How to lose your job with one online post

Ladies and gentlemen, a priceless example of why it is so important to remember who you add as a friend on your Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or whichever networking site you are on.

You should always remember what the reason was you created your pages.
To find long lost college buddies? To network with other professionals and develop business or to just be a part of the virtual world we call The Internet.

For example, I mainly socialize on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But Facebook, I only use for friends and family. People I actually know in real life. If I would, however, want to use it for work or professional networking as well, I’d make sure not to add “Farting Machine Steve” from uni and to – by any means – stay away from commenting on his hilarious and intelligence-glinting home videos of him and his boys after a long day/night.

Although Facebook does have specific settings to allow you to pick who you want to share what content with, it is pretty complicated and tricky to stay on top of it.

My advice for the day would be to never mix business with pleasure. And this applies to your social networking needs too.

22 Facebook funded start-up businesses

22 Facebook funded start-up businesses pitched to potential investors and the press at the FbFund Demo Day on 1 September 2009.

Under the mentorship program that was created for businesses built around Facebook, they’ve been set up in their “big brother’s” office and working for almost three months, building their products and receiving guidance.

Well, here they are listed by Mashable:

1. BackLight: Backlight uses your social graph to help inspire your creativity.

2. Friend Radio: This app takes the favorite music of your Facebook friends and lets you listen to it in a social music player. It plays within Facebook and soon there will be a browser plug-in to let you listen to it anywhere.

3. Funji: Funji is an iPhone app that creates a virtual community within the mobile world. Slick avatars and Facebook integrations are just the start of its features.

4. Gameyola: It’s a monetization and distribution platform for Flash games, especially in the realm of virtual goods.

5. GeckoGo: Its product, Travel Brain, is a social tool for tracking your travel and discovering new places to go. It joins a crowded market including Kayak, Bing, and Joobili.

6. GroupCard: Yes, it’s a virtual group card, and you may have heard of it, because it’s been around for a while. It lets you sign and collaborate on greeting cards. They also are introducing Cash.io today, a product that helps businesses save money on rebates and promotions. It lets you issue codes that can be cashed in by users through everything from Paypal to Facebook Credits.

7. Life360: Life360 is designed to help you protect and track your family’s safety. The product, which won Google’s Android $300k Developer Challenge, can do everything like track family and pets on maps, recover lost item,s and protect you against identity theft.

8. MyChurch: It builds social networks for church congregations.

9. NetworkedBlogs: It pulls your blog feed to your Facebook profile and business page, allows you to add widgets, and lets you read news blogs on Facebook.

10. NutshellMail: A product we’ve previously covered, NutshellMail is a social media management platform that puts Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks in your email inbox. Customize the info you receive on event invites, friend requests, and more.

11. Photos I Love: Photos I Love is a Facebook app that helps you manage your digital media.

12. RentMineOnline: It’s a social lead generation platform for apartment property managers utilizing your Facebook, Twitter, and other social graphs. It wants to broaden to things like gyms, time shares, jobs, hotels, and more.

13. RunThere: It’s not a fitness social network, but a tool for mapping out routes on an interactive map and coordinating runs with nearby athletes.

14. RunMyErrand: RunMyErrand helps you get your chores out of the way by connecting you with people who’ll do them for you. For more, read our full review.

15. Samasource: One of the two non-profits of the FbFund, Samasource aims to train less-fortunate people in other countries in quality assurance. It has a product to help Facebook Apps test for errors.

16. Sociable: It’s a tool to drive sales by using social graphs to show friend and word-of-mouth recommendations on ecommerce websites.

17. Sortuv: It changes how you find things like restaurants. Instead of “Thai restaurant” it could be “Find me a restaurant like Thai Thai in Chicago.” It has a lot of categories.

18. Thread: Thread turns your Facebook friends into dating matchmakers.

19. Vittana: Vittana, the second non-profit in fbFund, lets you help students in developing countries by lending to them to further their education.

20. Wildfire: We reviewed Wildfire previously. It allows you to create branded promotions on Facebook and elsewhere.

21. Workstir: We highlighed Workstir last year for its winning implementation of Facebook Connect. Apparently Facebook agreed with us enough to fund them. It lets you connect with local service providers (contractors, plumbers, etc.).

