Digital Life Simplified
Posts tagged facebook
Facebook’s Open Graph API and Online Privacy
May 14th
A lot of information has been flying around the web for the last few weeks regarding Facebook’s privacy policy and Open Graph. My goal for this blog is to provide you with some sites that will help you bypass the volumes of information and get straight to the facts that concern the average Facebook user.
The main question is: Should you we worry about our own privacy? I mean, is our information safe in Facebook’s hands? I think it’s valid to question Facebook’s privacy changes, especially in relation to its new Open Graph API.
The New York Times posted an article criticizing Facebook for the complexity and length of their privacy policy. Accompanying the article is a map of all the Privacy Options in Facebook, which appear every bit as complex as The New York Times claims.
I’ll admit; it looks bad. But here’s the thing: there are so many privacy options because Facebook wants to allow the users to choose what they share. Facebook has offered a highly customizable user interface, so that we can select our own levels of privacy.
Facebook has implemented a really interesting program, the Open Graph API, which has the potential to enhance our online experiences. It can provide relevant information to marketers, who can in turn provide you with advertisements that are actually relevant to you, rather than random things you aren’t interested in. It can save you time by pulling information from your Facebook page to customize other web sites when you browse. Mashable provides an excellent summary of what Open Graph actually is.
One benefit I’ve seen is from the music-streaming website Pandora, as reported by Wired. With Open Graph enabled, Pandora can pull your music preferences from your Facebook page and create customized playlists based on your taste. You can then share music and recommendations with your Facebook friends.
The main thing I disagree with regarding Open Graph is the default setting that Facebook chose. Privacy settings are set to automatically share user information via Open Graph since Facebook put the new program into operation. Had Open Graph been implemented as an “opt in” system, I believe the media backlash would have been much less.
Inside Facebook posted a great review of the current issues surrounding Facebook, Open Graph and privacy. It’s pretty long, but if personal privacy on the internet is important to you, it’s well worth the read.
The bottom line is that as far as internet privacy is concerned, we all need to be aware of what information we’re sharing. It is each individual’s responsibility to know what he or she posts online. That being said, there is no need to close your social networking accounts immediately or to start using an alias. Just be responsible and cognizant of your online identity. Choose what content you want to share and customize your Facebook privacy settings. Use (or don’t use) Open Graph to create the web experience that you want.
Quick Tips To Group Friends with MeshTop’s “Search and Tag” Feature
Sep 3rd
In our previous post we revealed some general features of our Network View of how you can use tags to group your friends one by one, and our integration of Facebook chat, allowing you to chat with your online Facebook friends.
This week, I’d like to give a brief tip about how to quickly group your friends with the search and tag function. On installation, MeshTop gathers all the contact information from your email address book, and social networks, allowing you to search through your whole network using the MeshTop search function. The MeshTop search not only searches through name matches but also email and company matches.
For example, if I wanted to search for all my colleagues in the MeshTop department I could perform a search on the query, ‘meshtop’, and the MeshTop search will identify the company name or email domain name ‘@meshtop.com’ matches. Each search query is automatically converted into a temporary tag, allowing you to quickly add this tag to your favorites. Utilizing the MeshTop search function with MeshTop’s tagging feature allows users to quickly sort contacts friends to different groups when you first use MeshTop.
Ye Sun
Google Hasn’t Taken Over The World… Yet – MeshTop on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003
Aug 14th
Do you know which email client holds the largest market share? I thought that it was Gmail (I figured that Google is pretty much close to taking over the world). However, CampaignMonitor did a study on Email Client Popularity, and they found that Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express hold the largest portion of the market share for Email clients. What I found most surprising is that Gmail only had 5.51% of the market share!
Email Client Popularity (June 2009)
(Research and images from CampaignMonitor)
Anyhow, how does this relate to MeshTop? Well, its good news! This report supports our focus on creating MeshTop as a plug-in for Outlook. We desired to find a medium that would streamline Twitter and Facebook into the current work-flow that people already had, and our decision led us to launch our first release on Outlook 2007. The New York Times recently did a study on how American spend their days, and as shown in the graph below, a large portion of the day is spent at work – where Outlook is the predominant Email client utilized.
