In the hunt to find out if former FTC chief was hired by Facebook to help them with their privacy issues, a story was almost buried.  It can to light that someone had at some point hacked one of the Board Member’s accounts sending out phishing messages to any and all who it could get a hold of. Now, for most common users this would just be an annoyance, which you then have to go through some training on what is safe to click on and when you probably shouldn’t click on a link. For a top exec at Facebook, this is bad news. It is probably a good thing that it only sent messages out to his friend’s the program not realizing what it had gotten it’s fingers into. If this had been a person, we all would have been in trouble.

Checking Twitter this morning only to realize that all my followers were gone. Actually, this also was the case for a few other people I knew, and had therefore heard about it before I checked twitter. There were still people’s status updates, but the profile said there were no followers. It turns out it was a glitch and it probably shouldn’t be worried about. Twitter claims that they were fixing a glitch that allowed you to make anyone accept your friend request so that celebrities would have to follow your feed. It was a large glitch, discovered and published by Gizmodo. In order to fix it all twitter profiles can not follow or unfollow people, as well as the profiles all claim that no one has any followers. They are claiming it will be back up and running soon.

As a company, or as a person we often hear how important it is to have a social media profile, with all your information on there, so that you can reach the right people. That is in itself still a debatable point, but the truth in the matter is that while it can be very important these days to have a number of social media profiles across the board, it is even more important to have the right information up on the right social media profiles. Your key audience is probably on at least one social network, the key to differentiate you from your competitors is to choose the right ones and focus on those, giving out information to your potential customers that they need to know about. This makes you seem more like an expert in your field, as well as letting your customers know that you care. If you don’t know which social media center to try to put your information on, there are a number of experts, like Elixirinteractive , that can get you started and help you find the right places for you to post your information.

There is no need to stick with traditional media where it is appropriate. While on SEMPO, you may not want to go too crazy, and format your company profile more for potential employees rather than potential customers, Facebook and other such sites are more for the customers and should be formatted as such. This means there should be videos, pictures, and as much news as you can put up. You or your company should update your status message at least once a week, and add all new media as soon as possible. This includes new commercials, print ads, contests, which will get your customers involved, and anything else you can think of.

You also don’t have to stick to social media profiles. Once your customers have seen your social media profile, advertisements , or hearing about you from a friend, they are going to want to see what you are like, and will use the internet to do it. There are a few ways to go about giving the best first impression on the internet, and no matter what way you choose to go, you should make sure that the focus of it is content. Try not to have too much duplicate content , such as using the same used up statement on your personal website as you did on your social profile pages. You may also want to save a few pictures or video to post strictly to your own websites. This will make it a little more interesting when your customers go looking around. This will mean that they will also get more information about you when they go looking for you, which was their goal in the first place.

The newest phone from apple, the 4th Generation Iphone (which has been nicknamed the 4G, but probably will not as it most likely does not support 4G networks yet) will be unveiled on June 7th. There has already been a lot to do about this new phone when one escaped from an apple employee as he was partying in a bar and made it into the hands of a couple of tech bloggers. Because of this, people are expecting less of a surprise in what the new Iphone features will be.

The Youtube Project Report Winners have been announced and the contest overall has been a success. The idea was to offer money to Youtube’s top reporters to do a documentary anywhere in the world. Below is one of the winning videos. You should check out Youtube for the other winning videos.

Having gathered online, specifically on Twitter and organized the event, now a group of twitterers will be meeting offline to raise funds for education. This is put together by thousands of volunteers and joined by hundreds of businesses. This is the second annual Twestival, the first one raised money for clean water wells to be dug in Uganda as a kind of social experiment to see what happens when normal people band together for a good cause.

Just as a study was put out about how much teens love to text, another story broke about what might happen to you if you are texting on your company phone. A police officer may be in trouble if his case turns up that the City worker who was reading his private text messages sent on his work phone was not in violation of his rights. Unfortunately for many employees these days, work phones are the way many people communicate with each other, even when not at work. If that is you, you may want to re-think the way you have been talking to people, what messages have been sent out from your phone, and if you might be in trouble next.

Seeing as how we are solidly in the “Now” generation, and everything should be delivered to us “Now!” it is now wonder that search engines are trying to perfect the ability to get us the relevant information that we want to know about, as it is published. A new article came out recently regarding what this is going to mean for the three search engine giants, twitter, you  and much more.

