Yeah yeah yeah.
I just stumbled on a Yahoo! article (in Indonesian) calling all internet users to arms, with a strong password as their weapon.

So, all along the article, they beat around the 'please do not use 123456 as a password' theme and leave it at that. Good one, Yahoo! I still have friends who never ever remember their passwords.

Chosing a strong password is good, but how the heck are you supposed to remember " h4Xxx0|2l337fgalFUb@r30" ?
Hint: you're not.

 

But here, I am going to give you a trick that will make you feel like you have some sort of super power:
I am going to make you remember D4nFr&&Bl0g11.

Just follow the rules:

1. Pick a name you're sure to remember, nickname or pet name : Dan
2. Pick your family name, or a second nickname in relation with the first one: DanFr
3. Pick a random separator: DanFr&& (and)
4. Pick a word that has someting to do with the site you're using: DanFr&&Blog
5. Add the date (birhday, year of creation, last 2 or 3 digits): DanFr&&Blog11
6. Replace all vocals with numbers: D4nFr&&Bl0g11

Why you will remember?

Because the password is separated is two parts: your name, and the context. You won't forget your name unless you had that many beers, and the context will be pretty obvious. Now, if you're not an used to the technique yet, you can still write down the template somewhere safe: NameOtherNameANDx2ContextYear.
Oh and yes, you can actually read it aloud: Dan Efer And Blog Eleven :)

I know it looks a bit complex, so here is another way to make your passwords hard to guess for both machines and humans alike, with passwords such as: donkey123&&098yeknod

1. Pick a word you like: donkey
2. Add the 3 first digits on the second keyboard row: donkey123
3. Pick a random separators: donkey123&&
4. Add the 3 last digit on the second keyboad row, backward: donkey123&&098
5. Add the word you just picked, backward: donkey123&&098yeknod

 

Why you will remember?

Because the password is symmetrical. You type the same thing twice, but after the separator, you type it backward ;)

Why are these passwords safe?

• You can create your own rules and rely on the templates
• They mix lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters (neither machines nor humans are good at guessing all that)
• They use words that don't exist, limiting dictionnary based attacks
• They are long enough to discourage even a computer

You're still desperate?

If you're in search for the simplest solution... try that: &wakeupgrababrushandputalittlemakeup&.
These are the lyrics of a song you love, plus a couple of special character to frame them, like a nice picture in your mind.
It's not as strong as the first two methods, but that can do for an emergency ;)

Keep safe!

(picture source: http://www.worldofantiques.net/74.jpg)

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

So, I have a good Friend, who works for an NGO.

So, have you ever had to deal with this frustrating experience: blocking a user on Twitter, and seeing that user back and again in your timeline through RTs an mentions?
If yes, this little script can help you.

It will replace any tweet containing that user's name with "Just another tweet", so your adrenalin never spikes again.

You will need Mozilla Firefox and Greasemmonkey to run it. I can't host .js files, so you will have to follow the tutorial below in order to install the script. It's currently designed for one username only, but I could enhance it later, if ever you asked and treated me for a pizza.

Here is the tutorial:

1) Install the GreaseMonkey add-on . After installation, you should see a monkey icon on the botton-right of your browser, that's where you can manage your scripts, deactivate and reactivate Greasemonkey.

2) After installing, go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> New user script

3) Fill in the blanks:

4) Greasemonkey will ask you for your favorite text editor, notepad or textedit will do

5) Copy and paste the following, fill the blank space between the quotes with the username you want to block (keep the quote marks, no need for a @), save and close.

For Twitter:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           TwErazer
// @namespace      TwErazer
// @include        http://www.twitter.com/
// @include        http://twitter.com
// @include           http://*.twitter.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

erazeme = "     ";
setInterval(function()
{
    el = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
    for(i=0;i<el.length;i++)
    {
        if (el[i].className == "entry-content")
            {
                str = el[i].innerHTML;
                if (str.match(erazeme))
                {
                    el[i].innerHTML = "Just another tweet";
                }
             }
    }
    el = "";
}
, 5000);

For "New Twitter"

// ==UserScript==
// @name           TwErazer_new
// @namespace      TwErazer_new
// @include        http://www.twitter.com/
// @include        http://twitter.com
// @include        http://*.twitter.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

erazeme = "    ";
setInterval(function()
{
    el = document.getElementsByTagName('div');
    for(i=0;i<el.length;i++)
    {
    if (el[i].className == "stream-item")
        {
        subEl = el[i].children[1].children[2].children[1];
        str = subEl.innerHTML;
            if (str.match(erazeme))
            {
            subEl.innerHTML = "Just another tweet";
            }
        }

    }
    el = "";
    srt = "";
}
,5000);

 

6) Go to Twitter,  breathe.

