Facebook follies

Now we all probably know the story of Facebook. If not then I suggest you have a read of “How Facebook is taking over our lives” to give you an idea of the impact that it is having and the speed at which it is growing. What many people don’t seem to appreciate is that we are surrendering our privacy to commercial entities like Facebook at an alarming rate.

Many people don’t understand that whatever they post on the Internet is generally searchable and available to anyone. A good example of this is “Facebook scam: Ferrari man’s true identity revealed”. In short a recent Facebook scam featured a man standing next to a Ferrari (as if you would drive an Enzo on the road!) claiming that if you followed his method you’d make enough money to own an Ferrari (an Enzo costs over US$ 1 million by the way). Now the interesting thing, as the article details, is that the picture of the man standing next to the Ferrari is actually someone who uploaded his holiday snaps to the Internet and had no idea they were being used in this way.

The moral of the story is that you should never upload content that includes ANY private information about yourself to the Internet. I also reckon that you should also specifically avoid photos of yourself or your family. Problem is, many people don’t see anything wrong with it and continue to do so, not appreciating that once it is up on the Internet you no longer have control over it. Would you offer that information to a stranger on the street? Probably not, so why are you offering on the Internet to billions of strangers?

Facebook is a commercial entity. Its sole purpose in life if to make money for shareholders. If it allows you to sign up for free where do you think it makes money? It does that by collected as much information about you and selling that. If you willing provide more information, it will sell that also. Don’t be fooled by claims otherwise, your information is valuable. If you don’t think so then someone else certainly does.

Don’t get me wrong, things like Facebook and Twitter have their place but you should stop and consider how much information you are giving away and what you get in return. Once you have given that information away chances are you’ll never get it back. So, at the very least, don’t upload a picture of you standing next to a really expensive car or you could be the face of the next Internet scam!

Mobility the key

Interesting that now the sales of laptop have surpassed desktops as this article says, isn’t it? And according to this article, 2009 is going to be the year of the smart phone. It seems everyone has taken to these Web 2.0 and social networking sites and want to be able to update them from anywhere. It also seems that it isn’t just the young’ns that are doing it, entire demographics are discovering the benefits of Web 2.0 technology.

To me it shows the trend that people want to be able to access their stuff where ever they are. They don’t want to be tied down to a desk, they want the freedom of being anywhere and still be able to access all their stuff through their mobile or wireless broadband connection. For me this is simply verification that at the back end cloud computing is becoming more and more important.

If you are a reseller then you really want to be taking close note of these trends and making sure that you are able to make revenue from them, because if you don’t then someone else will. Problem is as demand increases prices and margins get driven down so you need to consider your strategy carefully. Yet there is opportunity.

A good example of an innovative Web 2.0 application I recently found is Wesabe. It allows you to manage you accounts and bills but the innovative part of it is you can get advice from other on how to save money, where to buy the cheapest item, what specials are available. The whole idea is that by creating a “community” people can help each other not only achieve their financial goals but also save money. I think this concept is a very powerful part of Web 2.0 in that you are using the collective intelligence of the Internet community, which given the size of the Internet population is pretty powerful.

It is these trends that you can’t ignore. Even if you can’t understand why people are moving that way you have to accept that they are. If you want a piece of the action then you need to put aside your “technology prejudices” and look for the opportunities. As I have said before, if you are a technology reseller, decide whether you want to own a business or enjoy a hobby. If you want to own a business you have to move to where the demand is or you face being marginalized.