You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

I attended a public guest lecture by Prof. Manuel Castells at the LSE last month where he introduced us with his new research and book titled Communication Power. He pointed out during his speech that the Green agenda has been here for over 30 long years! Indeed we all know that cutting trees or burning coal is detrimental to the environment but the reason why we see enhanced awareness in recent times is attributed to the power of Internet.

According to Professor Castells, it’s the Internet enabled Communication and Networked Power that has helped spread the message far and loud which has created waves of awareness and has enabled society at large to consider the issue which has been ignored for the past three decades. Companies now publish their sustainability reports on the web which are picked up by the common man and evaluated of its merit.  The pressure of open evaluation is playing an important role (though it is NOT the only influencing factor) in helping us go green.  It still remains a question if the reports display accurate carbon metrics, but it can safely be predicted that - though some of the figures on sustainability reports might have be extrapolated or incorrectly calculated, there are definitely some efforts being put by organisations to go green and the networked power of the Internet has an overall positive impact on the environment.

“Oh! I just love Twitter.”
“Twitter is cool.”
“I can write on the move and the message goes out! Isnt that great!”
“I confess, I am indeed obsessed.”

These are some of the responses I have received from Twitter users who tweet more than 20 times a day. The community of users who adore Twitter and find it useful is no doubt huge. Along with it is growing the number of Twitter applications that could be used. Fancy some? The web is full of applications which could generate move value for a Twitter account with free to use functions like Personalised Auto responders to Twitter follow requests and messages, auto-follow whoever follows you, Twitter Rank Check, Twitter Friend Suggest or even you could try the Twitter CRM. There are thousands of applications, just google them up!

Twitter users are now increasingly using these innovative free to use tools, but do they ever check who owns these Twitter applications? I found that some of these Twitter applications were developed as school or college projects and were launched by students for people to use it for free. Amazing! isnt it? No, its NOT. Most Twitter applications ask you to supply your credentials so that the applications can work with Twitter and you dont know who is storing your passwords!!

And are these applications bug free? You never know, afterall they are student projects. I have just heard a sad story from a friend who lost all his followers because he was using a free tool to send personalised messages back. The tool malfunctioned and all his Twitter contacts were lost!

On facebook alone more than 5 billion minutes are spent each day (ref: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) which is equivalent to keeping 3.47 million computers switched ON all the time! This excludes hundreds of servers running Facebook applications and the website itself. While organisations are trying to reduce their carbon footprint by switching off machines when employees leave office after their work hours and are trying to save small chunks of electricity, there is a major problem lying beyond organisational control. Who can control more than 200 million facebook users spread across the globe who spend hours on facebook each day? And facebook is just an example! The list of social networks is endless but not longer than our list of climate change issues.

Why did the gaming company waited so long before slamming the user with such a big bill, and allowing him to continue playing the game for over six months? No doubt the company waited for the fruit to ripen before cutting it. Web Coherence warns its readers to be even more cautious as the predators are now actively using legal powers to bail out themselves out of the recession!

Twitter – the microblogging platform – boasts millions of subscribers, and its user base is experiencing exponential growth. The time is right for it to go the way of AdWords. With millions already invested, but a negligible Return on Investment, it is only to be expected that Twitter would soon start employing some payback strategies. Now, it seems, is the time for Twitter to follow in the footsteps of most other social networking sites.

I logged into my Twitter account early this morning, and I immediately noticed some strange looking boxes appearing just underneath my profile stats: see the picture.

Currently these boxes are displaying Twitter applications – they started appearing soon after Twitter returned after two hours of maintenance downtime. How soon before we see advertisements taking their place? Advertisements mean that Twitter is profiling its user-base to ‘sell the right products to the right people’. Read more about profiling by following Professor Ian Angell’s  post here.

The digital advertisement market is already facing heat because of the credit crunch, and it would interesting to see what strategies Twitter employs to stoke the fires in its engine-room.

Some readers might be tempted to think that Twitter, with only status updates, has little information with which to profile users. Think again! Twitter has real time information about each user’s current activities! They can target Ads with extreme accuracy, and will be experimenting with some clever profiling strategies. Don’t be surprised if, when you tweet “got my loan approved, Yipee!”, you find that predators are trying to sell you cars, holidays, or restaurants in which to celebrate now that you have “loadsamoney”!

Together with one of my friends who also aspired to be a Management Graduate, I set out to attend the fair. It was quite impressive, as we got a chance to hear directly from a few of the best entrepreneurs in the country who graduated from these schools a few years back. We were briefed about the application process, and were given an opportunity to ask questions. Due to limited time slots not all the questions could be answered, and so we were asked to be patient, when in the second half of the event we could speak one-to-one with the admission officers at stalls hosted by each B-school in a large hall.

In the second half, I and my friend started off by visiting select B-schools in the hall, going to their stalls and speaking to their representatives and getting our doubts clarified in respect of the application process and procedures of the schools. These representatives encouraged us to leave our  visiting cards in a drop box so they could get back to us with answers to some questions we were looking for. I did just that, and left feeling that attendance of the event was a most pleasant experience. I can highly recommend these fairs to anyone who is looking for a Management degree. They certainly helped me clarify my thoughts and ideas, and introduced me to quite a few new facts.