How American Spend Their Day – Reported By The New York Times
(Research and images from the New York Times)
One interesting thing to note from the report “Most popular email clients in June 2009”, is that market share for Outlook 2007 is only 7.55% and actually lags behind the older versions of Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express, which has a cumulative market share of 32.8%.
So why did we build our first release of MeshTop for Outlook 2007 instead of Outlook 2003? First off, we didn’t have this report. But also, we wanted to ensure that we were building for the latest builds of Microsoft products. Fortunately, we have already been working on making MeshTop backwards compatible, and will be releasing support for Outlook 2003 in the beginning of September 2009.
The next step would be for us to prepare for the next release of Microsoft Office products for Outlook 2010.
We’d love to hear feedback regarding which version of Outlook you are currently using?
Follow us on Twitter @hellomeshtop
Email us at: hello@meshtop.com
Upcoming MeshTop Release
Aug 13th
As a software product, the most important thing to consider is the user experience – and that has been our focus in the past year’s efforts in developing MeshTop. MeshTop’s release is upcoming and as the development team’s Tester, I’m really looking forward to the release of our product.
Microsoft Outlook is a powerful Office tool that I work with in the office (and many of us work with), in our daily lives. Moreover, the mass movement of Social Networking Services has seen Facebook and Twitter rise up as the two favorites to connect users to friends, family and businesses. Currently there aren’t too many solutions that allow users to access these three communication tools in one client. In many cases I’ve seen many users log on to Facebook and Twitter either through their web-browsers, or Facebook/Twitter clients, and then interact separately with their emails through Outlook. This method requires a good amount of alt+tab juggling (unless you’re fortunate enough to have a dual-monitor setup of course), and can become quite bothersome while trying to keep up to date with these three networks.
The Outlook Meshtop plug-in is a solution to the problem, allowing you to work on Outlook, while also keeping track of Facebook and Twitter interactions with friends simultaneously; [insert cliché phrase here] kill two birds with one stone. Hopefully this should increase your productivity and not become a distraction to your daily tasks!
Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter
A Question From My Friends – To Switch To MeshTop Or Not?
Aug 11th
A good friend of mine asked me, “Why should I change from my usual Twitter client to MeshTop?”.
Frankly, I don’t know why- heh. If you have used a tool for a long time in your work-process, then I guess there isn’t much reason for you to change to another tool. However, there currently aren’t many mashup tools integrating Twitter and Facebook into Outlook, and we think that MeshTop will be able to fill that need. I’m really excited about the future of MeshTop, but there’s definitely a lot more that we can develop; we would love to hear some more user feedback regarding our current release, and anything that you would like to see implemented in MeshTop for future releases.
Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter
@hellomeshtop!
Jul 20th
Hello and welcome, from MeshTop!
I’d like to give a short introduction to our company, and hopefully later on through the weeks I’ll also be able to introduce some of our team members here.
MeshTop is a software division of Minesage, the Business Intelligence branch of the larger SagesGroup company. MeshTop’s goal is to provide the next generation of free tools for social networking, and our current team of developers hopes to bring you innovative and exciting technologies in the areas of social networking and social media applications.
We started our MeshTop for Outlook project in 2007, and our initial idea was to provide a tool for Facebook users to communicate with each other, while also giving them a tool to organize their information quickly. At the end of 2007, we developed a tool called Visual-Sage, which was built upon Microsoft’s new WPF technology. Visual-Sage’s functionality gave users a chat client for Facebook, and also a visualization tool for their networks. However, as Twitter began to dominate the social network world from 2008, we didn’t want to miss out on this potentially huge network. This integration of Facebook, Twitter and Outlook, was later termed MeshTop.
Head over to our main website to browse around if you haven’t checked out MeshTop yet. We hope that MeshTop will be one of the leading social mashup tools for users.
Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter
