We’re super happy to be helping Backupify and are offering a special welcome bonus for all Backupify customers. Grab a special copy of SocialSafe today and get 6 months of social media backup absolutely free!

SocialSafe enables you to back up your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social network accounts straight to your computer.

You can also use SocialSafe’s RSS back up option to download your latest photos on Flickr and latest posts from WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and other blogging platforms.

SocialSafe isn’t just about backing up your social media though. Our mission is to help you maintain and enjoy the whole story of you. You can view all your photos from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and your blogs, complete with comments and likes. You can travel back through your online timeline and relive those special moments. You can even get interesting insights on your content and on your friends’ and fans’ interactions with you. And that’s just for starters!

A quick note on privacy as it’s very dear to our hearts. Everything is stored on your computer and as such is never seen or accessed by us. We believe you should own and control your online social life and having your own personal copy is the best way to achieve that.

Get in touch or leave a comment below if you have any questions.

To get your free 6 month licence you need to download SocialSafe from here.

An answer in the TweetBackup FAQ section explains why they’re closing down, and a statement on their main site outlined the time frame for the closure:

“It’s been a great 5 years, and we are proud to have served the needs of so many people needing to back up their Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, starting May 15, 2013 TweetBackup will no longer accept any new sign ups.

Existing TweetBackup users… will still be able to sign in to the system, and backups will still occur, for 30 more days – until June 28, 2013. If you would like to retrieve your data from TweetBackup, please remember to download it before June 28, 2013. You can read more about the TweetBackup shutdown here.”

We were approached by TweetBackup last week with the sole objective of making the transition as smooth as possible for their users, and we’re pleased to announce that we are offering a special 6 month extended free trial of SocialSafe for TweetBackup users.

For those of you who aren’t aware of what SocialSafe offers, here’s what to expect in terms of Twitter support:

• Tweets
• Mentions
• DMs
• Bio Information
• Favourites
• Followers/Following (automatic in-app filtering shows new/lost/mutual/one-way followers and following)

Everything that you back up with SocialSafe is stored on your own PC/Mac, and presented to you in a journal where you can view, search and export your content. In terms of privacy, SocialSafe never sees nor stores any of the content you back up as it is all saved to your own machine. If you’re a fan of cloud storage then you can still export your data from SocialSafe and keep it wherever you want – we just thought it best to let individual users make that decision for themselves.

So to start using SocialSafe today, download the special 6 month free trial for TweetBackup users and take control of your Twitter content.

For more information about SocialSafe and the other networks it supports, please visit our main site, follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, and hang-out with us on Google+.

For example, whenever you change the password to an email account that you access from an iPhone, you’ll need to go into mail server settings on your phone to update the password before you can send or received any new messages. The same applies for backing up content from your social networks with SocialSafe.

If you change the password to your Facebook account, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, or any of the other networks supported by SocialSafe, you’ll need to reauthorise the app so that it has the correct login credentials to prove to the networks that it is actually you who is requesting your data. So don’t be alarmed if you see the pop-up window asking you to reauthorise access to one of your accounts when you try to sync with SocialSafe, it may just be that you’ve changed a password and haven’t tried to sync since then.

Another instance when you may find that SocialSafe will ask you to re-enter a password for one of your accounts is when the social network itself is having problems. Just this week, an internal issue at Facebook meant that some users are finding that they can’t login to Facebook all together, which might lead to some SocialSafe users not being able to sync, even if the correct password is being entered.

If you experience any problems with logging into your social network accounts through SocialSafe, please make sure that you are entering an up to date password and check to see if you can log in to the network itself before contacting our support desk. While we like to think that we’re pretty punctual when it comes to responding to support requests, the last thing we want is for people to be twiddling their thumbs waiting for us to tell them that Facebook or Twitter or whoever is experiencing intermittent login problems!

So what’s new in this version? Well our last release (SocialSafe v6.5) saw the inclusion of a major new feature – Insights – so this time we’re just taking care of a few bits and pieces that needed some attention, as well as laying the groundwork for more significant improvements later on down the line.

You won’t actually notice a lot of the work if you are already a SocialSafe user, as we’ve enhanced the first use network selection and automatic sync assistance that only occurs when you use the app for the first time.

We’ve also completed the preparatory work for multi-lingual support, so you can expect French as an option within SocialSafe once we roll out the first Language Pack in the next few weeks. As always, we try to be as user-lead as is feasible in terms of the direction we take with our development, so if there is a language you’d like to see in SocialSafe then please let us know. Likewise, if you are multi-lingual and would like to help us with the translations then please do get in touch.

As is the norm with our releases, we’ve also managed to fix a number bugs and make some subtle UI improvements. In addition to this we’ve improved the Help file with a contextual menu to help uses get the most out of SocialSafe.

We hope you enjoy this latest release and as always, if you have any questions or suggestions then please get in touch on Facebook, find us on Twitter or on our Feedback forum.

Today I came across a couple of articles that reinforced a point that has been becoming increasingly apparent lately – people are sending text messages less and less frequently, instead opting to use 3G or WiFi based messages on services such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

There are several reasons why someone may do it, each as valid as the other. For me, I have a brother who lives in Singapore and we use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to send messages and chat in real-time for free. Some people live in areas of intermittent phone signal, but if they are connected to a WiFi network they can carry on sending messages to individuals and groups of friends, indiscriminate of the device owned by the other people (eg Apple users being able to use WiFi to send iMessages). And with Facebook sprucing up the chat interface and becoming more prominent on mobile phones – think Facebook Home and Chat Heads – it’s becoming more common to receive a Facebook message than a text for a lot of people.

This brings us to the main point. People were thrilled when Apple brought out the iCloud which allows users to automatically sync their contacts, text messages and other content to a separate backup drive just in case their iPhones were stolen, lost, or the data accidentally deleted. However, when you begin to drift away from using a communication medium that is being backed up automatically (text messages), how many of you think about keeping copies of the new messages you are sending and receiving?

If you communicate via Facebook a little or a lot, you might well be looking for a way to download all your Facebook messages. With SocialSafe, backing up your messages is quick and easy, and you’ll also be able to browse and search through your entire Facebook message history offline. Simply download the free trial and start backing up your online social life today.

After all, if your Facebook account were to bite the dust overnight (and believe us, it can happen), there isn’t anything the iCloud will be able to do to retrieve your chats with friends. Don’t take a chance with your online memories – back them up once, relive them forever.

However, people don’t always come out in support of the complainant, and it seems the saying “the customer is always right” is starting to ring less and less true. For this example we turn to a conversation that unfolded on Twitter a few days ago between Cineworld – a UK cinema chain – and a customer who thought that their prices were too high. Despite repeatedly telling the man that their prices were some of the most competitive around and pointing him in the direction of a number of special offers, he refused to give up, and – as many other people chipping in pointed out – failed to grasp the fact that we live in a free market economy, and film studios need to some home make back the millions they invest in producing high quality movies.

What was refreshing to see was that instead of trying to pander to the man’s every whim and not offend him, the Cineworld employee stuck to their guns and didn’t stand for the customer’s illogical arguments and abject refusal to acknowledge his earlier erroneous accusations. Common consensus is that it was one helluva gutsy move from the Cineworld employee to respond to the awkward customer in the way they did, but on balance ‘the internet’ seems to think that Cineworld came out on top.

If you’ve got a few minutes to check this out for yourselves, the stream of tweets between Cineworld and the angry customer is well worth the read. Who do you think came off best here?

