This morning I received an email from a very dear friend.

The email:

Dear,

Hope all is well with you? sorry to bother you at this time, please I need your urgent assistance, I had a trip to United Kingdom yesterday for a program, and I was attacked last night by some robbers on my way to the hotel and they took all my money from me, including my phone, right now I don't have any cash on me and I need to pay for a return ticket and make arrangement back home. I want you to kindly assist me with £750 (GBP) or any amount you can afford to help me, I will pay you back when I return. I had to walk down to a public cafe to quickly send you this mail as I do not have access to any phone.
I will be waiting for your urgent response.

She is a music reporter, so she tends to travel a lot. We hadn't been talking for a little while and the story was kind of plausible.
After I replied, I received another mail containing this:

Thanks for the mail and concern, I am somewhere in London at the moment and I have lost contact with everyone ever since the incident took place. I am still not in total control of my self and the bad news is that, I cant access a phone at the moment.

That's where common sense came into play. My friend is smart, way smarter than that. If she's in a hotel, she can use the phone there, she can call the police, the ambassy... She has a twitter account, a facebook account, she cannot have lost contact with anybody at all.

Passed the knee jerk reflex of helping a friend in need, I smell fish and give a try to her BBM, which I should have done in the very first place. She replied.

I know, my email has been hacked

It's sad when you have to doubt your best friend's words. And it's sad when you are rewarded for your lack of trust.
But that's the reality of things, especially on the internet.
So, one more time, I'm giving you a checklist here, in case of doubt.

The anti scam checklist:

• Doubt everything councerning money
• Call your contacts on their phone
• Check their social media account as well
• Ask for proof of identity, something personal
• Use common sense
• Never communicate sensitive info online

Happy I didn't fall for it, happier if you don't ;)

Ever received a weird message from one of your friends mentionning some bizzare malfunction of your instant messenging service business plan or claiming to have uploaded pics of you poledancing with a lobster?
That's a hoax.
Here are three patterns you can learn about, so next time, I swear, you don't fall for it.

1) Facebook/Twitter/Yahoo!/YourDog/BBM is going to shut down

I you have used an IM service for more than a couple of month, you have already seen this one.

How it usually looks like:

• The big boss of your favorite IM service woke up this morning and decided to commit corporate suicide
• He took the decision to close/charge for it's star service because it's not making enough money/their servers are full/they are fed up of being rich
• Unless everybody forwards the message they are reading right now

Ask youself:

The smallest number for an IM service I know of is about 33 million users worldwide, and that's BBM. , Twitter must be around 200 million now, Yahoo! has around 250 million users, Live Messenger more than 300 million and Facebook 500 million.

All these service have more users than many countries have inhabitants.
We're not all supposed to know about these numbers, but look around you, isn't literaly everybody you know already using them?
Why would they close the gold mine? Wouldn't such a decision make the news, be documented?

Oh and yes, why would the CEO of Big Fat Internet Company bother sending you an...IM for something that important, instead of caling a press conference and making it a headline on the first page of their website?

Because it never happened, the CEO/Message/Broadcast/Cake is a lie.

What if you do what they say?

Someone, at one point, will come to your office with a fully loaded chicken launcher and chase you around untill you collapse.
Seriously, chain messages are pointless and everybody will end up hating you for relaying them.

What to do?

Don't forward, and tell the contact who forwarded the hoax to try and think about it for two minutes. And to never do that ever again. Ever.Again.

2) Hey is that you in that terrible picture/video ?

This one is a bit trickier. It usually comes via a legit contact, is not a broadcast and provides you a link to check what terrible deeds you have been immortalized doing. Man these blackouts are annoying.

How it looks like:

• A contact has tagged/seen you in a photo/video
• What you did is often either terrible or wonderful, or both
• The links points to a website you never use, or worse, it's a shortened URL full of crunchy garble

Ask yourself:

What have you been doing lately? Do you really pass out that often that you don't remember who takes your pic and puts them on totally unknown websites hidden behing completely incomprehensible urls?

If week long hangovers are not your favorite hobby, there are hudge chances that message is a scam.

What if you do what they say?

You're in for a whole lot of trouble. Sometimes these links are just there to attract visitors to badly coded, ugly ad-ridden website about poultry dating and the likes.
Most of the time, a virus is patiently waiting for your click to turn your computer into a scam broadcasting zombie machine.

What to do?

Do not, under any circumstance, click on the link.
Copy-paste the message and send it to your contact, followed by the questions "Did you just send me that?" and, to be extra sure, a more personal question such as "How many Swiss cheese can I ingest before turning into a dafodil?".

You'll know wether the answer make sense. If not, your contact is infected already, advise her to use a better anti-virus and to stop clicking on random links.

3) Just a random link

I won't develop here, the scams use the same methods as the photo/video links, they are just too lazy to ellaborate: A legit contact sends you a random URL without any other information.

The consequences are the same, you'll end up infected or redirected to avianDating.info

Again, same method, check with your contact: Did she really send you that?

Bonus advices:

Just because I'm a good guy, here are some bonus tips when in doubt:

• Never give away your password, websites never ask for it
• Never give away any sensitive information (bank account number, phone number...)
• If you believe the contact is legit, use the phone
• Never forward a message when you're asked to
• Use common sense (would your mother send you a link containing " \/iag|2a" ?)

