Category: Facebook

I did NOT like that!

So, I was sent a link to a fun game, Chronotron.
I was playing away, getting past versions of myself to work out puzzles, when a little pop-up appeared on the bottom right of my screen, saying that Beacon was telling my friends I was playing Chronotron on Kongregate, before sliding back into obscurity.
So I went over to Facebook, and sure enough, that information had appeared in my profile!

This is my first encounter with Beacon, and needless to say, I don’t think my friends want to know when I’m playing a game on a totally separate website, so I disabled it immediately.
But I didn’t know that Beacon was activated, or affected UK users? Maybe I need to find out more about it, as who knows what else it’ll be informing my friends I’m doing on other websites!

Would you question a Facebook email

If it appeared to come from Facebook, and just asked you to confirm your name, date of birth and email address?
Or would you give an old school friend your eBay password?

Apparently, those details were enough for scammers to steal money from individuals who’d been perhaps a little too forthcoming with personal information on social networking sites.

It does seem that they were perhaps using some of their personal information that they also publicly shared as passwords, but still, how much do you trust Facebook and similar sites?
Would you be as wary about clicking links in an email that appeared to come from them or giving personal info as you would if it came from a stranger?
Do we now trust these sites more than banks, to the extent that an email from them must be authentic and reliable?

Clicking ‘ignore’


I find myself spending less and less time on Facebook recently, and most of that time is spent looking at notifications, and clicking on ‘ignore’, because I don’t want to join the Oregon Trail, or allow my friends to buy and sell me.. . A large part of the problem is applications that insist you invite friends (generally at least 20) before you can see your results / scores / what other people have said about you. If I add one of those applications, and it demands I invite my friends to play too, I just exit, and uninstall it. I like my friends too much to bombard them with invites every time I decide to while away some time playing a quiz!

It seems even Facebook themselves have finally realised that the amount of invites / notifications to play whatever game your friends are playing at the time is statring to get ridiculous. I noticed today that this information has appeared in my News Feed:

Too many requests?

We’ve added a “clear all” option for when you have more than 25 requests waiting on your Requests page.

Yay – Now in one fell swoop I can get rid of the zombie requests, pirate requests, the pokes, the super pokes…

You know, I think I may be becoming the least social social networker possible! Or maybe just the one that feels it’s not really essential to know minute-by-minute what games my friends play?