

To me LinkedIn has been one of the biggest sources of learning around Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and many other topics other than for networking with people from across the globe in the last few years.

If you have access to internet, you have no excuse to stay behind. Be thankful to those who created all these amazing things on internet. That’s my message to all in my network. 🙂

Social Media

Facebook Privacy & Security tips

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Many of us use Facebook for various reasons like socializing on the internet, managing and participating in groups, creating and managing company pages, keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, sharing our updates & pictures, etc. But many don’t pay attention to privacy and security aspects of using Facebook.

Here are some pointers on what areas of privacy & security you should be looking at in Facebook. This post does not give you what setting / configuration you should be keeping / selecting rather it makes you aware about those settings and you should select / configure the option based on your requirements.

  • Explore OTP / Two factor authentication using mobile / smartphone number / authentication app
  • Explore notifications over email & mobile
  • Explore options for your Cover & Profile picture – there is option to show your Profile picture to only your friends or network
  • Check whether your default posts are Public / shown to friends / shown to friends of friends / shown to friends except acquaintances
  • Check the type of groups you join: Public / Closed / Secret
  • Explore the privacy options like LIMIT YOUR OLD POSTS, Who can search you by email / phone, Who can see your friends list, etc.
  • Explore the options for people to Tag you in their posts
  • Explore the option to create custom username
  • Check the Location History option
  • Check which profiles in your network are Inactive / Spam / Without data / Suspect / Unknown. It’s best to remove them from your network by clicking UNFRIEND. Stay in touch with them over other mediums like Skype, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Signal, Google Hangout, etc.
  • Check the Apps & Website integration under Settings
  • Check the locations from where you are logged in under settings
  • Check your public posts by logging out & checking your profile or using the VIEW AS option under your profile
  • Check the setting whether search engines should link to your profile under privacy
  • Check the information in your profile added under ABOUT and who it is visible to on all sections and details of profile – Friends / Friends of Friends / Public / etc.
  • Check manage sections option in your profile and check privacy options for each of those sections
  • Check your advertisement preferences
  • Check the options which show your relationship with others under profile – whether it’s only shown to you, friends or friends of friends or public
  • Set up Trusted Contacts to recover your account
  • For your Facebook Mobile App check what permissions it has been given by the operating system (Android or iOS) under App permissions and review them based on your need
  • Check the people who are added as ADMIN for your company page if you manage one
  • There are a host of other options in settings for company pages too from which you can manage options like – from which country the visitors can see the page, whether tagging is allowed, age profile of your visitors, etc. If you are managing a company page you should explore them too
Social Media, Software

Social Media Solutions

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Social media is an evolving beast. From few sites and systems few years back to plethora of different sites and systems across the internet accessed from laptop/desktop/mobile – this domain is exploding currently.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google+, Yelp and so on. List is endless.

Everybody is talking of social media sentiment analysis and analytics over customer information, yes that’s an evolving and interesting field.

But something that is going to create a problem and will require innovation would be areas like:
1. How do you sync your information across various social media sites:
1-a. LIKES
1-b. COMMENTS
1-c. NEWSFEEDS
1-d. Etc.
2. What is your unique public and private unified profile across social media?
3. What is your network of connects across the various sites?
4. How are you perceived across these sites – a unified view?
5. How do you sync your contacts and network across various social media systems?
6. How do you enable similar privacy settings, access control, etc. across all social media sites?
7. Evolving threat management across social media for individuals

Many such questions will come up as social media matures. Lot of innovation, building of standards/protocols, tools and products would be needed in this new exploding social media sites/systems.

There was a phase where database access/import/export/features across various RDBMSes were standardized, operating systems related standards came out, ECM, integration, etc. came out with standards.

A similar phenomenon should and most likely will occur once social media expansion stabilizes and matures. It will be one level above technology and will be at functional/domain/social media feature level backed by unique new ways of implementing technologies. To give an example: if you export your contact from one phone, if you export CSV/EXCEL from one system you are able to import and sync it at other place, such solutions for problems listed above and many more upcoming areas would be needed.