What part of ‘No Automated DMs’ don’t you understand?

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Jul 6, 2010 in social media | 0 comments

I know this is neither a ‘current’ topic of discussion nor an exciting one but it got me thinking again after I received a couple of auto-DMs from both individuals and businesses after I followed them. I was immediately put off by it, but then I thought maybe I’m being too much of a purist, and maybe with a more practical approach they did have some utility. So I decided to put the question out there to collect the wisdom of the crowds.

The answer was a resounding ‘No’. You can see some of the responses as embedded tweets below

The rest of the responses were in the same vein. But it seems many Social Media ‘Experts’ and Agencies continue to do this. So I’m forced to ask,
What part of ‘No Automated DMs’ don’t you understand? Is it the No? Or is it the Automated DMs?

I discuss Online Privacy and what it means for Businesses & Users

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Jun 28, 2010 in Published, social media | 0 comments

“What is left of privacy has become the user’s responsibility to control what they put up online, since anything you put up online can become public – one way or another; the phrase ‘Online Privacy’ is now nothing more than an oxymoron.

Suddenly marketers are sitting on unprecedented levels of data, opening up a new world of opportunities limited only by their definition of it.”

Read the entire article on Emirates Business 24/7

Online privacy is dead and it is a good thing

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Jun 14, 2010 in social media | 0 comments

Privacy and protection of online users  (and the content posted by them) has been the subject of great debate recently. The latest iteration of the Facebook Platform – a framework to create applications – has given developers and websites access to user data which they use to personalize content  for arriving users. The social network has received a tremendous amount of flak for this endeavor ranging from mild criticisms to elaborate campaigns to quit Facebook (Quit Facebook Day campaign on May 31^st). Facebook for its part has had a fairly solid privacy framework underpinning the network granting users granular control over what content can be seen by which of their friends. After the backlash, Facebook (recently) introduced considerably simpler controls to the previously complicated system. Is that enough though?

A World with Location enabled Facebook

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Apr 10, 2010 in Featured, Geo Networking, social media | 2 comments

Geo Social Networking and Location based services and applications are all the buzz these days. Not only do we have applications like FourSquare and Gowalla and the many others battling it out for the top spot in this category, Twitter and Firefox also enabled the ability to determine the location of a user. The future of Social Networking has started to look increasingly ‘local’. But what is the biggest social player doing about it?

Facebook, right now, doesn’t have any location features but there has been an increase in chatter about it unveiling something at it’s developer conference – F8 – that takes place at the end of April.

So what can a world with a location enabled Facebook look like?

Blackberry’s official Twitter application (beta) reviewed

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Mar 16, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

I reviewed Blackberry’s official Twitter application – which is in beta – in Emirates Business 24/7

Click the image to see the full review.