MySpace Safety: 51 Tips was quoted in an interesting article titled Lifegame 2.0: The Ubiquitous always-on game of the future - MySpace? in the online magazine the escapist. The article quotes the section of the book's Introduction that is titled "The World's Biggest Role-Playing Game?"
If you're interested in the gaming aspect of MySpace and other social networking sites, you'll probably find the Lifegame 2.0 article to be quite thought provoking.
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A post titled "Employers finding 'digital dirt'" on the NetFamilyNews blog references several articles that document the growing use by employers of online content for making decisions about whether or not to offer a position to job candidates.
For example, in a survey of 100 executive recruiters, ExecuNet found that 35% of the recruiters had dropped a candidate "because of information uncovered online."
As we have repeatedly stated: when you post blog entries or comments on MySpace.com, post with care! In addition, it's important to monitor what your MySpace friends are posting in their comments on your MySpace page. Who you "associate" with on MySpace, and what materials you allow others to post on MySpace, may turn off a potential employer as well. You are not carrying a private conversation with friends on MySpace (unless your profile is private and always has been private and was never hacked by anyone who knows how to extract your postings even when you have a private profile).
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TechSpot.com reported today that software created by the adware company Zango.com was being "pushed to people via their MySpace profiles in popups and maybe even false advertising."
Two profiles created by a Zango developer were found on MySpace. One of the profiles "pushed a toolbar and programs designed to 'protect kids from predators.'" The other profile "popped up an extra window prompting the visitor to accept a license to play a video file."
With its highly customizable user profiles, MySpace is an incredibly inviting environment for spammers and scammers. We wrote about this in MySpace Safety: 51 Tips and the situation has only gotten worse since the book was published in May.
Any time a MySpace profile opens a new window, you should be suspicious. If you don't know what's happening, immediately close the new browser window and exit the MySpace profile in your original browser window. If you want even more security against what may have been an attack on your computer, close all browser windows and shut down your system. There's no guarantee that this will prevent a fast-acting invasion, but it could protect you from an invasion that was delayed due to slow communication between your computer and the scammer's site.
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The Wall Street Journal printed an article titled "Covering Your Tracks In an Online World Takes a Few Tricks" on the front page of its July 7, 2006 paper. The article is subtitled "Mr. Pratt Cleaned Up His Act To Impress an Employer; Killing a MySpace Profile."
Mr. Pratt, who is 22 years old, had a "rowdy online identity at MySpace.com ... where he had posted [a] page that kept turning up in search results." The page showed "pictures of Mr. Pratt's various drunken exploits" and had "messages from friends about his dating habits."
Having landed an interview for a job he desired, Mr. Pratt suddenly wished his MySpace identity didn't exist. Unfortunately, he had some difficulty closing his account. Meanwhile, the "rowdy" MySpace page was the top search result on Google for "Craig Pratt."
We talk about this type of future risk in conjunction with MySpace features in our book, MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents. What is posted on the Internet today almost immediately becomes part of the public domain. Google and other search engines index the new material, Google and others copy the pages onto their own computers (so they have a back-up copy in case the original disappears), and the entries are also often copied onto servers throughout the world.
Merely deleting the information from the original site where it was posted may not remove the information from the Internet at large. I've found that blog entries are particularly susceptible to being copied to foreign servers.
When you post information, pictures, videos on a public site like MySpace.com, you are publishing that information. The goal of publishing is to spread information, not hide it. Once the information you authored spreads beyond your reach, you no longer have control of that information, and hence no power to remove it from the public domain. Publish with care!
For more extensive discussion of this issue, as it relates to specific components of MySpace.com, see MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents, available at Barnes&Noble and at Amazon.com.
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Many MySpace users have desired to increase the number of "Top" friends -- the friends whose pictures are posted on the user's profile page -- from the standard 8 to 12, 16, or more. Many creative people have posted methods for doing this on sites that provide code for customizing MySpace user profiles.
MySpace has now added a selector to its "Edit Your Top Friends" page that lets you choose the size of your top friends list. The choices for number of friends in your "Top" list are:
It's a nice change on the MySpace.com development team's part!
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There are really two aspects of posting too much information online at sites like MySpace.com. The first is the near-term risk that has gotten most of the news thus far, namely young teens posting information and photos that attract the attention of predators. This can be dealt with effectively if parents are involved with their teens online. Much of our book tells how to do this.
A perhaps more ominous problem with all the information teens and young adults post online is the growing archive and retrieval capability of the Internet. The Internet is fast becoming a place where all statements immediately cease to be under the control of the person who posts the statement. Yet, search and retrieval capabilities permit those statements to be found and identified with the individual who made the post.
Colleges are already searching MySpace to find extra information on their applicants. Employers will be doing this as well. And perhaps medical personnel as well, searching for clues that might relate to a person's medical condition later in life? Certainly potential boyfriends and girlfriends will use the capabilities.
When you post on MySpace and similar sites, you are publishing, you are creating a permanent record that will be available for others to see, pretty much forever into the future.
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