This raises and interesting Should the people responsible monitoring company social media channels have to put up with angry customers in a different way to how they would deal with an irritating person in their personal life? We’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Before we discuss this story it’s worth quickly pointing out that Twitter is currently beefing up its security with the implementation of two-factor authentication in an effort to combat would-be hackers.

So yesterday the AP’s Twitter account was hacked, and the following message was posted, purportedly telling of an attack on the White House:

Unsurprisingly the original tweet was deleted (so we’ve had to borrow this screen-grab from the Mashable article) as soon as the breach became apparent, and the account was suspended before another AP account clarified the siutation. However, the impact of the tweet was being felt by the financial markets almost immediately. The Standard & Poors 500 Index dropped sharply by around one percent before bouncing back, with the trough representing a temporary dip in value of $136 billion.

If someone had been privy to the knowledge that such a tweet was to be sent and at what time, there could have been significant gains to be made by selling high (before the tweet) and buying low after the price dropped in reaction to the report from a ‘trustworthy’ source that the White House had been attacked and the President injured. Of course there could have been no guarantee that the markets would react in the way that they did.

The Syrian Electronic Army – a group claiming to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – has taken responsibility for the attack, as well as saying that it is behind other recent attacks on the Twitter feeds of Agence France Presse news agency, Sky News Arabia, al-Jazeera mobile and CBS News.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that certain countries react with more volatility than others when changes are made to Facebook’s privacy settings. And now, following the release of her book Lean In, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has admitted that there is a significant difference in the levels of acceptance between America and other countries in Europe, she insists that Facebook does care as much about privacy as anyone:

“I believe there is a perception and fear that because we are American, we don’t take privacy as seriously as Europeans do. We feel this most acutely in Germany… If there is a single American who cares as much about privacy — just one — as someone in Germany, then we have to understand it.”

Despite her suggestion that a lot of the fear associated with changes to Facebook’s privacy settings stems from the fact that the technology is still relatively new, it is nice to finally have an acknowledgement from Sandberg that these changes are often too complicated and confusing for the users:

“Our biggest mistake over the years was not one of violating privacy, but was one of complexity. There is this tension in privacy between control and ease of use. You can give people a lot of control and it is very complicated, or you can give people less control and it is easier to use. Facebook has historically given people tons of control, but then it was all on privacy pages with 40 things, and it was hard to understand.”

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s privacy settings? Are they too complicated to allow for meaningful sharing, forcing you into restricting what you share too harshly through fear that something might slip through the net? Or do people need to be more educated in their online sharing habits?

As already the case with Twitter’s trending topics, #Music is intended to provide users with a snapshot of what is hot right now, by measuring social activity around artist and songs. As Stephen Philips explained on the Twitter blog:

“It uses Twitter activity, including tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and centre: go to their profiles to see who they follow and listen to songs by those artists.”

There are four ways to discover music on Twitter #Music:

• Popular – new music trending on Twitter.
• Emerging – a selection of emerging artists, presumably curated by Twitter.
• Suggested – based on the artists you follow, Twitter makes recommendation of other artists you might like.
• #NowPlaying – this is made up of the songs tweeted by people you follow, not necessarily what they’re listening to.

For the last two you’ll need to be logged in to Twitter to discover music in those ways. Because Twitter #Music is standalone, you don’t need to be logged in to Twitter or another music service to start finding tunes. However, until you login you’ll be restricted to 30-second clips of the songs provided by iTunes, so to hear full tracks you’ll need to sign in with a Spotify account or something similar.

At present Twitter #Music is available as a web app and on iOS . There isn’t really anything to shout about in terms of search functionality, but the early feedback seems to imply that the user experience is smooth and slick, with clearly a lot of thought from the designers as to how the app would respond as users interact with it.

Will Twitter #Music radically change the way we share and discover music, or do the likes of GrooveShark, SoundCloud, Spotify et al already have this all sewn up? Tell us your thoughts on this by leaving a comment below.

Here is an extract from their query:

“I see in the help section that if I delete data online, it is still stored in my hard drive.  Would it still be available after the next sync? or would my hard drive data also be deleted when syncing?”

In short – yes, absolutely, 100%.

This particular user was wanting to trim back their online presence while still keeping a copy of all their content. The good news for them – and many others who ask us the same question – is that yes, everything you back up with SocialSafe will still be stored on your own hard drive, even if the originals on the networks are deleted. If you then go to sync with your online accounts, SocialSafe won’t delete anything from your hard drive if the source data is no longer available online.

However, you will find that friends, contacts, followers etc will move to the another part of your SocialSafe journal if you disconnect with them. For example, anyone you decided to de-friend on Facebook or stop following on Twitter will subsequently appear in the ‘Lost Friends’ or ‘No Longer Following’ sections once SocialSafe syncs your account and realises that you are no longer connected.

So to come back to the original question, whenever back up your data, it is safely stored on your own PC or Mac forever. This is really the whole reason why we created SocialSafe in the first place – as a backup for your photos if anything happened to your Facebook account. Obviously we’ve come a very long way since then, as SocialSafe now boasts extensive support for a comprehensive range of content from a variety of networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more.

To bring together all the various parts of your online story safely in one place, download SocialSafe now.

Once in a while, joining several words together to create a hashtag can create something completely different than the intended message. Yesterday the UK learned of the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher – the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Soon after the news broke a hashtag started trending, derived from the phrase “now Thatcher’s dead”. However, spaces and apostrophes don’t work within hashtags, so the truncated version doing the rounds was #nowthatchersdead.

Remembering Lincoln Rhyme’s tid-bit of analytical advice, how you break up the words that make up the hashtag gives us a very different story all together. We’re no longer discussing the death of a former UK Prime Minister… But rather mourning the loss of an American singer and actress:

now / thatcher’s / dead

becomes…

now / that / cher’s / dead

The exact same string of letters, but two very different messages. It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point. As often happens with all things internet, common sense is the first thing to go out of the window, so many people began tweeting to say that Cher had died.

This isn’t the first time that a hashtag has been interpreted differently than intended. Last November there were guffaws all round after singer Susan Boyle’s PR team made a hash (sorry, couldn’t resist it!) of promoting her new release on Twitter. The hashtag #susanalbumparty – meant to be Susan album party – also turned out to be a rather naughty double entendre when read as Su’s anal bum party.

Which then begs the question, was this a simple PR gaff or in fact some very clever marketing? As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and the extent of the coverage was far greater as a result of the risqué hashtag.

Have you ever misinterpreted a hashtag? Without proper punctuation it’s easy for the meaning of something to be changed radically. Let us know the hashtags that have left you scratching your head!

• Insights – it’s still at beta, so please forgive us if you find the odd bug.  You can now easily see which is your most popular content or find out who you interact with most and you can even filter results by account or using different time periods.  You can also see on which days of the week you are most active.
  
• Improvements to Search so that Search History is now displayed and Searches can now be saved
• Updates to ‘Accounts’ view for easier navigation when adding a network & viewing your data
• Backing up and display of Twitter Tweet/Mention/Favourite images
• Improved Cancel Sync functionality so that syncs can now be cancelled safely and without any delay
• Download improvements to reduce the Twitter enforced rate limit impact
• Scheduled backup enhancement to help where a backup is missed

• Fixes for a number of customer reported bugs & UI improvements

Here are a couple of screen shots showing you how the latest version looks:

As we’ve been saying for a while, this first round of Insights is just the start, and we’ve got plenty more planned for the future. While we’ve got our own ideas about what to include in subsequent releases, our development plan has always been user-driven to a certain extent, so if you have a light-bulb moment, then please by all means submit your suggestion to the team via the Feedback Forum.

