"So what's all this Social Networking stuff about, then", he asked

My older brother has managed to avoid getting involved with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc so far but now feels that he ought to make a bit of an effort and asked me for a quick summary. So these notes are written for someone who has heard the names but not really seen them in action, someone mostly looking for news on topics that interest him or to find old friends. I do hope he does use Twitter, though, as he has the driest wit ever and will have great reviews of pubs and restaurants too.

Experienced technologists won't want to read this simple stuff. It's for him and I just thought I'd share the advice for anyone else starting out.

Twitter

Twitter is pretty cool and can be a very good way to get the latest news, very locally or internationally, help with a problem or can be an interesting 'news' summary that is constantly updating.

You 'follow' people on Twitter. Who you follow will make it good, bad or useless. Simple as that. You can also say things to the world at large as long as it's less than 140 characters. Sharing web site links is very common. and you can 'retweet' to your followers with one click something that you've received so you don't always have to come up with something original.

Go to twitter.com and set up an account. Use a nice short and simple twitter name. They all start with @. @Rupert has probably been taken but @RFHsays may not be, for instance. You can be anything - it doesn't matter, but may influence who later decides to follow you. @lunchexpert might be popular but @wuffler would attract an odd combination of old farmers and doggie fans.

You need to follow people to get started. You can always unfollow them if they get tedious. You can use the Search box to look for anyone who may have tweeted on something you're interested in and then try following them. It's a bit hit and miss. Most of my best ones have come from someone who is following someone else and 'retweets' what they've said - I then follow that someone else and slowly it starts to grow. Dead slow at the start.

People will start to follow you eventually too. Depends what you say and whether it appeals to them or they find it useful. My tweets are mostly about technology and TV and music programmes so I get followed by people who like that sort of thing.

Here are a few of the people I follow that you could start off with at least and get some interest / entertainment from the start (which most new users don't!)

News people: @theJeremyVine @MartinSLewis @PrivateEyeNews @FrontPagesToday @rabbiton @qikipedia
Radio2 people: @Radioleary @StuartMaconie @R2KenBruce @SimonMayo @TonyBlackburn @Wossy
and just for fun @swillingtonfarm
and me of course @kirrisdad

You can find these people's home pages by going to http://twitter.com/username (where username is the bit after @) and then click the Follow button on their Twitter home page. (That link actually goes to the QI Elves' page as an example).

Facebook

Annoying and very 'social' network but regrettably the only way I can actually keep in touch with some people these days. Seems to be the default news and message system for many nowadays. So I guess you need to be visible there. Making sure you have at least some identifying things in your profile will help others find you.

People become your Facebook 'friends' and all are likely to see whatever you type in your status (not limited to 140 characters or anything) so it can be awkward if you have business 'friends' and personal 'friends' as they all see the same stuff from you. There are ways to adjust who sees what but it's complicated. I use it almost entirely for 'social' stuff only and, although other posts from Twitter and Google+ do get shared there, I have almost no 'business' friends there. For some it's the other way round and that's fine, I suppose. The two don't mix though.

The only real use is to keep in touch with the people who are only there. You can get Facebook to e-mail you if you a message or a comment on something you've posted. So I only go there if prompted to which works well for me and could for you too. No maintenance required really but you do at least keep in touch and get an idea of what old friends may be up to.

My Facebook profile is at http://facebook.com/andrewx

Google+

This is my favourite. You set up a profile and get a nice page on Google. It's a bit like Facebook but you put contacts into Circles. then when you post or share something it is easy to do so for just one group and not others. It is the best place to store your photos too, using something called Picasa which is absolutely brilliant and if you haven't got it on your computer it's highly recommended. Works a dream, finding all your photos, sorts them out and makes sharing on-line easy.

Like Twitter, it'll seem dead at the start as you'll get no-one's news or comments. There's a Search bar, though, and, being Google that's pretty smart. I just tried Combine harvester and got thousands of people who have written or seem associated with them somehow. So you'd quickly get people to 'follow' and add in to Circles.

You need a Google account but that's a good idea anyway. Just sign up on any Google search page, top right. You don't have to use GMail but will get a GMail address too, based on your chosen user name - so take your time choosing a good one that makes e-mail easy if you do ever use it (e.g. with a new Chromebook or smartphone).

Google+ would be the social network of choice for all your contacts because you can put them in different Circles and avoid the mass mailing of that dodgy video. It is new, though, so may be a while before your colleagues and friends use it. Most seem stuck in Facebook.

You can find my G+ pages at this link as an example.

Hope that's helpful and see you somewhere before long :)

I Need Islands In My Stream

My goodness, things are changing so quickly! I am doing my best to keep up but doing so is my excuse for not having written anything here for ages. I will try and make up for that with some posts about all sorts of exciting new applications and web tools in a while. For now, though, I thought it might be a good idea simply to share this feeling of being overwhelmed - excitedly overwhelmed, I should add, but also slightly exhaustingly so too!

I blame Google Plus. A little while ago it was a pretty but pretty dead area where one or two posts would appear in my stream, like a few headlines in a newspaper. Twitter was my main source of morning news and E-mail is something that I'd look at as apart from a very quick scan by phone to make sure I wasn't missing something important.

My Rockmelt browser would advise me if there were any Facebook messages so, unless my daughter was panicking about something, I didn't need to go there which had somewhat brought my incoming stuff back into some sort of order. Rockmelt also lets me mark tweets to read later if a first glance wasn't enough or a link needed to be clicked so that was vaguely under control.