Some students dream of interning at a small startup company, being there when it takes off, and hopefully being kept on as it fly into stardom. There has not really been a way for students to find these companies unless they happen to already know someone who is starting a company right now. StartupRoots is working to change this.

Facebook unveiled its new Safety Center on Tuesday, and it is a large improvement on the old Help Center. There are now special areas for law enforcement, teens, parents, and educators. There was apparently some help in changing up the site with consultations from Common Sense Media, The Family Online Safety Institute, ChildNet International, and many more. If you want to learn what features are now in the Safety Center, you can go check them out on Facebook, or else read this article.

There has been a fiasco going on in Hollywood as Jim Carry jumped on his computer to tweet his feelings about Elin, wife of Tiger woods. Whether what he said was right or wrong doesn’t seem to matter to her supporters, nor does it matter to most of the media who is calling for a ceasefire on twitter. Here’s some video.

It never ceases to amaze me, the ease of the access to information today . I feel like an old timer, saying %22Back in my day… as back in my day is not so far back. But it is far enough back to remember a time when you had to just answer the phone, having no idea who was calling on the other end. I remember the time when you had to buy a road map and find your own way to the restaurant or whichever destination you were headed. Now you can find directions online, and the cars manufactured today talk out loud, telling when to turn left and when to turn right. Back in my day, when it was time to look for college apartments to rent, we had to get out our red pencils, and circle ads in the paper. We had to drive to locations having no idea what the place may even look like or what condition it was going to be in. Now there are rental listings online , which not only present pictures of the properties and the surrounding area, but some now are even utilizing Youtube. This is amazing for a couple of reasons. Youtube is huge. People go on looking for one video, and before you know it your surfing the Tube…while watching one video you check out the list of similar videos, you choose one and so on and so forth. You may have started out looking for a video of your favorite band, but before you know it, a couple of hours have passed and you watching home videos of dreaming dogs and dancing cockatiel birds . It is amazing where you end up, and so for companies to post videos it provides them the means of being discovered. It is good for business. It is also great for consumers, or for prospective rental applicants. Looking for an apartment is a pain, especially when you are new to a city as are many students who travel out of town to attend university. If we had, back in my day, access to this kind of information, to be able to take a virtual walk through an apartment before we drove there to check it out, so much time would have been saved, and so much aggravation would have been avoided. Some things may have been better back in my day, but I’m kind of digging the things that are better in our day.

The virtual freeway is one of the most exciting places in the world today.  It operates according to rules and systems that are largely determined by the users, and there are many things that are still remarkably unknowable about how it might behave.  That’s largely due to the fact that it is determined by users, and the numbers and their behaviors are rather unpredictable.  However, experts have been trying to predict human behavior for generations, and at times it does seem like we’re no better at these predictions than we ever were.  This may be because human beings have always been rather proficient at determining the behavior of other human beings.

There are, of course, certain factors today that never entered into the equations before.  Your site’s download speed, for example, where the amount of time spent waiting for a page to load, can and does affect the site’s popularity.  Furthermore, over even a short period of time, page loading can affect its position in search engines, and that can sometimes make or break a website.  Through looking at human behavior and trying to predict outcomes, it’s possible to determine which terms are the most popular in web searches, and this is but one way to make these variables react in your favor.  A low position in search hits can see a swift rank increase with just a few careful and savvy moves.  In many ways, the things that are unknown in any kind of guesswork will remain largely unknown, because there are always more variables.

The amount of variables always increases the unpredictability, and that’s something that really hasn’t changed at all over time.  It’s always been true that the greater the unpredictability, the more desire there is to predict.  It’s human nature that we like to know how things will turn out ahead of time.  The more uncertain, the greater the desire.  Human nature is what determines human behavior on the internet, because it’s driven by human beings.  But it’s also true that there are more automated programs, and programs that are automatically programmed to make automated changes, and in this, it is a whole new world.

Though it’s especially true for businesses, data loss prevention affects 43% of PC users, and can be just as devastating. Backing up your personal or business files and database is of paramount importance. These days, all it takes is one strong worm or virus and your data could be forever lost.

Carbonite is a data backup client offering data protection with a 15 Petabyte storage capacity, providing internet and computer users an indispensable service, at a bargain rate of only mere pennies a day. They also offer a 15-day free trial, which will give you a nice introduction to their services.

Once Carbonite data backup is setup on your computer, it requires little ongoing work on behalf of the user. It reads and stores your data as long as you’re on the internet, and users can also log on to the Carbonite site and access their files.