22. ZimRide: ZimRide is an app that helps you find carpools to join.

The “secret” patents of Apple’s Steve Jobs…

To read the full article on Technologizer by Harry McCracken, CLICK HERE!

Here are ten Steve Jobs patents to chew on–none of them landmarks, but all of them interesting:

1. A quiet blessing.

When I started doing stories comparing the cost of Windows PCs and Macs, I used to include Apple’s power adapters–which are unusually compact and sport magnetic connectors, an optional extension cord, and little wings you can wrap the cable around–as a point in Macs’ favor, until I got sick of Windows fans snickering. I shouldn’t have caved. The fact that the CEO obsesses over even mundane necessities such as power bricks is one of the things that makes Apple Apple, and makes Macs worth more money than garden-variety Windows boxes. If you’re not sure if you’re a candidate to buy a Mac, here’s a simple test: If the notion of a really well-designed AC adapter excites you, you’ll probably be very happy with a Mac. And if it doesn’t, you won’t. The one shown here is from a 2001 patent filing that credits Jobs and eleven others.

2. A maniacal work of minimalism.

I haven’t been to every major Steve Jobs product unveiling, but I’ve been to more than my share–starting before there were such things as Macs–and I can’t think of anything I saw Jobs reveal that seemed to tickle him more than the Apple Remote, which debuted at an October 12th, 2005 event and is shown here in a drawing from a patent filed five days earlier. He showed a slide contrasting the Remote’s six options embedded in two unmarked controls against a Windows Media Center remote completely covered by fifteen zillion buttons, and just stood there and beamed. I think that the Apple Remote is merely very good–I prefer the Vudu box’s thumbwheel driven model–but it’s as striking an example of Jobsian restraint as you’ll find. If most consumer-electronics companies set out to build the simplest remote ever, they’d still end up with three times the buttons, and half of them would have incomprehensible labels.

3. An apparent obsession.

A surprising percentage of the Apple patents that carry Jobs’ name involve one basic idea: desktop computers with the guts in one box, the display in another, and some form of articulated arm in between. Apple only made such a machine for about two and a half years–the iMac G4, produced between 2002 and 2004. Yet the U.S. Patent Office holds plenty of evidence that Jobs was smitten with the idea, including this patent for boxy a snake-arm iMac that was filed just weeks before Apple stopped shipping the more rounded G4. I’m not sure if Jobs has ever spoken publicly about the brief life of the “desklamp” Mac, but I’m betting that it was with at least some degree of regret that he retired it in favor of more conventional, less fanciful iMac designs. I’m also not sure if it means anything that some of these patents are among the few in which Jobs’ name precedes that of any collaborator.

4. A minor enigma.

Here’s a “handheld portable computing device” from a 2007 patent filing, credited to Jobs and a dozen others, that looks like an early iPod Nano with some sort of touchstrip control rather than the iconic clickwheel. Apple has yet to make such a device. (The 2007 Nano turned out to be the squart, square variant–and it came out less than three months after this filing.) But did it seriously consider doing so? Or is this something else? Maybe even an Apple product which was released which I’m somehow not recognizing?

5. A frickin’ box.

The iPod Nano box, to be exact. Although with the consistent design aesthetic of everything Apple, it sometimes seems beside the point to distinguish between the product and its packaging: An iPod’s box is pretty much part of the iPod that you happen to remove during use. If Apple doesn’t go entirely to recycled, biodegradable packaging at some point, it wouldn’t startle me to see it introduce a unibody aluminum iPod box with an Apple logo that lights up.

6. A bad idea.

This we know about patents: They’re permanent and unflinching, recording embarrassing failures just as definitively as they do history-making successes. So this drawing of a 1998 “cursor control device“-better known as the original iMac mouse–preserves for all time the fact that Steve Jobs and his team inexplicably chose to make a mouse that had nothing to do with the shape of the human hand. What we don’t know is whether the ten people credited with its creation (who also designed an amazing array of brilliantly functional products) all suffered a simultaneous bout of bad judgment, or whether some of them sort of knew deep in their hearts that mice shouldn’t be round and flat. Later Macs returned to mice that were less distinctive but far more useful.

