MySpaceSafetyTips.com

This past week (November 7-9) I had a chance to hear Tom’s boss, the “Big Boss” of MySpace (Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media), speak at the Web 2.0 Summit. I posted a blog about it on my MySpace.com/OreillyMedia account, if you’re interested. Ross hopes that long-term members of MySpace have noticed big improvements in how the site works in the past year.

So I’m wondering what real MySpace users think about this: in your opinion, does the MySpace site work better than it did a year ago, or when you first joined MySpace?

Please let me know by responding to this from your MySpace account using email to me (MySpace profile MySpace.com/oreillymedia) or by adding a comment to my blog post.

I’m sure Ross Levinsohn will be interested in hearing what people think. I’ll tally the responses, and compose a message to Mr. Levinsohn that summarizes the results.

I encourage people to forward this message to all your MySpace friends. The more data we gather, the greater the likelihood that our message will be “heard” by Mr. Levinsohn and passed on to Tom.

If your MySpace password is phished and subsequently changed, you won’t be able to log into your MySpace account any more. This has happened to lots of people. Many of these people give up and create a new MySpace page, then try to find all of their old MySpace friends.

Thanks to the MySpace software developers, this is no longer necessary. MySpace has created a new password retrieval page, at URL:

http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.retrievepassword.

If your password has been stolen from you and changed, go to this page and enter the email address you use for logging into MySpace. Your current password will be sent to your email account.

Immediately after receiving the password message from MySpace, you should:

• log into your MySpace account using the current password
• go to your Account Settings
• select “Change Password”
• enter a new password that is very different from the password that was stolen

I received messages today at two of my MySpace accounts from a MySpace user named “MySpace.com Contact”, whose MySpace profile address is MySpace.com/92416760. The messages were titled “Warning: Please set you age correctly”.

For both of the accounts, I had set my birth date to indicate I am 99 years old, for privacy reasons. Unfortunately, clicking on the links to read the messages failed. Either a standard MySpace error page appeared, or my Inbox was re-displayed with the message from “MySpace.com Contact” missing. Re-clicking “Inbox” did not bring the “MySpace.com Contact” message back.

When you try to visit the MySpace.com Contact profile, you briefly see a standard MySpace profile page begin to display, then you are redirected to the MySpace “Contact Us” page.

If this is really from MySpace, then it appears they are trying to enforce the requirement that people enter their actual birth date into their profile database. While this strategy can force people who claim to be 99 or 100 years old to enter a different birth date, it’s hard to see how this can help the much more significant problem of underage kids creating MySpace accounts.

An article titled “Living online: The end of privacy?” in the September 18, 2006 edition of New Scientist talks about the massive amount of personal information that available and readily searchable on the Internet, and the impact of this on the future.

“Safety Tip #51: Can You Ever Really Leave?” and many other sections of MySpace Safety: 51 Tips talk about the problem of individuals creating a public record that passes out of their own control the moment they post information on public web sites such as MySpace.com. All of this information can be seen by others, and it may be available many years into the future, by which time new technologies will have made it much more readily obtainable than is possible today.

But not everyone is content to just let this happen. The New Scientist article also talks about ClaimID.com, a service “that allows you to track, verify, annotate and prioritise the information that appears about you online.” Employers, colleges, and other organizations are already using search engines to find information about potential applicants. In the future, use of the Internet in this manner will only increase. Continuing the commentary on ClaimID, the New Scientist article says “such a service could prove increasingly useful for people entering the workforce with a few years of social networking behind them.”

If for any reason you’d prefer to make it more difficult for someone to see you complete friend list (for example, if someone appears to be targeting you with slander and false accusations), one thing you can do is to remove the View All Friends link at the bottom of your Top Friends list on your profile page.

The blog post “Remove the View All Friends link from your MySpace profile” at the O’Reilly Media MySpace page MySpace.com/OreillyMedia describes how to do this.