Also, there are no limits on backup storage capacity. Carbonite will back up all the supported files on your internal hard drive whether you have 1GB, 10GB or more. However, users should be aware that the speed of today’s DSL and cable internet services
will make it very slow to back up more than, say, a few dozen GB of data.

“Backup” refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after an incident of data loss. These additional copies are typically called “backups.” Backups are useful, primarily for two purposes. The first is to restore a state following a disaster, a.k.a. disaster recovery. The second is to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

66% of internet users have suffered from serious data loss!

It doesn’t take a computer scientist to parse the fact that data backup should be equivalent to getting car insurance, or boiling unsafe drinking water; in short, a given.

Of the buildings that make up the Manhattan Skyline, the NY hotels, the businesses…one building stands out as perhaps, not the tallest in the line, but the most elaborate and one of the most beautiful structures in the city. In 1928 Walter Chrysler was in search of a way to advertise what it was he was producing and selling, the automobile. Now at this time, the auto was still a novelty. The invention had the interest of people, yet not many were actually driving them. Chrysler had an idea, and saw the opportunity to put forth that idea in another relatively new invention, the skyscraper. At the time, he thought that if his company had the tallest, and the most magnificent and incredible building on the block, it would bring notice to the company and to the cars. It would also serve to bring notice and to symbolize the wealth and the power of not only his company, or the city of Manhattan, but of the entire country of America. He hired the architect who could do just that, a pioneer in the new world of skyscrapers, William van Alen.

Fifty years prior to this commission, there were no skyscrapers. Walls had been built with bricks, and without the steel armature, and the bricks carried the weight of the building. With the metal infrastructure, or skeleton, buildings were provided with the strength necessary to hold a building of that size up and to keep it standing over time. This innovation was created by Williamle Baron Jenney , who put this to use creating the tallest building in the country at the time in 1885, the first skyscraper, in Chicago. A 10 story building for an insurance company.

Now the Chrysler building was not revolutionary in terms of the construction, but it served to reform the way people considered what a building could look like. It is an interesting fact that nothing used to make the walls, the stone or the cement, none of it serves to hold the building up, it is all completely held up by this inner metal skeleton. The building was finished in 1930, and just barely surpassed the previously taller Bank of Manhattan, to become the tallest building in the world, with 77 floors. Now days, in 2009, it no longer carries that title, but it is the one building in the world that most architects and designers agree upon, and they agree upon the beauty of the patterns, the spire atop the building, and the incredible, decorated nature of this piece of artwork.

CRM or customer relationship management is a term used for the process or methodologies as well as software that help an organization manage their customer relationships as well as finding out about their needs and behaviors.  The goal is to improve their relationships with all customers.

CRM is more than technology – rather it is a process that pieces together all aspects of information relating to the client.  This can include sales, marketing, customer service, help desk, quality, and research.

Access to this information helps employees to have an accurate view of the customer history when communicating with them.  This helps to give an insight into customer behavior and their value.

CRM software helps to provide improved customer service, increase sales, improve efficiency and simplify processes.  This can take the form of online CRM or traditional desk based software.

Web designers are expert at design. With that in mind most designers are not marketers and are unaware of the implications of online marketing. If you do not optimize your site it’s like designing a beautiful brochure and putting it in a drawer where no one can see it. Search engine optimization opens your site up to search engine spiders and the people searching for your products and services.

Internet marketing and search engine optimization are concerned with higher search engine rankings and increased traffic to your web site. If the traffic is targeted to your products and services it can increase your sales and business dramatically. Look out for top search engine optimization tips to help you out.

Search engines such as Google use various criteria to determine which sites will rank highest for particular search terms. These include; the age of the domain, the meta tags, the site content and the links pointing to the site from other related sites. Therefore the highest ranking sites will be given to those that have been around for a while, have relevant meta tags and content relating to the search terms, and have links from other ranked sites with similar content. High ranking sites are deemed ‘authority’ sites. Find more SEO tips and articles and information at Top SEM tips.

I bought a new computer recently.  I managed to transfer most of the stuff from my old computer with relative ease.  However when it came time to convert Eudora to Outlook I was stuck!  I’ve heard of many people having trouble when they convert emails.  I went online to look for solutions.  I found the Connected Software site which has lots of solutions relating to email and address books.

I also got help relating to some of the other issues I have been facing.  I was able to sort out my GAL to Blackberry problems.  I was also able to import AOL favorites which was a great help.

The Connected Software site is an excellent resource for information relating to migrating address books and email.