On behalf of the other ‘non-techies’ here at SocialSafe, I think it’s appropriate to give a public pat on the back to our team of developers and testers, in particular Ben, Oli and George, who have all made this release possible in the face of some particularly challenging external factors - great work guys.

We’re already plotting for the next big thing, so stay tuned! If you have any questions or feed back from SocialSafe v6.5 then please get in touch via our Facebook page, on Twitter or send an email through the SocialSafe website.

From everyone here at SocialSafe, have great weekend!

The new update that started rolling out today to English-speaking users sees the addition of a tag- or mention-like feature that will give the ability to link to other users. The feature is intended to make engagement with users and companies easier for the members of LinkedIn’s community.

TheNextWeb highlighted the update earlier today, while a blog post from LinkedIn later explained what the network hopes to achieve:

“…we want to make it even easier for you to start those conversations, share knowledge with one another and ultimately become even better at what you do. We’re excited to introduce a new way for you to engage with your network through the ability to mention your connections and companies in conversations on LinkedIn.”

As you’d expect, the mechanics of LinkedIn Mentions are strikingly similar to the way that you would tag someone in a Facebook post or mention a Twitter user in a tweet. Given that people should by now be accustomed to this method of including other people in conversations or topics, it makes sense for LinkedIn to adopt a homogeneous approach when implementing a feature that seeks to accomplish the same end result – connecting people and driving user engagement higher.

Do you use tags in Facebook updates and mentions in tweets to actively include people in the conversation? Will you be doing the same on LinkedIn? Let us know what you think of this update in the comments below.

First announced in March, the new Facebook News Feed groups content together into categories, so you can view a feed that only contains music news for instance, or perhaps one solely devoted to photos. However, as clever as all of this is, it doesn’t stop people from getting pissed at the fact that Facebook repeatedly second guesses what it thinks people will want to see, and then hides things that they’ve made a conscious decision to add to their lives – for example adding someone as a friend or liking a page.

But fear not. One Mashable writer has been getting to grips with the new setup and she’s written about how while the new iteration allows for even finer granular filtering of content, it also allows you to zoom out and see everything in your News Feed. Absolutely everything.

Think of the right hand news ticker, but having the expanded version of that as your News Feed. It’ll essentially be the unadulterated News Feed of early Facebook, but with everyone’s public actions reported in real-time, so if a friend comments on a photo you posted a week ago, it will appear in your feed again.

There are a number of different ways that you can configure your News Feed if you have the update, but I don’t have it yet, so it would be wrong to try to educate from ignorance. Instead, you can read Amy-Mae Elliott‘s article on Mashable that details what you need to do.

As you can see, if you already use SocialSafe the whole thing can be done within a minute. If you’re not a user yet, then download the free trial of SocialSafe, and then all you need to do is back up your Twitter account and apply the basic filters as shown in the video.

You could also do this for the people who you follow, or you could change the query to search your followers‘ descriptions for a certain keyword or phrase. We’ll be producing more of these in due course, so if there is anything about SocialSafe you’d like to see demonstrated in a video then please let us know.

We hope you find this mini-tutorial useful, and if there is anyone who you think would benefit from hearing about this functionality, then please share this video with them!

We’re aware that some of you have been experiencing issues when attempting to login to Facebook and LinkedIn through SocialSafe. As soon as we realised that this was causing difficulties for our users we looked into the problem to see how we could fix it.

The symptoms were such that when users attempted to add a Facebook account, the login screen was blank, meaning that they could not enter their login credentials to authorise SocialSafe to download their account content. The LinkedIn problem was slightly more complex, in that this login box was not appearing at all, meaning that users were not able to reauthorise their accounts when attempting to sync.

Our investigation revealed that the issues were caused by some subtle API changes made by the networks, and we are pleased to report that we have now updated SocialSafe to work correctly with these new API settings. All you need to do is open SocialSafe and install the update (v6.4.6) when prompted, and everything should be run smoothly once again.

We’d like to say a public ‘thank you’ to everyone who reported these problems – it certainly makes life easier for us when you tell us what works and what doesn’t!

For those of you reading this and wondering why you need to enter a password and what happens to it, allow us a brief moment to explain this privacy point:

When backing up any content from your social networks to your own PC/Mac, the respective network needs to know that you (the data owner) are the one requesting it, hence why password authorisation is required. SocialSafe as a company never actually sees nor stores your login details, and furthermore, any content that you back up using our app is only stored on your own machine – we never see nor store any of your data.

And finally we’re sure that there are many of you wondering what’s going on with SocialSafe v6.5 and the new Insights feature that we’ve been promising you. Well, we had originally planned to release v6.5 before Easter, but as we hope you’ll understand, addressing the Facebook and LinkedIn login issues had to take priority. However, we’re pleased to say that we will be issuing a full release next week, which will include Insights and more!

Thank you all for your patience up to this point – we hope today’s update fixes everything for you, and that you all enjoy the Easter break. Next stop – SocialSafe v6.5!!

Have a great weekend.

- the SocialSafe team

Direct replies should make things an awful lot easier for businesses when it comes to managing interactions with users. When several users add comments to an update posted on a page it can quickly become a bit of a mess when someone else adds a comment or replies to a reply before the page admins have replied to the original comment. Before you know it you’re having to explain who the last comment was aimed at, and then it can easily spiral out of control… See, even trying to explain the problem was a bit of a hassle!

We’ve enabled this functionality on the SocialSafe Facebook page, so here’s how it looks:

By indenting replies to specific comments and creating threads, page admins and users are able to carry on a conversation that may still be read by and be of benefit to other users, but it’s just easier for all concerned to keep track of their own interactions. The other side to this is that the most commented-on or liked replies begin to climb to the top, making it easier to find the responses that garner the most social interaction.

What do you make of the new Facebook Pages features? Will you be enabling them on your Pages, or are you dreading the mandatory changeover in July? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Well, it was about time it happened. All too often I blog about the misfortunes of others when it comes to losing online content, and now I’ve just noticed that Facebook has done a number on my Mobile Uploads album. It’s still there on my profile, Facebook knows how many photos should be in it, but I can only view less than half of the 72 it tells me are in it.

If you look at the screen shot below of the album as presented by Facebook, nothing seems wrong (apart from the dubious Movember effort from 2011, my shocking haircut when I was 18 and playing in a band, and the sheepish look on my face as my cousin took me riding on her horse when I was knee-high to a… well, knee-high to a horse in actual fact):

This is what Facebook is showing me…

However, if you cross-reference that to what I have backed up in my SocialSafe library, you’ll see that there’s a shed-load of photos missing from the same album on Facebook. I’ve used a red box to highlight two pictures from the screen shot, and again highlighted them within SocialSafe. As you can see, there are lots of photos in my SocialSafe library that simply aren’t there (at least right now) on Facebook:

…and this is what should be in there.

Okay, I can get over losing a picture of the odd meal here and there or a screen-grab from my iPhone about the weather, but losing the picture of me with my grandmother taken the last time I saw her before she died? No, I can’t deal with that I’m afraid.

The missing photos may well reappear on Facebook, but this is an issue that has been persistently affecting users for some months now, so I’m not 100% confident that this will happen. Thankfully however, I back up all my Facebook photos with SocialSafe, so if Zuckerberg and co screw the pooch when it comes to looking after my pictures, it won’t be the end of the world.

