I do love Facebook, for many reasons. However, as a community manager, sometimes Facebook really annoys me. It seems that over the past little while, they like to implement changes, but then leave it up to the user to discover what changes have been made and figure out how the changes affect them and potentially their brands.
It’s like they never tell us anything.
Case in point: Last year I discovered that fans on our Facebook page could directly send us messages. Facebook didn’t tell me about it, I actually heard about it on Twitter first. Odd.
With Hurricane Sandy raging across the east coast right now, we are all being reminded of so many things. Like making an emergency kit, knowing where flashlights and candles are, stocking up on food & supplies etc. But as I was reading tweets and Facebook posts yesterday, I saw a lot of people talking about how they were preparing for the oncoming storm by making they were “all charged up,” as in, phones, tablets, laptops.
Technology is an incredible and wonderful thing, and I truly believe it’s something that everyone needs to embrace in whatever way they can to enrich their lives. Geekdom rules. However, there is an ugly side to technology and social media: Cyberbullying
Like thousands of others last week, I was totally devastated to hear of another teen suicide that was the result of cyberbullying. Beautiful 15 year old Amanda Todd took her own life after years of trying to undo a mistake she did online.
It’s already been a year since Steve Jobs passed away. For me, the day he died was one of those moments where I’ve been able to recall where I was at exactly the time I heard the news.
I was sitting at my desk, working, surrounded by Apple products. I read the news on my Mac at the same time as my iPhone alerted me to a breaking news update of his passing.
Every day it seems I get direct messages from people on Twitter that say incredibly shocking things like,
“OMG I can’t believe they filmed you doing this!” “Someone is spreading nasty rumours about you” “This person is making up dreadful posts that are about you” “What exactly are you doing in this movie?”
Contrary to popular belief, my life is not that exciting as these DMs might suggest. I'm actually quite well-behaved.
Mondays are always such busy days aren’t they? My Monday today was no exception, it’s been crazy busy with lots and lots of things to do. No problem, I was running on a big dose of vitamins and caffeine so I was fuelled for the busy day.
And then mid-Monday I started reading that Facebook was publishing private messages to public timelines.
What the what? Facebook you just farked up my Monday. This was not part of the schedule.
First of all Pinterest, before I start talking about how awesome you are, I need to apologize. You see, YOU were going to be my very first GigaMom post—the debut, the beginning, the new chapter. Yes.
A new bug was discovered in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser yesterday, and while Microsoft is working like crazy to release a more secure version of Explorer, security experts are recommending that users temporarily switch to a new browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox in the interim.
There’s just no such thing as a bad day when Apple has a product unveiling. Ever.
Yesterday the iPhone 5 was announced to an enormous gathering of like-minded geeks & tech junkies consumers in San Francisco. Being the Mac-head that I am, this was the kind of day that fell into the “We must get a cake” category. As in, “How was your day, kids? A new iPhone was unveiled today. Here, have some cake.”
The kids love it when technology news makes Mummy happy.
There are three things in this world that make me simultaneously cringe and shake my head back and forth in a WTF motion: Bad drivers, blue cheese, and Facebook contests that are run incorrectly.
It’s been over a year and a half since Facebook did some serious tightening up of their promotion guidelines. Before that, the guidelines were a tad more lax & fan pages/brands were able to run “sweepstakes” and contests simply by posting a status and getting people to comment or like the status.
Yesterday millions of people’s livelihoods and businesses were brought to a halt when websites hosted by popular GoDaddy.com came to a crashing halt.
And what caused the crashing halt? Supposedly a hacker. With a point to prove.
I should probably be honest here and admit that the first time I wrote the sentence above, the phrase was “jackass hacker” but I counted to 10 and then edited it out.
