March 2007

Michael Tabolsky

The most doubtful aspect of this post is either I should disclose the names or post links to profiles, however, I will not, otherwise I can become the same personality I am trying to criticize.

It was about 3 years ago when I have registered on the LinkedIN, around the same time I also opened an account on LiveJournal. The two on-line communities seemed really different at that moment, when LinkedIN was created with "making bussines" in mind, livejournal was just a blogging framework where people could make  communities, create "buddy" connections and generate content about just anything.

Both of the communities have grew up to enormous account numbers and both have been slightly changing with the time. I broke up with LiveJournal almost one year ago, when one of my posts where commented by people I don't personally know and do not respect their opinion at all. But that was not the reason, rather the last drop, the real reason was LiveJournal community of Russian speaking people (also called "Cyrillic Users" by LiveJournal devs) from all around the world which made it a kind of Russian MySpace, more oriented to blah-blah and chatting than to content generation.

Anyway the story is not about LiveJournal, but about so-called "Social Bussines Networking" on-line, and the above was just to make an analogy with what has happend to me a couple of weeks ago.

It started from a bunch of connections requests I have received within a five minutes interval one day. All the requests where originated from two names, on Neurona and LinkedIn networks, but the destination addresses where my three different e-mails. So I opened the profiles of the two, and discovered that they are from these "500+" accounts. "Ok", I said, "that is great for them, they do their communications and stuff, may be they are in sales business or something, they may need a lot of contacts, and they may have it", but I found that they are not sales or marketing people, instead, they have technical profiles related to the technical support, and both are consalters. It's been a long time I am not impressed by the number of connections people make on LinkedIN and it's been a long time I have started to reject requests just not to become one of "500+ but-do-not-know-anyone-there" members. That is my personal POV and I don't care about others. But this time something was different, that multiple requests was really annoying. So I decided I need to know whats the heck is going on:

Dear PersonA and PersonB,

I have received from both of you invitations on both LinkedIN and Neurona.

From your profiles it is obvious that you know each other or you are the same
person and that's why I write to both of you in the same message.

While your way of making the networking is totally fine with me (having
connections with people you don't know, writing the same recommendations to
each other) and I don't really care about it, instead there is something that
makes me worry, and that's how come that your automated connection method
sends me invites to 3 different e-mail addresses???
Did we meet somewhere? How did you get these addresses?

I will be very oblige for a fast and polite reply.

Thanks and have a good networking.

That was the email message I've sent to both of them. After a few days of silence, I've sent this message using internal Neurona messaging system and I've got an answer from PersonB:

I've imported a contact of my friend and i don't have controlled a duplicate of contact with multiple email address.
Excuses for the disturbance.

Thanks and good networking.

It was a polite answer, I am pleased. The PersonA, which actually gave away his Plaxo address book to his friend until today ignores me.

I am not going to judge these two folks, insted I want to share what I have learned from this story, or rather the moral of the story.

The social networking has become a lot of fun, but it has lost the importance as a working tool, the people using on-line communities to connect with others are often not the people you want to share anything, and often they have no respect for others. Moreover, these people often do not respect the obvious privacy rules and behave in the on-line community just as it is an anonymous chat we all know from late 90s. For me this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Though YMMV.

There is a lot of buzz nowdays around Web 2.0 and self-generated content, and the question I ask myself is about what will become with the on-line communities and for the sake of MilanIN based blog, with Social Networks? Will it be ruled by what kind of morality and community? Once we used to call WWW - Wild Wild West, because of the possibilities it created, should it be further called like this because of irresponsible and ignorant netizens?

P.S. This post obviously has an underlying message: "MilanIN is different!" ;)

Keywords: milanin, morality, netizens, opinion, social networking, linkedin

Michael Tabolsky

I have not ever seen something more abusive on "Social" sites before.

This is so obvious that I will not even comment on it.