7. A stairway to heaven, or at least the Genius Bar.

This would seem to be the towering glass staircase at the Apple Store in San Francisco’s Union Square, a set of steps I’ve trod up and down dozens of times since the store opened in October, 2005. (My most memorable trip up it? With out a doubt, the one on the evening of June 29th, 2007, when I ascended it to buy an iPhone on the first night they were available. Bathed in light and applauded by an army of Apple employees for my good taste, I felt like I was entering paradise.) Microsoft, having taken note of the Apple Stores’ great success, plans its own chain of retail outfits, but let’s just say it: There’s absolutely no chance that Steve Ballmer is going to roll up his sleeves and help design the fixtures. It’s hard enough to envision him rolling up his sleeces and helping to design Windows 7’s fixtures. I’m not saying that that’s good, and I’m not saying that it’s bad–just that it’s a defining difference between the Two Most Important Steves in Tech.

8. Evidence of trouble.

[UPDATE: Commenter "Duck" says that he or she thinks I'm wrong about what this is, and it's a CD icon formerly seen in iTunes. Which may well be right--looking at the other frames of animation in the patent, it looks like it. Please disregard musings to follow in this item.] It’s not quite the Blue Screen of Death, but OS X’s spinning beach ball is never the bearer of glad tidings–it’s there to tell you that you’re trying to do stuff so fast that your Mac can’t keep up, and it’s been known to do its rotating for abnormally long times and/or be the first warning sign of a crash. (I get paranoid when I see it or any other animated status indicator, and brood about the computational cycles that are being wasted on needless animation.) Apple filed a patent for the festive status indicator in January 2001, and Jobs was one of two designers to receive credit (Me, I would have tried to deny responsbility.) It’s one of the few examples of an Apple patent on something that we’d all be just as happy to never see again.

9. A commodity.

I don’t even think of iPod and iPhone cases as something Apple gives much though to—other than cheerfully selling gadgets that scratch easily, then turning around and selling us protective cases from a thriving throng of very small companies–let alone a matter that occupies many of Jobs’ precious brain cells. But in 2002, Apple filed patents for a couple of iPod cases, including this one which claims Jobs and ten others as its inventor. From all evidence, it’s nice, but not extraordinary. (If you know what qualities would cause an iPod case to be extraordinary, please let me know.)

10. A possible sign of things to come.

Most of the many Apple patents that the blogosphere discovers and takes as evidence of amazing gadgets to come have one thing in common: Steve Jobs’ name isn’t on them. He tends to show up on patents that show real Apple products in more-or-less final form. This one is an exception: It’s a 2004 filing for a touch tablet computer of some sort, credited to Jobs and fourteen others. Apple has released no such product to date, and the drawing at right is about as close as the filing gets to explaining how one might work. But in recent months, the world has pretty much decided that Apple is building a tablet for release this year or next. If it does–and there are still no guarantees–anyone who paid attention to this patent had the news first. Sort of.

Facebook and issues… You won’t like this one!

I am a member of quite a few groups on LinkedIn and follow a lot of the discussions as well.

Ritu B. Pant is one of those active posters whose messages you should be following and looking out for.
He is blunt, funny, very visual and straight-to-the point. Ohh, and he posts things that actually make sense and interest me.

Now back to Facebook.
One of Ritu’s newest posts is something I have been thinking about lately as I have noticed some interesting looking ads on the above site in the past few weeks.

If you are using Facebook, make sure they don’t use your profile photo for advertising various things!

Recently, I have noticed a few of my connections appearing on Facebook ads without their permission.
Be aware, Facebook can use your pictures by default.

The most annoying of it all, is that Facebook did this under the radar, so that you wouldn’t even know when your face shows up promoting stuff and you can’t even complain about it, because your privacy settings show that you allowed it to happen.

If you want to read further, please click the below link. It has been written by Ritu B. Pant, not me.
Facebook can be such a jerk!

If you don’t want to navigate to the other post, please just follow these steps to opt out of this craziness:

1. Log in to your Facebook account!
2. Hover over the menu item “Setting” at the top right. Three options will appear as a drop down.
3. Out of the three, click on “Privacy settings”!
4. Click on “News Feed and Wall” out of the options!
5. There, you will see two tabs at the top : “Actions within Facebook” and “Facebook ads.” Click on Facebook ads!
6. Click the drop down menu and choose “no one”!
7. Click save changes!

That should do it to be safe!