We thought this was as good an opportunity as any to talk about how you can use SocialSafe to look back over all your social network content, including old tweets, mentions, DMs and more, as well as jumping straight back to any given date – such as a birthday.

By backing up photos, updates, friends, connections and more into a searchable offline library, you can easily browse your online social history and quickly find a tweet made about a certain topic or on a particular date for example.

So whether you’re a business wanting to see how often you receive tweets about an individual product, or a private user wanting to view all of your exchanges with a certain user, SocialSafe affords you this functionality – and so much more – all within the privacy of your own PC or Mac. To try it for yourself download the free trial from our website.

Taking to Twitter on Friday night, the Slough representative posted the following message:

I will give £1.00 to Comic relief for every retweet of this message before 9pm

—
fiona mactaggart (@fionamacmp) March 15, 2013

In the 35 minutes between posting the update and the 9pm deadline, Fiona MacTaggart’s message had been retweeted 14,268 times, equating to a donation of £14,268 to Comic Relief. Thanking the Twitter users for being generous on her behalf, she also admitted that she had been naive, not expecting so many people to have taken her up on the offer:

“I knew it would be a lot but it was more than I expected… I had expected to give around £10,000 but there you go, it was a risk I took”

While some of the more cynical observers are claiming this to be a publicity stunt, and that she would ”probably claim it back on her expenses form anyway” – which she said will not be the case – her actions helped raise awareness and stirred others into donating. The Slough MP added:

“Someone from Australia retweeted it and said she gave 30 Australian dollars so that’s rather wonderful”.

For more on this story you can watch a short clip of Fiona MacTaggart speaking with the BBC about the whole episode.

One of our SocialSafe partners, a social media agency by the name of Immediate Future, recently staged a “social media mock employment tribunal”, held at the Law Society. In collaboration with legal firm Colman Coyle, real barristers went through the motions of a case, giving the those involved the chance to see the detailed consequences of what can happen when social media goes wrong.

In his conclusions, the Judge made it clear that if the brand had a social media policy in place, that case would have been favourable to the brand rather than the employee. The barristers and the judge also agreed that there is a need for not just a social media policy, but training. “A stitch in time, saves nine”, as my grandmother used to say.

The issue of privacy was dealt with during the tribunal, with many references to the ‘employee’ thinking that their social network content was not publicly available. It is becoming all too apparent that people aren’t fully aware of what their default privacy settings are, or what further privacy can be achieved, and this is another area where social media training, as part of a company policy can help both the employee and the employer.

The last and perhaps most important point made in the blog from Immediate Future was that of evidence. Knowledge is power as they say, and having all the facts available when entering into legal proceedings is a must. If someone is accusing you of saying or posting something on a social network that has legal ramifications, or if you are contesting something said by an employee, it’s good to have a record of what went on, even months or years in the past, and to be able to search through it quickly and easily.

As Immediate Future say at the end of their blog, SocialSafe is a very good way of keeping a detailed and accurate record of content created on social networks. If you are a company wanting to keep track of what is said on your Facebook Page or Twitter account run by employees,or if you are an individual wanting to have your own private reference of your own social content, you can use SocialSafe to download the content from your social networks.

Evernote functions like an online organiser, allowing users to save data such as images, webpages, video clips, notes and more to a cloud hosted account.

As a result of the security breach, Evernote said that usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords were accessed, but oddly enough the company insisted that there was no evidence that users’ payment details or stored content were accessed, changed or deleted.

On Saturday, a posting on the Evernote blog (which was also sent to all Evernote users as an email) explained what had gone on:

“Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost. We also have no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed.

The investigation has shown, however, that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption.”

There are further instructions on the Evernote site explaining what you need to do change your password. Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly common to hear of large companies and networks being the victim of hacking attacks, but at least in this case it appears that no lasting damage was inflicted.

Do you use Evernote? What is your reaction to the whole incident? Feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts.

“Some Photo albums not appearing on my timeline, sometime disappearing and reappearing after they have been published, most specifically for Sept & October 2012. My album count is correct but they should be appearing on my timeline which they are not.”

There were further complaints of not being able to see as many individual albums as Facebook listed in the total at the top of the page, while some users said they weren’t able to see all of the photos that they know are in an album.

The first post in this comment thread goes back to 6th January 2013, but even today – some two months later – users are still commenting saying that they are having problems seeing Facebook albums.

A couple of the people who commented tried using SocialSafe to download albums from Facebook, and from their mixed successes we can deduce that Facebook’s problem may be two-fold:

• One user was able to download all of her albums with SocialSafe, despite the fact that they were not visible on Facebook – this would indicate that the albums are still there and that Facebook has an issue displaying them.
• Another user was only able to download seven new albums that she had posted – this implies that Facebook might also have a lost some photo albums belonging to users, as well as not being able to display them properly.

Facebook’s Bugs & Known Issues page says that this can happen when the site is undergoing maintenance, and advises users to wait a few hours to see if the photos reappear. However, in the case of the users who have posted to the community forums this issue has been affecting individuals for several weeks now.

So as ever, we’d strongly advise that you regularly backup your content from the social networks you use, just in case something like this happens to any of your accounts.

People often use Twitter to try to connect with and find people who may be able to help them in some way, and you’re more likely to get a response to a DM than you would if you just posted a lone tweet into the vastness that is Twitter.

Here’s what to do:

(Before you start, make sure you sync your SocialSafe journal so that you are working from the most recent data)

1. From SocialSafe, use the left hand navigation to go to Accounts

2. Click on ‘Select content to view’ and then click on ‘Followers’
3. Click ‘Export’ and select where you’d like to save the CSV file on your machine

   The rest of the instructions refer to Microsoft Excel, but it should be easy enough to work out the equivalent functions for other applications.
   

4. Once you’ve opened the worksheet, add filters to the columns by clicking (from the ‘Editing’ section of the Home tab) ‘Sort & Filter’ > ‘Filter’.
5. Locate the ‘Description’ column (usually E) and from the drop-down menu select ‘Text Filters’ > ‘Contains…’
6. Enter your keyword (perhaps ‘marketing’, ‘journalist’ or ‘C++’) and hit ‘OK’.

Hey-presto, you have now found everyone following you who has your keyword in their description. You can also refine this by applying the same filtering logic to other columns, such as ‘Location’. If you were on the hunt for key influencers or wanted to see how much their opinion may be worth, you can also sort your filtered results by how many followers they have.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s by no means perfect, nor is it an exact science. But once you know what you’re doing with the filters it’s easy enough to play around with the search terms to find people who may be able to help you in a neat and timely fashion.

We hope you find this guide to be useful, and if any of you out there have managed to come up with your own uses for exported data from SocialSafe, please share them with everyone else by leaving a comment.

When the web developer stumbled upon the flaw in Facebook’s security, he did the right thing and contacted the social network to alert them to the error in their ways, and sat on his discovery until the problem had been fixed.

Writing on his Web Application Security Blog on Saturday, Nir Goldshlager told of how he was able to manipulate the OAuth service – used by developers to obtain various permissions for their apps to run – into giving him full access to accounts, including inboxes, private photos and videos.

You can read more about the specifics of the Facebook security flaw on Mashable, and also on Goldshlager’s blog.

While in this case Facebook was fortunate enough that the person who found the workaround alerted the social network, if someone more mischievous had discovered this way to access strangers’ Facebook accounts, there could have been some severe consequences.

First of all there is the privacy issue to contend with - what sort of damage could someone do if they were able to go through all of your private messages? Even though there is likely to be nothing incriminating there, someone going through your messages and photos is not a particularly comfortable thought, never mind the potential for identity theft and fraud.

