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I'm Annelie, a Swedish business student who posts weekly articles about the latest developments in social media.

10 Reasons To Why Students Should Blog

Posted By Annelie Näs on February 1st, 2010

Yesterday, I got the question “why do you blog?” of course I had around a million answers to respond with. Then I realized that the reason the person asked was not to find out why I blogged but to see if there was any reason to why he should blog.
This got me thinking about what [...]

 

Posts Tagged ‘facebook groups’

Why You Should Track Notifications of Group Names – Current Issues With Facebook Groups

Posted By Annelie Näs on January 16th, 2010

I recently blogged about the Profile Watcher, and why the groups promoting it are not legit. After writing this post I found out that the creators of these groups have an alternative motive that I was not aware of.

Apparently they encourage Facebook users to join the group, and when they have reached a certain amount of members they change the name of the group. Name changes which might be far from what you would never choose to join voluntarily.

The Swedish Newspaper Aftonbladet recently wrote in an article that the group called  “See who is visiting your Profile with the Profile Watcher ,“ suddenly changed name to “People who have sex fantasies about our children.” Even worse is that many of the affected people might not have been aware of the problem, as they turned off the “Group name notification.”

To handle this, there are now discussion to implement a rule that will remove the possibility to change a name of a group after it has reached a certain amount of members.

But until then, here is 3 tips:

  • Check what groups you are a member of. To make sure that you know what groups your support, and that none of them have changed names.
  • Let Facebook notify you about name changes of groups. If you have turned off the notification for “Changes the name of a group to which I belong,” you should do go here and turn on that notification. (And just to be sure, do the same thing for events)
  • Think twice before you join a group. Even if you see the notification about the group change right away, perhaps you could avoid this issue by not joining certain types of groups.

Update 20/1/09:

I just found an update on Hans Kullin’s blog about what can happen: 200,000 Swedes joined fake Facebook group for Haiti

Posted in Social Media
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Why the “Profile Watcher” and “Dislike Button” Groups aren’t Legit

Posted By Annelie Näs on January 11th, 2010

Lately, I see more and more of my friends joining groups on Facebook, which promise them that they will get a “dislike button” or that they will be able to see who visited their Facebook profile. So the message I want to send with this blog post is:

Why groups for “A dislike button” or a “Profile watcher” are not legit.

The Profile Watcher

Now, if you want to know why the” Profile watcher” does not work, I’m going to do my best to explain it to you:

  1. It is groups not applications. First of all this is groups and not applications that we are talking about. To be able to create this type of service they would have to create an application which can control who visits your profile page. An application that you would have to get and approve.
  2. You control what information applications get from you. In the Facebook Privacy Policy you can read that “You can control how you share information with those third-party applications and websites through your application settings.” This means that even if there were an application that was working, you would have to allow that application to show people that you had visited their profile.

Basically this means that to get this application to work both you and the people that are visiting your profile page would need to get this application, and then approve that the application can get this kind of information from your activity on Facebook.

I have read a lot about “visitor counts on Facebook profiles” on various forums and on the applications discussion board, where the general comments are “bullshit” or “Facebook privacy does not allow visitor count.” Ironically, I have to say that the first one of these are more correct from what I have read, as I have not been able to find any kind of statement about this particular issue in the privacy policy. Even though it is technically correct that “Facebook privacy does not allow visitor count” I am still waiting to find out where this is written.

The Dislike Button

First of all: There is a “dislike button” add-on available to Firefox users. Thus, all Firefox users which have installed this add-on can see what others dislike, which means that for them this is not an issue. Read more about this on Lifehacker.com.

Basically the first problem with the numerous “Dislike button” groups is the same as with profile watcher. It is groups not applications. Although this time, there are not any privacy issue that is the reason, it is common sense. Basically, the dislike button won’t appear just because you invite your friends to join the group, the groups are just created to market the person who created the account. There is an example of how on: Kramer’s blog.

Also, I do not know why Facebook have decided on not having a dislike button, because clearly people are interested in one, if you look at the petition group. However, if they did want to create one, it is not that difficult for them. They did the “like” button, right?

Some people still claim that they have heard that it has worked for other people, but I do not know anyone who have said so. Now, I cannot promise that there wont be a “Profile Watcher” or a “Dislike Button” for everyone in the future. But for now, please, think twice before you join one of these groups.

Friendly Reminder: Google or Bing the things that you cannot understand, or are not sure about. That is how I found these results.

Posted in Social Media
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