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Posts Tagged ‘Contacts’

PhotoNest: your Twitter stream, in pictures

Filed under: iPhone

I just tried out PhotoNest, a cool new way to view just the images posted to your Twitter stream. It picks up just the photos, and presents them in a slide format, captioned with the tweet they were posted with. You can quickly flick through and see what your friends are up to (based on the photos they post).

Given that Twitter doesn’t have a genuine photo-posting mechanism, this seems like a grand idea to me. I’ve done something similar to collect and expand just the links posted to my stream, but this app does a great job of pulling photos posted with multiple services and presenting them in an easy-to-navigate format.

The only trouble I ran into with PhotoNest was a login issue: when I mistyped my password on the first try, it gave me an error and took me back to the login screen. After that, though, a correct password just kept landing me back at that screen without any message. However, quitting the app and starting it again logged me in automatically without a hitch, so I assume it’s a small bug that will be squashed in the next update.

The app will also let you post photos (with a tweet) to your Twitter account, and you can filter your view based on favorite contacts. PhotoNest is available on the App Store for $1.99US. If your Twitter friends post a lot of photos (and people with iPhones tend to), it’s a fun way to keep up and worth checking out.

TUAWPhotoNest: your Twitter stream, in pictures originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail Security Enhancements Expected Tuesday

Google will roll out a number of security enhancements to Gmail this week, and perhaps as early as Tuesday, says a source with knowledge of the new features. The changes are specifically designed to cut down on phishing and hacking attacks on Gmail accounts.

There are two specific changes that we’ve heard Google is implementing. The first is a secondary line of defense when a user has lost his or her password. If a Gmail account is accessed from a new computer, the user will have the option of receiving a text message with a new one time use pass key. They then enter that pass key into Gmail to authenticate themselves and lock out any bad users with access to the account.

Google is also possibly implementing a different version of OAuth for its contacts exporter (something often used by other services to import Gmail contacts). It’s likely to be OAuth Wrap, an easier to implement version of OAuth. If developers can be convinced to use it instead of harvesting and storing user credentials, there’s less of a security hole.

These changes are likely in response to the Chinese security incident from earlier this year. A secondary line of security for users would have avoided the Twitter documents leak from last year, which originally started with a guessed Gmail password and spiraled out of control from there.

This isn’t confirmed and Google hasn’t responded yet to our email, but we’ll update with any further information.

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BuzzAware. Yup, Now There’s An App Directory For Google Buzz

Google Buzz might have been pushed out too soon, but there are already at least a dozen apps for Google Buzz, most of them unoffical. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to start BuzzAware, a Google Buzz app directory. BuzzAware is started by the same folks behind Twitdom, a Twitter app directory with more than 1,500 apps.

Some of the apps in BuzzAware include:

• Browser add-ons for Firefox (Buzz It!) and Chrome (Chrome Buzz)
• Google Buzz desktop app built on Adobe Air
• Buzz buttons (Buzzr) and counters (BuzzStats) for your Website or blog
• A bunch of WordPress plugins
• A Buzz search engine (Buzzy)
• Ways to send your Buzz stream to Twitter (BuzzCanTweet) and import your Twitter contacts to Buzz (Tw2Buzz)

If Buzz grows, so will this list of apps.

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With New Features, Seesmic Web Blurs the Line between Web and Desktop Twitter Clients

Seesmic will release a major update of its web-based Twitter client Seesmic Web today that will introduce a number of new features like drag and drop list management, TweetMeme integration, threaded conversations and a new way to view and manage your retweets. Seesmic Web now also includes a very handy new contact manager for Twitter.

With this new version, Seesmic Web continues to blur the line between desktop and web-based Twitter clients.

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Drag and Drop List Creation

The nicest new feature in Seesmic Web is the ability to drag and drop contacts to any list. Compared to TweetDeck and other desktop tools, this makes managing and creating lists a lot easier and makes for a more efficient workflow.

Contact Manager

Another interesting new feature is the contact manager, which allows you to quickly get information about your followers. The contact manager displays the basic information from the user’s profile: number of followers and tweets, favorite tweets and information about the lists this user follows. In addition, Seesmic also displays the names of this user’s top 3 most publicly contacted friends on Twitter.

Better Integration with Third-Party Tools

One area the Seesmic team has focused on for this release is the integration of third-party tools. A small icon appears next to every shortened link now and clicking on this link will bring up some basic information about the link, including the name of the site the link will take you to and the number of retweets (powered by Tweetmeme).

Seesmic Web now also allows users to share pictures from the web interface and also offers picture previews right inside the app for pictures that were shared on most of the popular Twitter photo services.

Geolocation

As long as you use a browser that supports Google Gears, Seesmic Web now also makes it easier to share your location. Whenever you write a new tweet, you can choose to attach your location to this message. Just make sure you have the location feature turned on in your Twitter settings. As we reported last month, only a very small number of Twitter users currently makes use of this feature, which isn’t a surprise, given that only a handful of Twitter apps currently support this functionality. It’s good to see that Seesmic is making this feature a priority in its apps.

Verdict

Overall, the experience of using Seesmic Web comes very close to using a desktop client. There are a few features that are still missing in the web version (resizable columns, for example), but otherwise, Seesmic Web is a very good replacement for a desktop Twitter client.

Using a web-based client brings a number of advantages with it, including the absence of any Twitter rate limits. If you like the Seesmic interface give it a try in a site-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Mozilla’s Prism.

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Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why?

Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions. Facebook says this is largely a talent acquisition, according to GigaOm. Octazen has a slightly different story on their home page, saying Facebook acquired “most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction.”