7) You can test the script with any word or username you want.

Voila, hope it's helpful :)

Facebook is everywhere now. I won't emphasize on it, just go to any tech site and you will see what everybody is taking about now.
I've never liked wearing a uniform, and I am thinking of closing my Facebook account.

But I've been thinking, I still have some friends I want to keep in touch with, and there is still a part of my work I want to share (show off, really). Of course, I don't want any of my friends to feel obliged to subscribe to any service to give their feedback, so I am looking for the most open ways to share my life. You'll see, you can even gain more control on your privacy.

Here are the features Facebook proposes, and what you can do to replace them:

Sharing Photos

If you only need to let your friends know about how wonderful your last drunk pole dancing was, there are two pretty discrete ways:

Posterous, the service I use to blog, can also double as a password protected (that's optional) site to share your pictures, you just need to send them from your email. It allows "anonymous" comments, meaning that you don't have to sign in to leave your feedback.
All you need to subscribe is an email address and 3 minutes of your time.

E-mails are still a very good solution. I sounds old school and much less grandma-friendly, but the truth is my 76 years-old auntie knows how to use it.

If you're more into sharing for the show, Deviant Art is the best solution out there, with plenty of features (enough to make you forget there is a premium version). The community is wonderful and you'll even get advices on what you publish. Only subscribers can comment, this is the exception on the list.

Sharing Links

Delicious, if it's not the ultimate solution, allows you to make your bookmarks public. Your friends can view your delicious bookmarks and even subscribe to your RSS feed.

While you're at it...just send them the link by email or messenger. Copy-paste is not that difficult.

Sharing Thoughts/Status/Chat

Who doesn't have MSN messenger, Y!M, Google Talk or BBM? Seriously?
The question is: Do you want to let the whole world know what you had for breakfast, or just your friends?

Here I'll refer to Posterous again. You can open a blog there and everybody can comment, commenter can see each other's comments, no worries here :)

Dialog online

Facebook inbox or email?  Same use, without the updates from all the groups you joined out of fear of disappointing your contacts. Email has more features too.

Organizing events

A phone call. Seriously. I've never had any difficulty organizing something with a simple phone call or a couple of sms.
If it involves more than 3 people, just send an email.

Discovering content

The whole web.
You don't need "real life" friends to discover content, and joining Twitter, Delicious, Flick, Picasa, YouTube... random googling are as many ways to extend your views on the intertubes.
I've discovered many awesome bands, comics, rss feeds. Funnily enough nothing I have ever been tagged in on Facebook has ever had any value to me.

Finding friends/Keeping in touch

If you're thinking of getting rid of your Facebook account, you probably are the type of user who only added people you really know anyway. Keeping in touch with them is not really a problem then. Phone, emails, blogs, they are available for you to use at will.
You might be asking: What if we lose contact? My answer is: Up to you to foster your relationship with the person you love. Friendships are a lot more than tagging a picture.

The password thingie

With that many services (well, really a blog and an email), you may wonder how you are going to manage all the credentials.
That's actually pretty easy. All browsers have a "remember password" function. Write you credentials somewhere safe (on you home computer, a note on your phone, somewhere only you can access) for the sake of having them remembered and just forget them :)

I might close mine soon, I'll blog about it if it happens. Stay tuned!

So I've been wandering on YouTube, no more than the average geek, but I've noticed the change of interface.
As a good friend of mine puts it "It sucks". It indeed suckles much.

But don't be fooled, beloved readers, this is totally on purpose.
This is a technique called "eye tracking", where you determine where your users look based on the amount of clicks on "hotspots"  on your web page.
Facebook do that a lot.

Let's decompose YouTube new layout and see what new purpose the frabjous eye tracking technology is serving this time.

