PicApp has a problem, and so does everyone who uses them. Formerly a benevolent, free photoservice which allowed bloggers of all types access to fresh, high-quality images, over the weekend it morphed into an unstoppable plague, taking over websites all over the interwebs while their owners slept.
There comes a point in every free service’s life when it feels the need to generate income. If you’ve been around longer than ChatRoulette, you know this, and you knew the day of reckoning would come. Well, it came over the weekend in the form of an email to bloggers that if they wished to use Picapp images in the future, they’d have to register and install the Picapp widget on their blogs (or insert a line of code in their themes).
That’s a simple yes/no proposition, and easy enough to make up one’s mind about. But whether or not one agreed to the terms, Picapp went ahead and did something to its existing images already embedded in blogs, with the following result:
- every image on the front page of a blog now links to PicApp instead of wherever it linked to before.
In the case of blogs that give credit to their image sources by linking to them, this is a huge deal. Well, I wouldn’t want some third-party service messing with the actual links and content on my site without specific permission in any case, so PicApp has some ‘splainin’ to do this week.
Yet another example of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
I know we occasionally rag on Facebook here, accusing it of being a sort of social media honey trap from which one finds it impossible to completely extricate one’s self, but it’s not that we’re saying they’re actively malevolent. Just look at some of the things they’ve come up with to make your life better:
Customer Service Manifestos
“You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers—advertisers. Forget this at your peril”
As the internet found out yesterday, the thirty million bloggers who’d staked their digital turf at Windows Live Spaces were rather abruptly informed that they had six months to pack up and leave: specifically, to WordPress.com, which appears to be the only platform to which a direct Export is even possible from that platform.
We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.
Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.
That is what you call an offer you can’t refuse.
Suddenly, WordPress.com has gone from a relatively pastoral 5 million users to more than 6 times its original size, with the same amount of support staff. AND the exporter has a few glitches, like not taking draft posts along with it, and if you’re a drafty blogger, you KNOW what that means: all heck breaking loose when you find your carefully-crafted words missing from your own blog!
Staff at WP.com report that, as of right now, the import servers are swamped and they advise allowing 24 hours for the import to take place. It is not reversable. It is not really optional either, unless you want to lose everything: although Microsoft will maintain the existing content for six months, at that point the Live Spaces themselves go poof.
Welcome to the world of someone else’s service: it’s up to them when you get traded and what you get out of it; in this case, objectively you’d have to say this is going to be an improvement for those affected, but it could just as easily have gone badly, depending on whom Microsoft made a deal with. Whether you’re traded for magic beans, a pot of gold, or a plug nickel isn’t up to you, nor is where you land, if you’ve been hosted on a platform without a robust exporter.
If you happen to be in Vancouver this coming Tuesday, you should take the opportunity to attend this one-of-a-kind dinner and socialize with the social media set over a memorable meal in a private dining room deep under Blood Alley.
The Social Media Club of Vancouver, in association with Vancouver Food Tour, is throwing a fundraising dinner to raise funds for the post-production of With Glowing Hearts, a documentary on social media, activism, and the Olympics.
The filmmakers and several of the stars will be in attendance. Details on how to register:
$40 includes your meal, tax, tip and a contribution to the charity. Of course, you’re free to donate more if you like, and everyone who donates a Toonie or more is listed as an official Producer of the movie, which surely has got to be worth some bragging rights.
There are lots of technical hacks and ways to get at your internet properties, be they blogs, websites, or social media pages and profiles; why, there’s an entire master’s program in Bulgaria on hacking: not preventing it, doing it. So your internet security is always at risk, both from amateurs who only want to change your Facebook status to “poopyfacepoopyface” and from experts who have a commercial interest in your data and control of your internet properties of whatever kind.
That said, by far the easiest way to get at someone’s site is to convince them to give you the password. Don’t think it’s easy? Check this elegant, yet evil little trick out:
Facebook Password Trick
That’s not nice; don’t fall for it. But if you do, remember that you can delete your posts on Facebook if you hover your cursor over the right-hand side of your comment, just above the line of typing. But if your friends do this to their friends, GET NEW FRIENDS.
Have you ever sent an email or posted something to someone else’s Facebook wall or to the comments section of their blog and then thought, damn, I shouldn’t have said that! Of course you have: we all have. If you haven’t posted something you later regret saying, you haven’t posted enough!
The question is, what do you do then?
You get over it. In some cases you can “withdraw” an email, but the sad fact of the matter is that this fails more often than it works, particularly in an instant-alert culture where people open their emails on receipt. You can email the blogger and humbly beg them to take your comment down, but if it happens to be a swipe at said blogger, you’re probably only going to make the situation worse. And you can delete your Facebook account, but if you posted something to someone’s wall, you have to delete it before you delete your account, otherwise you are well and truly hooped.
The moral of the story, boys and girls? While we are all about backing up your own material, we advise taking a deep breath before posting something to a region of the web you yourself do not control. As comfortable as you may be in the blogosphere and the Facebookosphere, it’s pretty much always a mistake to drink and comment.
And speaking of which, when you’re tempted to drink and dial, it’s probably best to avoid those with Google Voicemail, otherwise you could find your slurry imprecations forwarded all over the internet as mp3′s. Get yourself one of these drunk dial blockers and never wake up wondering what you have to regret again!
Mercury is the god of communications, rogues, thieves, and social media gurus
Normally, you’d think backing up your data was a safety precaution, akin to flossing your teeth, eating right, and looking both ways before crossing the street. Normally, you’d be right.
But what about when you and your existing site have to part ways? What if your web host goes under, leaving a big hole in the internet where your site used to be? What if you want to move to another server? What if your DNS starts PMSing and your website is MIA?
Your backups can be your guarantee of freedom and mobility.
If you have an up-to-date backup, you can relax. Okay, you can pour yourself a stiff Diet Coke and THEN relax, because you haven’t really lost anything; it’s just temporarily offline, suitcased, and you can put it anywhere you want: new address or old. Once you get your new web home, you can simply upload your old contents and you’re up and running! Try re-creating a lost website from traces left on Google Cache and the Wayback Machine and you’ll never again forget to do your weekly (or more frequent) backups!
And yes, sadly, that is the voice of experience talking. If you’re not the detail-oriented type, you can always have a qualified professional take care of it for you. Now, gee…where would you find one of those?
This isn’t particularly related to backing up or protecting your data, but it is awesome. Those of us in technical fields can often take the technology for granted and fail to see the fact that it really is life-changing if it’s designed well and gotten into the right hands.
Those would be this woman’s hands.
I didn’t get the point of the iPad at first; in many ways I still don’t. It just feels like the Segway, something about which we’re all supposed to become uncontrollably excited, but which isn’t game-changing for anyone.
iPhad convert your iphone into an ipad
I was thinking too small: the iPad is game-changing for those with visual impairments. People like the 100-year-old Virginia, who had never used a computer before. Watch and see the Digital Revolution in action.