Either way, it’s leaving some people scratching their heads. Said one senior engineer at a competing company that we spoke to this evening, “Facebook just bought the web’s most talented and creative scrapers that have gotten around everyones rate limits and detection systems.” Said another person we spoke with this evening who is knowledgeable of Octazen’s product, “Facebook is so sanctimonious about protecting their own user data through Facebook Connect, but Octazen has been scraping user data for years off terms of service and then reselling it.” Both sources asked to remain anonymous.

Facebook, for their part, have not yet responded to our request for comment.

What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data.

One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multple souces. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most.

But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening.

In 2007, for example, People were buying and running Octazen scripts to scrape contacts in a very sketchy way: “So we use this toolkit from Octazen to scrape contact lists off of various sites. Our ever eager users (ab)used this feature so much that hotmail blocked us.” The poster found a way to access Hotmail’s API instead of just scraping to get the data, and Octazen responded, saying “Very nice indeed”

Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be).

The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested.

This is obviously just one side of the possible story, albeit based on hard evidence of Octazen’s shady prior practices and via multiple sources. But until Facebook explains this acquisition in more detail, we don’t have much more to go on.

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Facebook Now Bulk Exports Phone Numbers

Facebook released an upgrade of its excellent iPhone app today and there were two very big changes. Push notifications will now notify you whenever people send you messages, tag you in a photo or comment on your messages – whether you’re looking at your phone at the time or not. That is going to change the Facebook user experience dramatically, increasing sychronous conversation and engagement on the site.

More importantly, Facebook added the ability to sync your phone’s local contacts with your Facebook contacts list. Remember when Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of the site for exporting his contacts’ emails in bulk? The company said it was important that users maintain control over their contact info. Apparently it doesn’t feel that way about phone numbers any more.

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The syncing feature is very useful and sends to your iPhone peoples’ profile photos, phone numbers when available and a link to load a contact’s profile in the Facebook app. It does not export email addresses though, oddly enough. Emails have been obscured as an image to prevent machine export from Facebook, but phone numbers haven’t. Now that Facebook itself exports the numbers, anyone could take them off of a phone and do anything with them.

This Summer when the slick new Facebook iPhone app was launched, developer Joe Hewitt told us that Facebook to iPhone contact syncing was coming – but said it was “a Terms of Service thing more than a technical thing.” Hewitt has since stopped working on the app due to frustration with Apple. But what happened to the Terms of Service objections?

The funniest part? When you’re doing the bulk export to sync, the Facebook app requires that you agree to the following text: “if you enable this feature, contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook and your friends’ names, phots, and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone adress book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.” (Emphasis added.)

Ha! Is that all it takes to make export of Facebook users’ info ok? Well let’s apply this to some other forms of data while we’re at it, shall we?

A number of theories could explain what’s going on:
1. Facebook has changed its mind about user data privacy and control. The company is certainly pushing users towards being more open than ever before.
2. Facebook was never really serious about privacy, the ban against exporting friends’ information was just a matter of corporate control and privacy was a ruse to justify it.
3. Something else is happening that we don’t know about yet. We’ve contacted Facebook for a response, we’ll update this post if we get one.

That said – this is a really convenient feature. It’s very handy to take a quick gander at someone’s Facebook Wall before calling them on the phone. The ability to do that is going to make Facebook much more important in my every day life. In other words, you should add me as a friend on Facebook so I can put you in my iPhone. (You should also become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, while you’re at it.)

Like it or not, honest or not, this is going to make Facebook much more useful for those of us who operate in the public sphere. Even most of us though, and certainly the bulk of the hundreds of millions of people who signed up for Facebook-the-private-social-network, do have some use for a degree of privacy. Each time another bit of that is taken away, it makes you wonder how long the rest of it will last for.

Next: What’s coming next to the Facebook iPhone app? This Summer developer Joe Hewitt named 3 things that were coming soon and this update includes 2 of them. What’s still on the list? Read on to find out.

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Feature: How to obtain and install an SSL/TSL certificate, for free

Anyone operating a server on any scale should want a digital certificate to encrypt data between clients and services, whether for personal, office, or public use. That’s a broad statement, but it holds true no matter how you slice it.

With so many people accessing networks over WiFi or other untrusted networks for an increasing number of different kinds of services—calendars, contacts, Webmail, email, and so on—encryption is a must, whether via a VPN or by securing services one by one. While I recommend VPNs, they aren’t always the practical, affordable, or correct solution. For remote email access, SSL/TLS is simpler and more straightforward, and you don’t have to compromise on protection in the process.

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Palm Pre WebOS 1.3.1 update available now, a day early

webOS 1.3.1 was always destined to come alongside the launch of the Pixi, but it’s surprised us by showing its face a day early. No app catalog bombshells here, but there are a slew of more minor fixes and updates that should make users experience a great deal smoother. Is this the update that finally unlocks access to the GPU and provides the speed boost Pre owners are waiting for / advances the iTunes chess match another step? We’ll let you know once our unit reboots, for now here are a few highlights from Palm’s list of changes:

• Yahoo! now appears as a Calendar/Contacts/instant messaging synchronization account.
• You can forward a text or multimedia message by tapping the message > Forward.
• A new option is available for restarting the phone: press and hold power > Power > Restart. The prior restart method (Device Info > Reset Options > Restart) is still available.
• Widescreen videos (including YouTube) now display in widescreen mode on the phone by default, instead of being cropped.
• If you tap to play a YouTube video embedded on a web page, the YouTube application launches and the video plays in the app.

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pre WebOS 1.3.1 update available now, a day early originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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