And then there is the possibility that they delete your content. While in this case it is not clear if the security flaw enabled a hacker to delete anything, it is always worth backing up any data that is stored online. If you are looking for a way to download the content from your social network accounts for safe keeping, then create your library of you with SocialSafe – the offline backup tool for your online content.

It’s fair to say that most of the content you see on Facebook from your friends is positive – holiday photos, news of an engagement, being offered an amazing new job, checking in at a popular event etc. However, research from the Stanford University Psychology Department suggests that we overestimate the happiness of others on Facebook, and by doing so feel less happy about our own lives.

It stands to reason that if all you ever see are the positive aspects of someone’s life, that your own problems might seem a lot worse in comparison. But it’s worth remembering that even your Facebook friends with the most seemingly perfect lives will have their own insecurities and concerns lurking beneath the surface, it’s just that they may not post them on Facebook for everyone to see. So chin up!

Another cost of Facebook to consider is the environmental one. All of those pictures and updates you post have to be stored somewhere, and there will be an energy footprint associated with the maintenance of the servers responsible for holding that content. The video from Insurance Quotes and subsequent article explains how opposition to the construction of a server farm in Oregon eventually led to Facebook working with The Climate Corporation to develop guidelines for building greener data centres with a reduced carbon footprint.

The third cost looked at by Insurance Quotes in their video actually deals with the financial performance of Facebook, and the problems it faces with regards to the number of its users  accessing the site via mobile devices. I’m not going to spoil the fun by telling you what the findings are, so you can watch the video for yourself, and also head over to Insurance Quotes to read some of the supplementary text.

“Here at Memolane, we’ve had an amazing two years helping people see, search and share all of their social media content from across the web. Our goal was to make it exciting to relive great adventures with friends… Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22nd.”

They company also announced that the Memolane team are joining another company, and we’d like to take this opportunity to wish them well in all their future endeavours.

But if the sudden closure of Memolane has left you with ‘back up and search social network content’ shaped hole in your digital life, then fear not. With SocialSafe you can privately and securely back up the content from your various social networks to create your library of you.

All of the content is stored on your own PC or Mac, so whatever happens to the originals hosted on the networks themselves, you will always have a copy of your data. Whether you choose to browse by date, search across multiple networks, view content by type, or export to CSV, SocialSafe brings you memories to life so they are never forgotten.

For more information and to get started, simply visit the SocialSafe website and download the free trial for PC or Mac.

A series of tweets was unleashed, with the perpetrators jokingly announcing that the brand had been sold to rival firm Cadillac. When the Burger King was de-throned earlier in the week, the pretenders to the crown tweeted to say that McDonald’s had purchased the fast-food chain, and the account’s avatar and background picture were changed to display the McDonald’s logo and other promotional images.

With Jeep’s images, its icon was changed to the Cadillac badge and the background picture replaced with a picture of a clapped out sedan painted with McDonald’s logos and brand colours. In the same way that McDonald’s were quick to point out that they had nothing to do with the Burger King hack, Cadillac extended a similar olive branch to Jeep:

Just to clarify, Cadillac is not connected to the hack of the @Jeep Twitter account.

—
  (@Cadillac) February 19, 2013

Burger King also tweeted its sympathies to Jeep, and judging by the nature of the response, the car giant – or at least its Marketing/PR department – seems to have been able to see the humour in the whole escapade:

.@Jeep Glad everything is back to normal.

—
  (@BurgerKing) February 19, 2013

.@BurgerKing Thanks BK. Let us know if you want to grab a burger and swap stories - we'll drive.

—
  (@Jeep) February 20, 2013

Just to make things a little more bizarre, some other brands were apparently so jealous of the exposure gained by Burger King and Jeep, that they decided to ‘hack’ themselves. Yup, MTV posted tweets from its own account that poked fun at certain musicians, in an attempt to publicise itself and its affiliate networks.

An MTV spokesman told TechCrunch “the hack was pre-planned in the spirit of corporate camaraderie with our sister network, BET [Black Entertainment Television]“. However, the reaction was less that positive for MTV, with many users heckling the music reality TV channel for performing the marketing equivalent of jumping the shark.

In an ironic twist of fate, Denny’s Diner managed to gain more social kudos and exposure after its tweet lambasting the actions of MTV went viral:

OMG we hacked ourselves because it's the cool thing to do! yfrog.com/h2tdxup

—
Denny's (@DennysDiner) February 19, 2013

What do you make of all this hacking? With Twitter in the process of rolling out an advertising API this week, will the apparently ease with which two household names have had their accounts hijacked caused companies to think twice before investing time and money on the micro-blogging site?

The account is now back to normal, but for a time yesterday the @BurgerKing Twitter page looked like this:

The tweets have since been removed, but there are some screen shots of them at Mashable. It would be foolish to think that McDonald’s were actually behind this – the fallout of being found to have hacked a competitor’s online presence would far outweigh any potential PR gains that might be made. In fact, McDonald’s offered their own showing of support for Burger King on Twitter:

We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.

—
McDonald's (@McDonalds) February 18, 2013

At this stage it is not known who is responsible for the hacking, but it does serve as a stark reminder that nothing is untouchable when it comes to the online worlds we inhabit. Thankfully for Burger King it has control of its Twitter account again and if anything, this little incident has probably acted as some rather good publicity. However, Burger King could have lost a lot more than just some time had the hackers started to delete tweets or unfollow people.

We often forget that impersonation isn’t the only danger that lurks for social network accounts – all the time you spend creating content can easily amount to nothing if you don’t have a copy of your online social history to look back on. This is also an example of the PR department of a global, household name brand asking Twitter to shut down an account – you can bet that if this had happened to a small business it would have taken a lot longer for anything to happen, by which time it could be have been too late.

While initial reports suggested that there was no evidence of any user data having been compromised, the FBI is now assisting Facebook with its probe into the malware attack, prompting speculation that personal information may have well have been exposed to the hackers.

In an earlier blog post on the matter, Facebook explained that it was not the only company affected:

“It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well. As one of the first companies to discover this malware, we immediately took steps to start sharing details about the infiltration with the other companies and entities that were affected.”

While there is nothing that individual users can do to stop hackers from targeting Facebook and potentially stealing or destroying their data, they are able to mitigate the loss of any data in the case of a major breach.

With SocialSafe you can back up your Facebook profile information, wall posts, updates, photos albums, tagged photos, friend list and messages safely to your own PC or Mac, along with the comments, tags and likes. If you run a Facebook page as well, this can also be backed up in your SocialSafe journal, from which all your content can be browsed, searched and exported.

So whatever happens to Facebook, you don’t have to worry about your social library being lost, as your content is stored safely and securely offline.

The first was an article on Mashable that discussed the various problems that executors and next of kin face when trying to deactivate or preserve the online profiles of the deceased, and offered some very useful advice. Seems reasonable. The second was slightly more morbid.

The Tweet Hereafter is a site that posts the last tweet made by someone before they died. Of course there are many instances of ‘famous last words’ being uttered by many people of note through the years, but I guess the timing of this story isn’t great  - the homepage of The Tweet Hereafter shows the ‘Newest Death’ to be that of Reeva Steenkamp, who was shot dead yesterday morning, supposedly by her boyfriend the South African Olympic and Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius.