For now and from this, but what about other privacy threats?

Confidential Twitter Documents Leaked…

Ok, I have been debating whether I should repost this or not, but since TechCrunch is claiming they went about it the right way by consulting Twitter first, I decided to do so.

300+ confidential Twitter documents and screenshots of the past 4 months have been leaked and managed to find their way into the inbox of the above mentioned technology and internet focused site.
These include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.

They deliberately decided to share a handful of these sensitive docs with their audience and therefore with YOU too.

If you want to read further, please look up the blog by Erick Schonfeld, but watch your back while doing so!

In addition to these happenings, I just read the news that Twitter may be filing a suit against blogs and other Web sites that published their hacked information.

Because of this, I have decided to unlink all URLs I had up here in this article that would directly navigate you to these sources.
I hope you will all understand.

Have a Blessed Day and Weekend,

Zsuzsanna

Attention Bloggers!!! New filter in Google image search.

I love beautiful photos. Who doesn’t?
I love to use beautiful photos when I blog to illustrate my wordflow and thoughts. Which blogger doesn’t?

Now Google came out with a great option to specifically search for images that are marked with licences like Creative Commons allowing you to freely use them and not worry about copyrights in respect for the wishes of artists and creators.

Isn’t that great?

This new feature has just been launched on Google Advanced Image Search and it not only helps us to be creative and worry-free while inserting pictures we accidentally come across into our weblogs and webpages, but it also helps given artists to promote their work across the Web by letting others discover, reuse or even modify their pieces.

Why don’t you give the new search method a try right now and see free-to-reuse photos of kittens for example?

CLICK ME, CLICK ME!

If you want to read more about this, go to the Official Google Blog!

Tesco offers an API for its shopping. Now start thinking what to use it for!

Original story: Guardian

By Charles Arthur

Tesco – you know, big shops, profits, that sort of thing – has unveiled an API for its shopping service. So in future, buying stuff from it won’t be limited to Tesco.com or its shops.

With the API, it could still be open 24 hours, but in your living room or on your mobile phone.

The details, first noted by Programmableweb, make for brief reading – but some delving into the terms and conditions for the API make more interesting reading.

The details at present are rather limited:

The Tesco API gives you access to the vast grocery and more catalog of the third largest retailer in the world. The initial API is SOAP-based, but a new REST-based API is under development. As of July 2009 the API documentation is available to registered developers only.

Curses! Except it’s fairly simple to register – Nick Lansley, who has been at Tesco since 1987, and was one of the people behind Tesco.com, is clearly the person behind it. Why, he’s even blogged about it.

There’s also a Ts&Cs page which makes it clear that – for now – the API is “for play, not serious work”.

Then again, there’s that familiar corporate feel..

You will not use data sent or received (including, but not limited to, product search results) from any part of the API-CTP service in any marketing or publicity that portrays Tesco.com or any other Tesco PLC company in a negative manner.

and:

You agree not to create any application or use data from the API-CTP that is to be used as part of a protest or dispute. This condition is here to discourage negative use of the API-CTP.

And just to emphasise that this is very early days,

You must not deploy applications that use the API-CTP which your users will then come to rely on. (For example, you may create an application that makes it possible for a disabled person to shop for groceries independently. But if they rely on this application at this early stage, they may suffer considerably if the API-CTP fails).

But, refreshingly,

You agree that will honour the spirit and ‘fair play’ of this agreement and not look for legal loopholes.

OK – we will as long as the lawyers will.

So: what would (or will) you do with a Tesco API? And is this the first supermarket with an API? (Amazon doesn’t count.)

Taller people earn more $!!!

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Read the article and vote please!

Let’s see what you all think!

Original story: Live Science

By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director

There’s a growing body of research that finds taller people make more money.

The latest study, in Australia, found that being 6-foot tall brings raises annual income nearly $1,000 compared to men two inches shorter.

“Taller people are perceived to be more intelligent and powerful,” according to the study, published recently in the Economic Record.

“Our estimates suggest that if the average man of about 178 centimeters [5 feet 10 inches] gains an additional five centimeters [2 inches] in height, he would be able to earn an extra $950 per year – which is approximately equal to the wage gain from one extra year of labor market experience,” said study co-author Andrew Leigh, an economist at the Australian National University.