(1) The new toolbar

Gone are the stars, you can now see who likes and dislike the video
You can save it to your playlist (not your hard disk, no, never)
The embed code is put there now, same for the flag
And last but not least, the share function that doesn't display Buzz as an option (maybe because I have deactivated it

It takes now more clicks to do several things you could do without clicking at all wit the last layout (get the embed code, see the ratings).

(2) Video Info now just under the video

That's where the real fun begins. Info have fled the top right corner to lend just under the video. Why is that?
Beside the video itself, what do users most often look at?
The video info and the user's comments.

It's logical then, to thread them in the same column... just under the huge irrelevant ads at the bottom of the video.
Bad if you like to see user's comments quickly though, since it makes you scroll down even more than before.

(3) Additional ad on the top right corner

Haha! You thought you'd find the comment there, right? You've been punked, that's an ad for you!
Since the video info were a hot spot, what's best to fill in the blank than one more ad?

You've been framed

Most of us read from left to right. Considering that the video is the most important part of the page, that's what you're going to look at first.
Then, looking for the video info, you are going to look further right, and stumble on the ad. Then you are going to look for them under the video, and in your way, the overlay ad will catch you by the eyeballs. The video is now literally framed with ads. That's what the eye tracking was for.

That's it, my two cents on the topic, I wish I had more than that but I have hard time framing my blog with ads.

So, the iPad is out.

One of the first questions coming to my mind : how good is the soft keyboard.
Answer: not good enough so there is no need for an optional keyboard/docking system.

It made me think. Handhelds are now in more or less everybody's life, and are sometimes said to increase productivity.
While receiving and composing emails on the go is for sure an improvement, bringing it to the next level would mean editing document without getting the curly thumb syndrome.

And, sorry to say, there is nothing better then a real keyboard to be productive or simply do more stuff, here is why:

1. 10 fingers typing

Nothing can beat typing with all of your fingers. The learning curve is pretty fast, and professional typists can achieve speeds above one hundred and twenty words per minute. A Blackberry keyboard won't usually allow you to go over sixty five for a very skilled user.
You can see how fast you can go here, it's a cool test, try comparing with your thumb typing skills.

2. Comfort

That one is easy. Lots of big keys and space to rest your hands. Nothing can beat that, ever.

3. Keys

Yes, it seems easy, logical and whatnot, but a clear delimitation between the keys helps the fingers keep on striking the right spots, take a closer look at the "F" and "J" keys on your own keyboard.

4. Keyboard shortcut

A keyboard shortcut takes no more time than typing two letters or three letters in a row. Many users, on all operating systems, are used to shortcut. Undo, redo, cut, paste, open, close, save and exit... at least. When working on a text document, shortcuts are also available for bold, italics, underlined and more.
Nice gestures are now available, notably on Apple products, but I doubt they can all help you to navigate and format a text as quickly as shortcuts.

5. Hotkeys

Keyboards... have space, a lot of space, and usually twelve function key that can act a hotkeys anyway. The best example I can find is the MacBook Pro keyboard, where the functions keys double with systems hotkeys for screen brightness, volume and so on.

6. Gaming

I'm not talking about Mafia Wars here. Take WoW, Command and Conquer, any first person shooter (all the descendants of "Doom" and "Quake")  and ask the players if they want to drop their mouse+keyboard combination. Then run.

Just for fun, here is what a pro gaming keyboard may look like:

7. Stock food

Well that's not properly speaking an advantage and it could be the perfect place for an ants colony to dwell in, I have seen it happening in a MacBook. But hey, that's still a story to tell.

Are our thumbs doomed?

No, not really. At least not always.

Editing documents won't happen in the bus, and more rarely (though it does happen) in a taxi. If you want to carry a brain heaving editing task outside your office, you may as well do it in a cafe, where you have some more space for these little monsters down there.

The bluetooth folding keyboard is my favorite because of the hard finish, you can feel the key response, it's important to me (laugh, I hear you).
Here is a version compatible with Symbian S60, Poket PC/Smartphone under Windows mobile and Palm OS:

Ok, it looks taken straight out from a Terry Gilliam's movie, but Oh So Practical.

After reading a very good blog post from @belindaang about the nature of social media, I've been tempted to leave a nice little comment, but I let the idea boil my brain overnight, and came up with a little something.