The days passed and I started receiving communications from a few schools to the email address printed on my visiting cards. In a few days, I realised there was too much! Quite a few schools had started spamming my mailbox with events on their campus, newsletters, guest lectures and what not! I tried unsubscribing from a few mailing lists, but for some that did not work. But worse. I was now getting e-mails from B-schools that I hadn’t visited, some of  which hadn’t even attended the fair. This  was two years back, and I am still receiving emails from some of these schools.

As best practice,  I would recommend that you create a brand new e-mail address, and print it on visiting cards produced solely for such fairs and exhibitions. Then you won’t be inviting a whole lot of spam into your regular mailbox!

This teaches a salutary lesson. Often, as you surf the internet, you come across websites that ask you to sign up just to read the content. During the sign up process these websites cunningly add you to their newsletter subscriptions and administrator alerts. They often even confuse you with ambiguous negations in the same statement. For example,

You confirm that you DO NOT wish to opt out of our partner marketing programs.

Clicking on that confirmation will ensure that junk mails will soon be entering your email box.

As a best practice, we suggest that everyone should have at least two spare background email addresses. Corporate email addresses or the primary email addresses should be used only for important communications, and an alternate email address should be used for all signups on websites. Care should be taken during signups to recheck options for newsletter and marketing campaigns. Spending 20 seconds more here to read these statements, will save you many minutes every day. Also, it lessens the chances of you missing that important mail hiding in a bunch of junk emails. Additionally, as previously mentioned in Email Best Practice #2, you may want to flag some emails as spam or create filters to reduce the bulk entering your inbox.

Why so? It’s just another piece of marketing mail, of which we all of get masses everyday? Then why am I so annoyed?

I have good reason! This email has some very peculiar characteristics. I received this mail at an email address that is not directly available. I don’t use this email address anywhere – other than on my Twitter profile, and in an image format. Personal information, along with my photograph and email address is displayed as a background image there. I had thought it would be a good way to keep my email address safe from automatic readers, while at the same time personalizing my Twitter page. It’s not only me doing this. Thousands of people have their contact details visible as background images on their Twitter pages. Internet gurus recommend this as best practice – namely personalize your Twitter page to create a stronger social presence. That’s what I did, and I’m rewarded with spam email messages!

I always thought that because I don’t have a public profile on Twitter, I was safe from nuisance calls! A state of grace somewhat rare on Twitter. But I was wrong! Marketing companies are somehow even pulling out image-based email addresses. How are they doing this? Optical Character Recognition? Or possibly by employing low-cost human labour to collect live email addresses from the images? Here’s another phenomenon that needs studying by web ecologists.

It’s time to raise the alarm. Marketing companies are using all sorts of tricks to get every piece of information they can get about you, and as soon as they strike lucky you get spammed. Because the email is personally addressed, spam filters let it through straight into my email box!

Add one more type of spam mail to the list – Twitter Spam!

“But how?” – A discussion sparked between me and another Web Ecologist  – Railsbob. We were aiming to see if we could devise a way such that more people get to know about WebCoherence using Twitter’s platform and to setup an experiment around it. After going through a lot of Twitter updates Railsbob observed that users were using hashtags to communicate in a larger community. RailsBob suggested: ” If we use a relevant ‘#keyword’ as a  hashtag, we could possibly attract more users to our site via Twitter.”

“Interesting,” I exclaimed, “but where do we find the relevant hashtags?” “It is not like the #communia conference, which some of our colleagues attended. They had a ready-made shared keyword. We don’t.” Back to the drawing board!

RailsBob then suggested using the #hashtags database on www.hashtags.org to search for relevant Twitter #hashtags. Eureka! We now had a list of the most popular hashtags. We would use only those we found to be appropriate from among the most popular ones (namely listed at the top), and this would save hunting through the whole of what is a huge database. After all there was nothing to lose – the worst that could happen is that we remained unnoticed. As Web Ecologists, we were now ready to test the idea. We took top 5 hashtags from the database list and sent out tweets publicizing WebCoherence. We waited for 3 days to collect sufficient Google Analytics Reports and here is what we found.

The Results:
1. In less than 24 hours 12 more followers started following WebCoherence on Twitter! And in 3 days now the count has risen to 53 followers. A staggering growth of 430% in three days from an initial count of 10 followers.
2. Google analytics report shows 19 hits came to the website with the referring URL Twitter.com. The number of hits were quite less as compared to the number of followers who started following WebCoherence.org.
3. Interestingly, no comments were received from new followers.

This brings us more mysteries that need to be solved before we come to any further conclusions. We are now left with various questions:

Do users follow on Twitter just to increase their follow count?
How do users interact when they receive links to external websites on Twitter?
Why do users want to increase their follow count if they are not interested in reading Twitter messages?

We intend to reveal answers to these questions in our upcoming posts as we analyse results and make more observations, keep watching!

P.S.: If you have seen some odd behavior and if you wish to contribute by experimenting with WebCoherence, do get in touch with us by leaving comments to this post or by emailing us. Thanks in advance!