Other studies in the United States and Britain put the extra earnings at nearly that much per inch.

“The truth is, tall people do make more money. They make $789 more per inch per year,” says Arianne Cohen, author of “The Tall Book” (Bloomsbury USA, June, 2009).

There’s nothing else physically measurable about tall people that explains the salary boost, however, Cohen explained recently on American Public Media’s radio program Marketplace. “They’re not nicer. They’re not prettier. They’re not anything else. But they’ve sort of gotten a halo in society at this point.”

Serious money over time

As the inches mount, the salary continues to, too.

Cohen’s number is based in part on a 2003 review of four large U.S. and UK studies led by Timothy Judge, a management professor at the University of Florida. Judge and his colleague concluded that someone who is 7 inches taller — for example, 6 feet versus 5 feet 5 inches — would be expected to earn $5,525 more per year.

Height was found to be more important than gender in determining income (though that claim is debatable, depending on how you analyze the gender salary gap) and its significance doesn’t decline with age.

“If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys,” Judge said then.

Being tall may boost self-confidence, helping to make a person more successful and also prompting people to ascribe more status and respect to the tall person, Judge said.

Of course all such studies generate averages. A shorter person can certainly beat the odds, and not every tall person is raking it in.

Cohen, who is 6 foot 3 inches tall, says the pay advantage is conferred partly because taller people tend to exude leadership.

“Tall people tend to act like a leader from a very young age because other children relate to them like a slightly older peer,” she said on the radio program. “In the workplace, when you’re automatically acting as a leader, that’s really important when it comes time for promotion.”

To some extent, then, the advantage of height may date back to youth.

A 2003 study of 2,000 U.S. men found that their height at age 16 had a big effect on their salary as an adult, regardless of how tall they ended up being. “We found that two adults of the same age and height, who were different heights at age 16, were treated differently in the labor market. The taller teen earned more,” said study team member Nicola Persico of the University of Pennsylvania.

Vertically challenged

All is not rosy on high, however.

In her book, Cohen notes that being tall can cost more, from additional food requirements to costlier clothes and the desire for outsized things like high-ceilinged homes. (Interestingly, there’s a growing debate about whether obese people should pay for their excess footprint on society and the environment, yet nobody is calling for taxing the tall.)

The average height for American men is about 5 feet 9 inches nearly 5 feet 4 inches for women. In more than a century, no U.S. president has been below average height (the last one was William McKinley, at 5 feet 7 inches, and he was ridiculed in the press as a “little boy,” Judge said).

Judge figures the advantages of height today are rooted in our evolutionary decision-making regarding who was most powerful.

“When humans evolved as a species and still lived in the jungles or on the plain, they ascribed leader-like qualities to tall people because they thought they would be better able to protect them,” Judge said. “Although that was thousands of years ago, evolutionary psychologists would argue that some of those old patterns still operate in our perceptions today.”

iResume – the Web 2.0 resume

I have just come across a site through my Twitter account and thought their idea was pretty neat to share.

I have talked about modernizing your resume before, and if you’re still not sure how to do it, iResume is the very product you need. It will get you up-to-date in a few minutes with a format you can use any and everywhere on the Net.

They even have a fab job search function, which combines search results from many different job boards, so you won’t have to start digging on separate sites over and over again.

A few reasons why you might need an iResume:

• iResume reduces the time it takes you to manage and distribute multiple versions of your resume.
• You can easily create your resume in a format that will get you noticed.
• You can create, store, and manage multiple versions of your resume in one location accessible and usable anywhere.
• iResume provides iResume submittal tracking and statistics and is the coolest resume tool around. Who does not want to be cool?
• iResume has been created with the ability to integrate to all of the major recruiting systems, providing 100% accurate data.
• Old school Word resumes are outdated. Get with the newest technology.
• You can use your iResume easily on Twitter and TwitterJobSearch.
• You have an iPhone and iPod…you definitely need an iResume.

Have fun and get to searching!

Visual Twitter Guide

I came across this mind map in one of my groups on LinkedIn created by Ritu B. Pant and thought it was awesome, so I wanted to share it with the people in my blogging world too.

Have I mentioned I just love social networking?

This map visualizes what you can do with Twitter and how you can utilize the network you’ve built on it.

To enlarge the picture, please CLICK ON IT!