I suppose it satisfies a certain curiousity to know what the last thing someone tweeted was, but is it always interesting? In some cases it might even serve as an eerie prophecy, indicating that their death could have been avoided:

Tru! Thats why I made the First move, Now Dude say He Gone KILL me. Wouldn't be so bad if he ain't (cont) tl.gd/isvsa9

—
DEANNA COOK (@DIVASEXYDALLAS) August 17, 2012

What both of these news items point out is that there is value to be found in our social data long after we are gone. While we are alive we have the ability to take control of and organise our social data offline so that if we were to suddenly drop dead, those we leave behind are easily able to preserve our digital legacy and look back at the content we spent years creating.

One way of doing this is to use SocialSafe to download your information from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks, creating your own library of you. By having your own copy of this data, you can leave it somewhere safe for your next of kin to deal with it as you wish, rather than them having to negotiate with the social networks for access to your accounts.

SocialSafe v6.4.4 includes:

• New User process & Add Network improvements
• API Timeout enhancements
• Twitter API migration.  Sync is now more efficient & Private Twitter users are now able to download all of their data
• Improved feedback during Sync
• Preparatory work for Insights
• Bug fixes & UI enhancements

Our development team are continuing to work hard on ‘Insights’ which is a new range of analytic function, set to be included in the next major release of SocialSafe. Insights will allow you to see the content contained within your library of you in a whole new light. For example, you can see which of your photos gained the most likes, which status updates had the most comments from your friends, or which friend you interact with most.

There’s plenty more to say about Insights and what we’ve got planned for the next major release, but we don’t want to spoil the surprise just yet! If you haven’t used SocialSafe before, you can start building your own library of you by downloading the free 60 day trial for PC/Mac from our website.

As ever, we love to hear what our users think of what we do with SocialSafe, so if you have any suggestions for how we can improve what we do, please get in touch via our Feedback Forum. If you submit a suggestion, share it with your friends and ask them to vote on it – the more votes a suggestion gets, the closer it moves to the top of our ‘to-do’ list!

Thank you for your continued support.

- the SocialSafe team

Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, changed the wording in the policy which had caused the consternation, but this did not do enough to stop a class action lawsuit being filed in response to the changes to Instagram’s terms of service in December 2012. The suit filed by San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk alleges that even if a user deleted their Instagram account, they would forfeit rights to the photos they had already uploaded.

Instagram are this week seeking to have the class action lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiff, Lucy Funes, could have deleted her account before the changes in the terms of service went into effect. The policy changes were announced on December 17th, Funes filed her lawsuit on December 21st, while the changes didn’t actually come into effect until January 19th.

However this particular case concludes, this issue of data ownership where social networks are concerned is still a hot topic. It is becoming increasingly apparent that users are keen to get their hands on their own content, as evidenced by the large numbers of Twitter users voicing their impatience at not yet being able to download an archive of their tweets.

If you are looking for a way to take control of your social data, then use SocialSafe to create your library of you. Download your content from a variety of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest, as well as your RSS feeds. All of the data is stored on your own PC or Mac and presented in a beautiful journal where is can be viewed, searched, and exported. Get the free trial of SocialSafe from our website now.

Could Maverick sue Facebook for using the thumbs up?

It hardly seems that a week can go by in the tech world without someone laying claim to a patent, starting months – if not years – of litigation. If Samsung and Apple aren’t at each other’s throats about something, there’s usually someone trying to argue that they are entitled to a slice of Zuckerberg’s money pie.

Some however, are more successful than others. The Winklevoss twins walked away with a cool $65m worth of cash and stock following their assertion that they were instrumental in coming up with Facebook, whereas the likes of Paul Ceglia was laughed out of court after being found to have forged and modified contracts between himself and Mark Zuckerberg.

But within the last week a new case has surfaced that sees one of the social network’s most used features at the centre of a paternity row. Facebook is being sued for its use of the Like button, which it is claimed was patented by Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer in 1998 as a functionality of Surfbook.

Van Der Meer’s creation in the late 90s was a social diary that allowed users to “like” each other’s content, however he has since died. The patent is now held by Rembrandt Social Media LP, who is seeking legal action against Facebook, as well as the company AddThis for using the patents without permission.

The law suit also says that Facebook is fully aware of the patents, and has in fact referenced them when filing its own application to patent some of its own social networking technologies.

However, there is a fair amount of debate as to whether a Like button can be patented. The technology itself is relatively basic and common – think how many times you click ‘OK’, or ‘Submit’ on any given day – but can you patent an expression of emotion?

Perhaps the mechanism is what is being contested here, but it still seems rather flimsy. So many websites have the ability to ‘like’ content independently of Facebook. A lot of the sentiment around this story seems to be that the line of what can and can’t be patented has been crossed, so I’ll leave you with this comment from one Mashable user that tickled me:

I’m going to sue Maverick and Iceman from Top Gun for using the thumbs up gesture. Clearly, this was not theirs originally…

We’d just like to take this opportunity to remind Backupify users that if they missed yesterday’s deadline, then there is no need to panic about LinkedIn data. As we mentioned when Backupify first announced their intention to cease supporting LinkedIn, SocialSafe is able to back up your connections, profile, education, updates and more.

So if you’ve been left high and dry this week and have not downloaded your LinkedIn content from Backupify, you can still take control of your data with SocialSafe. The 60 day free trial for PC/Mac available for download at the top of this page will allow you to experience the full functionality of SocialSafe, meaning that you can safely extract your LinkedIn content for viewing, browsing, searching and exporting.

Backupify also listed us as on their recommended alternative LinkedIn backup services when they first made their announcement last December, so if you were previously using Backupify to back up LinkedIn contacts, you should have no concerns about using SocialSafe in the future.

According to a survey carried out in the US by Pew Research Center, 69% of online American adults belong to a social network, and 67% of online American adults are Facebook users. On the whole, there has been a 20% increase in the number of adults using some kind on social networking site since 2009.

However, the report also found that 61% of Facebook users in the US had taken a break lasting at least several weeks from the social network. The reasons were varied, but only 4% said that privacy was a factor. This may be a surprise to some, given how vocal people can be about their data supposedly being used by Facebook, with seemingly every rumour of a privacy change being met with a raft of status updates declaring that people will abandon ship as a result of it.

But interestingly enough, the most common reason for people taking a break was that they are just simply too busy. 20% said that they did not have the time to log on, which begs the question, are social networks killing themselves? Around of third of people in the survey said that Facebook is less important to them now that it was a year ago, and 34% say that they spend less time on it than they did a year ago.

There are now more networks than ever for us to keep track of, and the type of content we view appears to be going through a paradigm shift with the number of sponsored posts people seeing in their feeds taking away from the enjoyment derived from seeing their friend’s updates.

Has your experience of Facebook, or for that matter any other social network, seen a negative change in the last year? Tell us what turns you on or off about the networks you use in the comments below.

SPOILER ALERT:

Febelfin - the Belgian Financial Sector Federation – has produced a very clever video that highlights just how much information a complete stranger can learn about us by simply using the internet. Like the viral Facebook app ‘Take This Lollipop‘, the idea is to educate viewers about the dangers of sharing too much information, but this particular short focusses more on financial data:

Sharing has almost become second nature these days. Whether it’s posting a picture of your dinner to Instagram, tweeting your opinion about a sports result, or just making an observation about the weather, rarely a day goes by without us sharing something with our friends.

We all love to share what we do with our friends, and often that does include the details of luxury purchases. However, before you post this sort of information online, just think about who might be able to gain access to it and how it could be used in an unlawful way. If certain information reaches a wider audience than we had anticipated, there could be some serious problems on the horizon.