Infomail.it requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:
I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
 
 -Infomail.it
Accept invitation from Infomail.it
Fact: Harvard Business School graduates have 58 connections each (average) 

It came directly to my mail address, so this "imprenditore" pays for being able to spam, and he is allowed to.

 

Keywords: LinkedIn, social networking, spam, abuse

Michael Tabolsky

This free calling has become one of the hottest issues on the net, so here is my 5 cents.

jajah.com has an offer that allows you to make free calls between registered and active users if they are on landlines and within some geographical limits.

Just a note on jajah, it is a different kind of VoIP service, instead of connecting you over the net when you should have some device connected to it, like software phone or VoIP handset or ATA, they connect phones directly. You go to their website, type in the number you want to call, select your number, click CALL and both phones start to ring.

Ok, so back to the free stuff or rather back to how I got free calls between Italy and Israel.

I am registered at jajah, and I have used it for some time to make calls. So I am totally active user with 3 phone numbers registered. Today I have registered my father too, and adding myself to his address book noticed that my nubers appear as free-to-call ones. So the catch was that you should not have both of the users within a country from "free" lists, you only need one. My father can call me free now.

Then I went to register another account with Israeli number, done it and it did not appear in my phone book as "free-to-call" one, obviously because the user is new, and he is not "active" yet. But the thing was that my number was "free-to-call" for that account. So the 2nd catch is that you need only one "active" to make the calls free.

The 3rd catch is a bit harder to understand. The thing is working only for landlines in the Europe. So actually it is not a "free" call, because you pay for your landline some fixed rate (mostly). But the thing is that you don't have to, at least if you need an Italian number (I suppose there are such services in many other countries) you can go to messagenet.it and get a totally free geographical number for Italy (02,06,01) to use as a VoIP number. Unless you want to use it for initiating calls - it is free. I have such number, and actually I can give it to anyone I want in any country, and if he has an Internet connection our call will be free.

It is also free for me because I am an Internet addict, so I always have an Internet connection, paying for flat ADSL, have a 5G/a week UMTS dial-pan on mobile, regardless of the voice calls which are less meaningful for me.

Keywords: cheat, free, free as in a beer, jajah, tip, voip

Michael Tabolsky

Luca,

You've said it all commenting on my post.

Such an  example of advertising that just creates a bad name for a company.

Just continuing with what you said in the comment.

The funny thing about ads, is that many websites are payed now by the visitors for not showing the ads. So were it brings? Right, the ads should become more and more annoying, we've seen flashing, singing an popping-all-around ads, now we've got also video ads. And IMO the intention is not anymore to catch the attention...

Or maybe I am just too paranoid?

The same is with spam, who will get the most revenue from new spam techniques? The spammers? no way... they get less and less clicks, and that's why they need to send more and more. But the spam fighters will get their coupons from users of their services.

Going any further in this theory just scares me, it seems like various internet entities are protecting us from themselves, yep, just like racket.

P.S. Don't take this post too serious anyway... 

Keywords: annoyance, joke, spam, web, ads

Michael Tabolsky

After some negotiations were done by Andrey, we can publish our new feature that was spontaneously born when me Andrey and four beers have met in front of the MilanIN web site.

It's not even a feature, or rather I don't dare to call a 40 minutes hack "a feature".

But anyway,  here is the deal.

Starting from today, you can attach your AdSense  to your profile and blog on MilanIN. If you look now at your profile, you most probably see  "Business Club MilanIN ads", which means you have not yet configured the "My ads". To configure go to your profile editor and scroll down to "Your Google Adsense ID":

Then somewhere on  google adsense account pages find your AdSense JavaScript code:

get your Google Ad Client ID from there and copy into your profile:

Now, save your profile and check that the  "Business Club MilanIN ads" title has changed to "My ads" title:

 

this means below you see your ads and not the ones of MilanIN club. Easy enough...

 

Keywords: ads, google ads, hack, milanin, milanin web platfrom

Michael Tabolsky

Keywords: web platform, Milanin site