Not so, Google Plus. I now have a genuine stream of fascinating, interesting and other complimentary adjectives I could apply to the posts that are arriving from all over the place. Really talented people in mainly Tech or Educational fields, mostly, but, for my sins and probably much to the annoyance or frustration of some people who follow me, also things to do with X Factor now that I am writing the reviews and recaps for both the USA and UK programmes and getting featured in various web magazines. I cannot keep up with it all. I want to. I try but I am staying up until the early hours of the morning most nights now just browsing through the steam and adding comments as and when I can.

Retirement would be brilliant because I could do this in the normal, sensible part of a day. However, there's too much interesting work to do to even envisage such a concept just yet. there's also the small matter of needing income. But there Google Plus offers hope too as I may well find that one or two of the new people who are reading the stuff I write might actually like me to write or do a bit more and pay me for it. The main problem is that everyone is just too damn interesting. Google Plus is not like Twitter or Facebook. Twitter shows you very short bursts of views, ideas or whatever from people that you follow. Facebook is a bundle of comments and status changes, mostly, amongst my 'friends', of a social nature and which can be smiled at, grunted at and I can move on without my brain being unduly challenged. Google Plus provides me with much longer items, usually well-written too, from experts in their fields about subjects that interest me and offering advice which I'd like to take or at least try out or asking for help which I'd like to provide.

And these posts are coming from far and wide, people I've never met, seen or passed in a conference corridor. They're in Circles that I've added to my Circles because they seemed just as deserving of being there as those I do know and I also get the comments and ideas and links that people in their Circles have added. At this rate I shall have vast numbers of posts flying down my screen and I don't have a clue how to handle them all and, more importantly, remember the ones that either I remembered wanting to remember or, even more importantly, remember that I had said I would respond or do something for some of those that I have now drifted past and into the first or second stream hidden under a More button.

LinkedIn people don't stand a chance of hearing from me more than once a month at this rate and I have completely abandoned Plaxo and Plurk. They had their uses but they used too much time that I no longer have spare.

I am also beginning to wonder if I should get a vertical instead of horizontal screen as, at it stands now, a few hours' worth of e-mail occupies the whole of a screen and, unless I am really fast archiving, labelling or deleting in GMail, someone's message has disappeared from view only to emerge several days later when I do eventually either remove its successors on the page or press the Next 25 button. In fact, I am beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't start displaying them in reverse date order. I wonder if I can?

I have now managed to get Google Plus to show me Twitter and Facebook streams without leaving its environs which is a good start. I can also post to whichever I choose or to the whole damn lot from there which is marvellous. That uses an add-in called SGPlus. Google must surely eventually come up with their own but, until they do, SGPlus is worth a a look for Chrome users.

On the occasions when I do have to dive into Facebook it seems that I have a new learning experience each time with ever-changing (and, I must say, quite impressive) displays of whatever is there. With its new Active Display my blog tool of choice, Blogger, is also now threatening to take over my daily news with a display that looks remarkably like a ruddy newspaper in some options too. But I already have paper.li aggregating all that it thinks I might want to read anyway.

I now learn that Google Goggles can solve my good old-fashioned Daily telegraph suduko, crossword and it won't be long before it does the balancing birds too. So maybe that will give me more time to read the rest. and perhaps catch up with my article writing on what is going on. Maybe. We'll see. Watch this space.

Firesheep. Possibly the best web security learning tool!

So many other people have written about this new simple application that I won't go into detail. TechCrunch do that much better than me anyway. If you've managed to miss the news then there's a simple little tool available that will not only show you who in your vicinity is using an open wireless network but enable you to log in to their facebook, twitter, amazon accounts using their log-in (and there's a massively long list of more).

If you fancy trying it out the you need Firefox 3.6+ as Firesheep is an extension to that browser. The extension doesn't appear obvious in a search for Firefox extensions which is probably wise and I'm not going to publish it here. It isn't that difficult to find, though. Windows users will also need to install Winpcap first. Once you've installed the Firefox extension a sidebar is available which displays all the icons and screen names of people using unsecured sites around you. Click on one and you're free to run around their pages! Hacking my youngest could manage while reading Noddy Goes Shopping.

Being unusually responsible, here's a link to suggestions for another Firefox extension Force-TLS which will help you protect several (but not all!) of your accounts. The TechCrunch article author, Alexia Tsotsis accepts that this is of no help to the vast majority who'll be using Internet Explorer (or Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc. etc.) but promises to publish more on that soon. Watch that space.

graphic by Dave Hoffman

Perhaps this will be the wake-up call we all need to be more careful about our on-line activity. I have no doubt that there will be patches and adjustments galore in the background, even attempts not to frighten us all with this story in mainstream news items, and a lot of people are very concerned to fix things today and it will all go quiet soon enough. In the meantime, though, just give it a try and I promise you it will be the most effective learning experience on the topic of internet security short of being fleeced for a few grand by a dodgy Luton fuel station till operator.

Reserve your name at about.me

A bunch of clever people bought the domain about.me which is probably about the only .me worth bothering about. They've now come up with a nice idea that they propose will combine multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. You register your name and get the page about.me/yourname which will feature all that's happening across your sites and profile pages.
As they say: "... and one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. Our focus is simple, enable you to:

• create a personal, dynamic profile page (think splash page) that points users to your content around the web (versus depending on Google search); and
• understand how many people see your profile, where they're coming from, and what they do on your page."

Their investors include True Ventures, Radar Partners, Freestyle Capital, Scott Kurnit, AOL Ventures, David Mahoney, Founder Collective & Ron Conway.

It may or may not develop but it won't cost anything to register your name. Remember how you wished you'd got on Facebook, Twitter etc. earlier before someone else had grabbed the name you wanted and left you thinking up something that hadn't already gone? OK. Don't say I didn't warn you! I've got mine.

Who's following @kirrisdad?

This nice little application will make a mosaic of your Twitter followers' avatars. here's mine at the time of writing:

Get your twitter mosaic here.