Hope it helped. Forward this blogpost to 400 of your contacts or your dog will get his car stolen.

For those who don't know, an API is a kind of middle-man interface between to programs, so they can communicate with each other.
For instance,  a Facebook app for iPhone and the Facebook website communicate via Facebook API.

RIM announced during the last Devcon Asia they would open Blackberry Messenger API later this February.

Here is why I think it could be game changing:

Let's start with some facts and figures:

• The key features of BlackBerry services are push email, integration with enterprise services and instant messaging
• BBM offers features pretty similar to social media services (photo sharing, calendar, etc...)

• BBM is used by more than 33 millions users worldwide
• RIM, by now, ties with apple when it comes to the amount of sales (behind Nokia with ± 14 millions units end 2010)
• The brand is available from approximately 565 carriers and distribution partners in 175 countries

Now with the crystal ball.

A daring bet

Where will the new users register, and how?
Through BES (paid) only, that would mean they would allow a one way only communication, potentially discouraging potential buyers who would have opted for their products for the IM service.
Making it free would mean even more potential loss, and the possibility for the BBM protocol to fall into oblivion.

Both methods are risky. Why taking this risk?

RIM could be the new Yahoo!

If now yahoo claims to have around 260 millions users, we all know where they're at.
Their innovation strategy toward the public as a disaster, and they are resting on their main services awaiting an epiphany that might as well never come.

RIM, though,  is in a similar situation as the early Yahoo!, with a powerful e-mail service (even if only push) and a fast growing IM protocol, but with the enormous advantage of being already well implemented in the mobile market and enterprise culture.

So yes, RIM could very well be the new Yahoo!, leading IM and e-mail for the next decade.

RIM can take on Apple and Google, frontally.

RIM can go where Apple and Google can't.

On the mobile market, they tie with Apple and best Google, that's no secret already.
But when you think about it, they have an advantage on one decisive aspect: the social factor of their user base.
Google has been desperately trying to get social with the failed Wave and Buzz experiments, and Yahoo! as done... practically nothing about it.
RIM has integrated many social features in their messenger already, statuses, media sharing and commenting, message broadcasting, and, of course, groups.
That is to say, BBM user base is social-media ready by nature, and already has a platform.

What could they do with it?

At that point, everything is but speculations. But there are some possibilities:

Opening the API in an OAuth kind of way (single shared log-in for several services) would provide a centralized and portable ID to access multiple services. Data monitoring, from that point on, looks like a logical source of revenue/information.

Setting up a persistent social platform based on BBM features has a lot of potential.
With their e-mail client, RIM has shown its expertise as an content aggregator, and with such a user base the occasion is golden for them to become both a provider and a connector in the social media field, especially since they already have a whole ecosystem ready to sprout around it.

2011 promises to be very exciting.

I discovered the Q&A web service Quora just yesterday and I'm late as a Santa in June.
I got immediately sucked in, thanks to its pretty clean interface and the relevance of the questions.

One of the first questions I answered was :
Will Quora become the next big thing here in Indonesia, or will it become just like another Formspring.me?

My answer is there,  and you can check it out. But here I wish to develop further on why Quora, if not the next big thing, could be right on time to get an established user base in Indonesia, and why this could be a win-win situation.

Why it can work

Indonesians are not afraid of asking.
You can say the opposite all you want, but I find Indonesians much more prone to asking things than, for instance, my fellow French.
Ranging from "Is time travel possible" to "What did you have for lunch" (oh dreaded question), I've seen all sort of questions flying my way, witnessed many debates, and it convinced me that knowledge thirst is real in Indonesia.

Indonesian culture is about sharing.
Well, probably not just sharing, that would be reductive, but for a huge part of it, it is.
On Quora, the sharing/networking features are spot on, not too much, not too little, with a link to Facebook and Twitter that really works.

Just a niche?

Quora is what it is, a Q&A service.
You won't share everything there, no photo album, no marketplace, no emotional status about your hamster's last failed relationship.
In other word: not much small talks, and it's precisely that small talk aspect that propelled Twitter and Facebook on the top of Indonesia's internet usage.

Quora's penetration in the Indonesian market will also be slowed down by its lack of mobile app.
Yes, mobile broadband is huge there, with a penetration rate of nearly 77% in march 2010 (latest number I'm aware of).

English is compulsory. Too bad.
Many local Facebook and Twitter users communicate in their native language. Indonesian is the second language in Twitter's trending topics (or was last time I checked). This is not, of course, exclusive to Indonesia and is also particularly true for China, Japan and Brazil.

These three facts make the service more restrictive than the more comprehensive Facebook or the faster Twitter, and more likely to attract a crew of active hobbyists and professionals rather than the average internet users.

Why a win-win?

A win for Quora if they manage to keep on attracting local users: The Indonesian user base will be active, dynamic and very versatile, and bring to the site a steady flow of interesting questions about many topics.

A win for Indonesia, as they have a very active entrepreneurial scene, especially in the new technologies and social media field. Quora could be just the right tool to let them show their real potential to the world while getting even more in touch with the tech trends.