Media, in Latin, is the plural of "Medius", meaning "Middle". I don't see it as the common "mass media" term.

What's the difference?

It's all about relations. Where radio, TV, and the early Web were about one channel diffusing to many viewers, the social Web is about many users diffusing to many users.

Where's the "middle"?

The middle is what we call now Social Media. I deeply agree with @belindaang, the term is over-used, over-hyped, and is now in my list of BS vocabulary. But still, we have to call it something. Social Media, then, are these services based on the relation between their users.
No need to be Facebook to be one, you just need allow your users to subscribe to one another's updates ('add', 'follow', 'friend'), share and dialog.

Is that just about it?

That's where I'm tempted to say...no, not at all. Facebook, Twitter and many more offer a great framework to subscribe, share and dialog, but many more platforms actually fit the requirements.

Your blog: Users are allowed to comment your post? That's a match. Plus, have you remarked that you generally can follow other people's blogs from your own? Blogger.com has this feature, so does Posterous. Blogs are giant profile pages, with long status updates. They are usually discussing deeper topics, on a longer format, it makes them difficult to read for the busiest of us, but any SNS consultant you'll hail in the street (just go out, you'll find one) will tell you: don't neglect your blog readers!

Bulletin boards: I know, it's old and busted. It's still a major source of information, and the concept is just about the same: subscribe, share and dialog. BBs are the most useful when it comes to looking for professional/technical help. They lack an update summary, like Facebook's newsfeed, but the brand new Gravity is working on it.

Your email: Sit back in your chair. I know it's hard to associate gran-daddy email with Twitter. But think about it. Subscribe, share and dialog, many to many? It's all there. Of course you can't "follow" someone who hasn't given you her email address, but that what makes its charm. It's also very old school, and still too complicated for some.

Youtube, Deviantart, Flickr, social all the same.

Ok, you're cool and all, but what's your point?

My point is: the term "Media" should be seen as 'anything that makes people communicate, a middleman for thoughts', and "Social" as 'Whatever builds a community'. Social Media should be seen as 'Any support allowing a community's members to communicate'.

Why should I think like that?

Because if you realize that your audience is not the media, but the community, you might want to broaden your views on what's social. Don't target the road, target the travellers...or else...

Or else what?

Exactly.

Dear you all whom I love,

Is it me being blind or what?

When I read about "Social Media Strategies" and their stats, I see two kinds of astronomic numbers :

1. The ones related to SNS activities (A hellion member, and so forth and so on)
2. The ones related to how much money is spent on trying to get a slice of the fruitcake.

Question: Where can I see the silly huge amount of cash some real venture has done in profit related to their SNS campaigns?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a great Social Strategist of the new communication era, but I'd have my own startup right now, I'd seriously weight it.

First I'd ask myself if I really need to market anything online.

• Do my canned red beans really need to be getting social?
• Do my customers need to be more aware of that product?
• Is there really a canned red beans community I can target?
• What can I bring to the community if ever I find one?
• And oh yes, how long will it take to get famous, if ever? Time is money after all.

There are a plethora of business related articles around (Google search for "Make money online": 155,000,000, feel free to feel them.), and some of them are actually full of common sense, and even a bit beyond the obvious see here (Futurebuzz)  and here (The Relationship Economy).
But they often forget to ask this one question of who actually needs it.
And then they forget to ask themselves how much it's going to cost.
And then Google brags about his billions of dollars in adwords.

I'm not a marketing genius but some aspects of it just plain make sense. Would it be wrong to:

• Ask myself all the questions stated before
  
• Spend more time networking away from my desk than in front of my screen
• Invest the least possible in hardware and tools (the starter kit and the book, you know...)
  
• Base my campaign on free solutions (which work pretty well e.g. with SEO,  try googling "Danny-fr", "Dannyfr", "@Danny_fr","Brutal Opinions" see who comes first)
• Do something as basic as trying to sell my used laptop on Twitter and see what happens

Bah. These advices don't make money. By that I mean they don't bring money to @FastBucksOnlinePro.
Or I am so very wrong I am in denial.

In my next post, we're going to play a game with real money just to prove my point.

Stay tuned ! (and retweet, favorite, buzz, bookmark this post and call your first born after it ;) )