BillWixted’s Blog

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld has an excellent story about how social networking sites can expose personal information and compromise your privacy in ways you might not have ever considered. This is an area that I am personally becoming more focused upon since my experience with Google Buzz.

One area that I’ve tried to tighten down on is my gmail account. For years, I have been used to hitting the “Archive” button rather than the “Delete” button when I’m through with an email. I had over 10,000 emails in my “All Mail” folder. Many of these were messages from financial institutions like banks and credit card companies. I realized that if someone managed to hack my gmail account they would easily be able to figure where I had bank and credit card accounts.

There’s not an easy way to dump your entire “All Mail” folder either since that folder also includes emails that you have labeled to place into a specific folder in order to keep around. The only solution I found was to delete everything and then go to the “Trash” folder and search for my labeled messages, move those back to my Inbox and then archive them from there. There might be an easy way to do this but I couldn’t figure it out.

Now, I’m following the practice of explicitly hitting the “Delete” button on every email that I decide I no longer want to keep around. I’m also taking pains to unsubscribe from each of these accounts so they don’t keep sending me emails that I didn’t ask for in the first place. I’ve also cleaned up my Google Docs to make sure nothing in there would be of any value to online criminals.

Yes, it’s true. We have no privacy anymore. But we can do things to make it harder for the crooks.

TechCrunch has the story on Twitter’s success in landing a new boatload of venture capital:

They’ve signed a term sheet with at least one venture fund to raise a new round at a $250 million valuation. We are still gathering information on how much they’re raising and from whom.

It’s likely they’ll raise more than the $20 million in capital they’ve taken in over two previous rounds.

Congratulations to the folks at Twitter. I’ve only recently started play around with it, but I can definitely see the incredible potential of a social networking service like Twitter even if I can’t come up with a viable business model.

Twitter’s future will most likely involve an acquisition by one of the big guys like Google or Microsoft. The coolest thing about Twitter is that it is a simple, yet ingenious, adaptation of existing web technologies into a wholly new form factor. It’s earned a place on my bookmark bar even if I haven’t fully realized how to exploit it’s power at this point.