Facebook Fatality: Will Security Issues Burst the Social Media Bubble? - Shelly Palmer Report

What happens when you drink the KoolAid OK better question What happens when social media becomes woven into the fabric of your life and you rely on a webbased profile that you cannot back up or export as the center of your social universe Answer 1 When everything is working as designed the world is virtually wonderful Answer 2 When everything is NOT working as designed we get an upclose personal view of the pain and anguish a truly Internet cloudbased world could eventually offer us As bright as the upside is the dark side is darkerI39ve been on Facebook for as long as they have allowed grownups You can friend me at shellypalmernet I have kids who are on Facebook and literally hundreds of friends and colleagues who have profiles as well So as you can imagine it didn39t take long for my wife to get a profile too Now like so many typical families we have kids that at live home kids away at school married kids etc We have friends and relatives all over the place and because Facebook now has the population of the 6th largest country everyone we know is on fbFor the past six months things have been great My wife although new to fb is in love with the social networking aspect of the service She has reconnected with her old friends connected with her current group and has a direct digital connection with our kidsI leave fb open on my computer most of the day For me it39s just one of many communications tools However my wife is a Facebook demon She39s on it like glue Actually I think she39s addicted For her it has replaced IM email and Kodak EasyShare And that39s saying a lotBACKGROUNDThe other day she came into my office and announced that one of her friends sent her a realworld email saying that they thought her fb profile had been hacked I didn39t think much of it We checked out her profile messages etc and determined that everything looked OK It wasn39tA few days later several of her friends had contacted her on and off fb to tell her that they had received messages that they were sure were not from her Then I received a Facebook chat from her while she was standing next to me The hacker was onlineI challenged the hacker and heshe told me that they were in my account too Unlikely but it sounded fierceBy the time we got to my wife39s computer fb had disabled her account and she had received a message that her account was compromised and that they were aware of the issueThat sounded good at the time But that was a week agoTHIS WEEKUnwilling to use my connections to deal with this and thinking that the experience would make for a good article I asked my wife to see if she could deal with it She agreed to tryWithin a few minutes she told me that she had no idea how to deal with it There seemed to be no way to contact anyoneI IM39d AOL IM that is her the URL of the appropriate fb security page and told her to follow the instructions The page clearly says if you think your account has been hacked quotclick herequot Sadly it asked for the URL of her fb profile which she did not know And there was nothing we could do to help her since her account was goneAfter several emails into the black hole of fb customer service I have decided to use my contacts to find a quotreal personquot inside to speak with This is not as easy as it sounds even for me I have several fb contacts however none of them work in security This is going to be hardWhat39s my wife doing Nothing She doesn39t have a profile and she doesn39t know whom to contact or what to doSEVERAL DAYS LATERThis is actually now a social media nightmare Debbie Sommers Palmer RIP Her virtual world no longer exists Every comment she made every picture she uploaded every connection she had every one of the old friends that she reconnected with all goneAN UNANSWERED CALL FOR HELPSo being the dutiful husband that I am I decided to go wide with my call for help Now I have over 3400 fb friends Most of them are in the related fields of technology media and entertainment A large number of them are in pure play Internet Three Facebook updates yielded several messages of solidarity but no possible help Two people in my fb network actually work at fb no answer to the question One is a relative of the founder nope Not even an answer to a direct messageOK if the fb community is not able to rally how about the newest social media darling Actually I sent simultaneous tweets to Twitter fb and LinkedIn using pingfm nothing nada zilch zippo we shall all mourn the loss of my virtual wifeTHE SAGA CONTINUESFrom a business perspective this is the problem with an organization that has 200 million nonpaying customers and no actual meaningful revenue model How many customer service people would a reasonable person expect them to have More to the point the service is free so it39s worth what you pay for itBut that is not what consumers of Internet services have come to expect We expect Facebook to live up to our extremely unrealistic expectations of customer retention and customer service We shouldn39t but we doDuring this week several of my friends39 accounts have been hacked Security on Facebook is becoming a real issue That being said it39s a technology problem and computer people are pretty good at solving those The bigger problem for Zuckerberg and company is the fact that my wife won39t ever trust a cloudbased social network again She won39t bother to invest the time and energy to establish another virtual presence because she feels completely victimized The hacker victimized her then Facebook penalizedamp160 victimizedamp160andamp160abandoned her The damage is done she39s gone herein lies the challenge and the opportunityAuthor39s note Just minutes before publishing this article Facebook reinstated Debbie39s account She39s back but for how longShelly Palmer is the host of MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer a daily show featuring news you can use about technology media ampamp entertainment He is the author of Television Disrupted The Transition from Network to Networked TV 2008 New York House Press and the upcoming Get Digital Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy 2009 Lake House Press Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts ampamp Sciences NY the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Awards For information about Get Digital Classes visit httpwwwshellypalmercomseminars

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Facebook Fatality: Will Security Issues Burst the Social Media Bubble? - Shelly Palmer Report

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