The premise of Bang With Friends is beautifully simple – you sign into the app via Facebook, and depending on your sexual orientation, you will be shown your Facebook friends that match whichever way you lean. You then make a fairly binary decision – would you or wouldn’t you?

By clicking on ‘Down To Bang‘ underneath a friend’s picture, the app makes a private note that you’re interested in sexual relations with them, although there is no notification sent to your friend… Well, not unless they happen to use the app and click ‘Down To Bang’ beneath your picture, at which point both you and your mutual admirer receive an email saying that you’d both like to get it on. From that point, Bang With Friends leaves the two of you to it, and whatever happens between friends stays between friends.

So from the sound of it, the whole process is pretty foolproof. You can say you’re ‘Down To Bang’ as many of your friends as you like, without the fear of being embarrassingly rejected, and the only way someone will find out you want to bang them is if they want to bang you too – everyone’s a winner!

Of course there could be the awkward situation whereby you discover that you and your friend’s wife want to bump uglies, in which case you’re both as guilty as each other! It’s not my place to pass moral judgement, I’m just surprised that it’s taken this long for someone to come up with an app of this ilk.

Once the problem was identified, Twitter invalidated the passwords of the affected accounts and emailed the users to inform them of the breach and provide a link which would allow them to reset their passwords. However, the problems may not end there for those who had their information stolen.

Many people use the same email address and password combinations across a multitude of different networks and services, meaning that the extent of the damage could be much more severe than just having someone gaining access to your private tweets. Not only is the idea of someone else being able to look through your content and post from your profile rather disturbing, but the thought that their finger could be hovering over the Delete key is also a worry.

Last year Mat Honan, a writer at Wired.com – was the victim of an ‘epic hacking‘ that saw someone gain access to his Google account, hijack his Twitter account and remotely erase everything on his iPhone, iPad and MacBook after breaking into his AppleID account. In his own words: “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed”.

While SocialSafe cannot offer any additional layers of security for any of your online accounts, it can give you peace of mind over the thought of permanently losing data from your social networks. By using SocialSafe to back up your Facebook profile, Twitter account, Instagram photos, LinkedIn connections and much, much more, you create your library of you on your own PC or Mac. So no matter what may happen to your online accounts, by taking control of your data your yesterdays will be preserved tomorrow.

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

Striking the right work/life balance has been tricky for a while, but now that the world is able to fit more and more easily into our pockets, it’s becoming increasingly harder to switch off and actually have some quality “me time”.

The line between work and recreation is also getting blurrier by the minute, as environments that started out as places to socialise with friends are evolving into the most fertile fields marketers and advertisers. Companies are now all getting involved in the social realm in any way they can, from Facebook Pages to Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels to Instagram feeds.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a huge international brand like Coca Cola, or a five-person design agency – employee access to company email and social network pages via smartphones and remote server login is now becoming the assumed norm. The problem gets more complicated when the device you use to access these channels of brand communication is also the gateway to your private social life (your phone or computer) – it’s hard to isolate yourself from work without cutting yourself off from your friends too.

So if your phone beeps with a notification over the weekend from Twitter or your company Facebook Page, or an email from a client comes through, what do you do? You’ve seen that there is an issue to solve or a question to answer, but at what point do you decide that work has had its pound of flesh for the week, and you’ve earned this private time to do what you want to do?

It’s a tough call, and one that will largely depend on your line of work and how integral your actions may be to the overall successful operation of your company. What is important to remember is that there does need to be a work/life balance, and everyone needs some time to themselves, otherwise what are we all working towards?

We’d like to hear your opinion on this matter, and what you feel constitutes a healthy work/life balance. Please also include any tips you’d like to offer the other readers of this blog.

In the same way that hashtags are used on Twitter to find tweets on a certain topic, users on Vine are finding videos tagged with NSFW words. Everyone knows that there are thousands of adult sites on the internet, you just don’t search for them if you don’t want to view them – surely the same practice applies to using Vine? Turns out it wasn’t as simple as that…

Vine has an “Editor’s Pick” stream on the home screen of the app, showcasing some of the more popular uploads to the service. However, a clip containing pornographic content managed to find its way onto this stream. Despite the fact that the video was covered by a warning notice, users have reacted angrily to the video appearing in the Editor’s Pick feed, with one user, Taylor Winkelmeyer, writing:

“I clicked on the link because I thought the warning was a joke…. I am furious I had to see something like this. Someone please tell me how to get it off my feed.”

Twitter has apologised for the incident, citing “human error” as the cause of the problem:

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realising this mistake we removed the video immediately… We apologise to our users for the error.”

Porngate aside, how many of you have tried using Vine, and what do you think of it? If you have any (clean) videos you’d like to share, please post a link in the comments section below.

Here is what the micro blogging site had to say about Vine, its latest offering:

“We’re introducing Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.”

Vine is a standalone app, but is also integrated with Twitter, allowing users to instantly share short videos – including sound – with their followers. You can see how Vine works in the wild by checking out this video from none other than Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

At this point Vine is only available for iPhone and iPod touch via the Apple App Store, but Twitter has said it is currently working on releases for other platforms. However, Facebook has prevented the app from being able to find your friends on the service, and Vine videos cannot be posted directly to Facebook. This will no doubt hinder the viral spread of the app.

But we’d like to head what you think! Got Vine? Then show us! Post a link to your short clips in the comments section below!

Two articles along this theme caught my eye this week. Firstly on Monday I learned of an app called FaceWash that seeks to cleanse a user’s Facebook profile of unsuitable content based on a predetermined keyword search. The other piece of news was that a number of workers at the Department for Transport in the UK had been sacked for misuse of social media.

Taking these two incidents in isolation, it is easy to shrug them off as other people not being sensible with their own activities, or too carefree with their privacy settings. However, the notion of privacy is increasingly being defined by the entity that holds the information, rather than the individual to whom that data pertains.

Facebook’s new Graph Search is causing quite a lot of discussion over whether or not it is a massive breach of privacy, of whether or not people are wrongly assuming that anything said online can ever be truly considered private. As one user on our Facebook page said this week:

“The site [Facebook] is built on sharing with others. If we want privacy in a quasi public place, don’t be part of the social media sites, like FB.”

Now, we’re not advising people to stop using social media sites, quite the contrary: we’d suggest using them with more thought. After all, by posting your thoughts to an online profile you’re essentially creating your library of you. Wouldn’t you rather make it a classic that will be remembered for years to come, rather than a throwaway comic strip that will be forgotten the next day.

Writing is one of those things that can be very personal, requiring a lot of time, effort and thought, and anyone who writes regularly will know the sense of worry you feel when you think you may have lost an article. Another issue encountered by bloggers who write often and in more than one place, is trying to find a particular entry or a specific passage from an article that you can’t quite remember.

Thanks to our latest release of SocialSafe, you can not only backup and create a library of your blogs via RSS feed, you can also search across the entries for any keyword or phrase. As well as RSS, Pinterest users can now download, view, search and export their content, although because of the fact that the Pinterest API is not yet available, we’re using RSS to perform this function.

In addition to these new features, SocialSafe v6.4.3 sees some bug fixes. Facebook Photo download API bug is no more, so users who previously experienced issues will now be able to retrieve all photos, and the Facebook Messages Sync Stall problem has been resolved, meaning all users will now be able to successfully complete a Messages sync.

If you’re yet to create your library of you from your social networks, you can download the free 60 day trial for PC or Mac from the SocialSafe website.

We hope you all enjoy the latest release, and we look forward to showing what else we’ve got planned for SocialSafe when those new features are ready to see the light of day. Thank you for your continued support.

- Andrew, of behalf of the SocialSafe team.

Brazilian-based website NamoroFake.com will, for a fee, generate a fake Facebook profile for your made-up “girlfriend”, which includes various interactions with your own accounts such as comments and likes, as well as the all important relationship status.

Quite why you’d want to go to such lengths to convince your friends that you have a girlfriend is frankly beyond me… Surely after a while when none of your real-life friends have met her, and there are no photos of the happy couple together, they’d smell a rat and realise that you’re telling porkies? Either way, people are paying Namoro between $10 and $99 for varying levels of online interaction over different periods of time.

However, it remains to be seen how long a company boasting to create fake Facebook profiles can actually survive, given the fact that using a false name breaks Facebook’s terms of service. Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie may have been victorious in getting his account reinstated after Facebook originally demanded that he use his legal given name – Ahmed Rushdie – but it is hard to see a company creating fake profiles for the express purpose of supporting a lie being given the same leniency.

In Zuckerberg‘s own words, “Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook.” In the first instance, there will be four categories that users can search across – people, places, photos and interests. The idea is to utilise the masses of data that is either publicly available or has been shared with consent between connected users. People can then search for anything from friends with particular interests to the best places to eat in a certain town or city.

One example used by Mark Zuckerberg is ”I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones, but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me.” But this isn’t just reliant upon a friend ‘Liking’ the Game Of Thrones page, Graph Search pulls information from the data your friends are sharing with you – comments, updates, posts on friends’ Timelines – to see if they have mentioned Game Of Thrones.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, with Zuckerberg admitting that “it will take years and years to map the whole index of the graph.” To see the new feature in action, visit the dedicated Facebook Graph Search page on the social network itself. The whole thing looks pretty impressive, and if you want to use it yourself as soon as possible, you can join the waiting list to get the Beta version as it gradually rolls out.

Firstly, the consensus is that we’re in for a big announcement, given that not many events are hosted at Facebook’s corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California – the location for tomorrow’s meeting. But what would constitute ‘big’ for Facebook these days? The social network has made some pretty punchy moves over the last year, such as buying Instagram and floating on the stock market to name but two.

Of course, there are several items in the works that have been spoken of before in varying degrees of detail, so there is an element of education to the guesses, but there is no real agreement on which of the possible answers it might be. Josh Constine over at TechCrunch usually has the inside track on what’s going on at Facebook, but even he is only able to speculate on what will be revealed tomorrow.

Some of Josh’s ideas sound pretty cool (I particularly like the sound of standalone feeds for different content types), so if you want to read more about them check out his article on TechCrunch. We’ll just list what he thinks Facebook should be working on:

• Facebook Search – For Businesses, Posts and People
• An easier way to find things on Timeline [he obviously hasn't heard of SocialSafe ]
• Friend Management so I can hide people I don’t care about
• Facebook For Cars [not that weird when you actually read it!]
• Standalone Feeds for different content types
• A revamp of Notes to take on Tumblr
• A real video chat competitor to Google Hangouts
• New advertising channels to show it’s all grown up
• A Facebook Phone – or maybe it shouldn’t

What would you like Facebook to announce tomorrow? Something along the lines of what Josh Constine has written about, or is there something missing from your Facebook experience that you hope to be developed? Let us know in the comments below.

]]> http://blog.socialsafe.net/2013/01/14/what-will-facebook-be-announcing-at-tomorrows-press-event/feed/ 0 adkrobertson http://blog.socialsafe.net/2013/01/10/interview-with-socialsafe-chairman-julian-ranger-on-startupbeat/ http://blog.socialsafe.net/2013/01/10/interview-with-socialsafe-chairman-julian-ranger-on-startupbeat/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:20:47 +0000 Andrew Robertson http://blog.socialsafe.net/?p=1667 ]]> Our Chairman, Julian Ranger, recently sat down for an interview with StartUpBeat to talk about various aspects of SocialSafe, including the origins of the product and what our plans are for the future. You can read the transcript in full here.

Those of you who have been with us since the beginning may be familiar with the previous incarnations of the app that Julian mentions, but not many of you will have heard the story of how and why we got started in as much detail as this interview goes into.

It hasn’t always been easy getting the app from the original conception to where it is now, and some of the obstacles we’ve faced – both from a development and a market communication standpoint – are explored. You can also read about our most recent round of fundraising, what we plan to do with this resource in terms of pushing SocialSafe forward through innovation and how we hope to reach a wider audience over the course of 2013 and beyond.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know about what we do that Julian doesn’t address in this interview, then just leave your questions in the comments section below and we’ll answer them as best we can! Thank you all for your continued support.

- Andrew (on behalf of the SocialSafe team).

So what else is new, and what does it all look like? This picture from Mashable highlights the new options beneath a banner picture:

But what is more interesting is the new DIY approach of which boxes on the right-hand side of your Timeline appear, and in what order. This is called the ‘Collections Manager’, and the whole concept harks back to the earlier ‘Wall’ layout of user profiles. Posts from friends are now also pushed to the left-hand side of the Timeline, as one contributor at TheNextWeb demonstrated:

Reaction to the changes seems to be positive, with many people commenting that the previous (or in the case of most people, current) layout was a little cluttered. However, there are also those who think that Facebook should be focussing on delivering more of their friends’ content to the now heavily filtered News Feed, instead of revamping the content that you already see.

For a more in-depth look at the update, check out the articles on TheNextWeb and Mashable. Next Tuesday (January 15th) also sees the first Facebook press event of 2013. It’s unclear what is to be showcased, with invitations simply saying “Come and see what we’re building”.

Has your Timeline changed over to the new version? What are your first impressions?  We’d also like to hear if you have any ideas as to what Facebook will be talking about next week. Please share your views with the rest of the readers by leaving a comment below.

As you are probably aware, Twitter is in the process of giving users the ability to download all their tweets to a searchable archive, and given that this is what BackupMyTweets does, they’ve made the decision not to compete with Twitter. They explained the decision this morning on (where else?) Twitter:

We will be shutting down BackupMyTweets on January 31 because Twitter has added a new "Download Tweets" option under Settings.

—
BackupMyTweets.com (@backupmytweets) January 08, 2013

After seeing the tweet, we also read the responses from many the people who had grown accustomed to using BackupMyTweets, saying that they will miss using the service, especially the automated daily backups. It was those user reactions that inspired this blog entry. We thought it appropriate to let our existing users know that we have absolutely no plans to slow down or stop what we do as a result of Twitter offering a partially comparable service.

So why are we soldiering on defiantly despite the appearance on the horizon of an ‘official’ equivalent to our service? Firstly, Twitter is just one of several social networks that SocialSafe supports, so there’d be no point in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Secondly – and perhaps more importantly – SocialSafe doesn’t just download your tweets. Users can download their mentions, DMs, favourites, followers and following, as well as their own updates. We go further still by aggregating multiple social accounts, allowing users to choose which aspects of their various online social histories to download, store, browse and search.

So to recap, we completely understand why BackupMyTweets have called it a day, and we wish all their staff the best of luck in their future endeavours. We’d also like to reassure our own users that SocialSafe will continue to provide the same services usual, and to extend a warm invitation to all you BackupMyTweets refugees who’d like to try using SocialSafe to back up your tweets for free – we look forward to you coming aboard. It’s also worth reiterating that all of your data is stored on your own machine, so no matter what happens to the original copies, you can have peace of mind knowing that your digital memories are safe to be viewed whenever you want.