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Facebook – Twitter – Twittermail – Livejournal Features & Issues

Someone perceptive who noticed that I complained about my Facebook profile getting hosed twice already asked me if there was a backup for it, which I think is a brilliant question, especially since some people don’t realize that unlike a real email account, these messages go into never-never land once an account is arbitrarily wiped, at least insofar as the messages the person sending subscribing submits to the site.

On Facebook I just did a search for “Facebook Backup” and narrowed the search to applications and got a bunch of things I’m going to check out, thanks to him, but in the meantime, here is what I do to mitigate the damage that is caused when this happens and what I’m doing to avoid it in the future:

  • To keep an audit of my status updates, I have a pretty complicated method: I synch with Twitter (there is a Facebook application to do this) and use Twittermail.com to update Twitter and Facebook by sending messages to a secret email address. If I’m not near a computer I either send a tweet/status update without it being included in my audit by using a text message on my phone, but going forward I’ll be smarter and will send a twittermail from my blackberry, which automatically puts a copy into my mail client! Until twittermail works without paying charge to send me all responses and the tweets I send from my phone, I’ll look for a way to get a twitter back up. When I’m by a computer, I simply email from Outlook my 140 character or less “micro-blog”. Thus far I have not been able to get Twittermail to send me all of my received tweets back, but supposedly it does that in summary form, which is cool. Then I have something called Loudtwitter, which my friend Brian uses, which doesn’t work for me yet, for some reason. What this does for him is bullet-points his tweets and adds them to his Livejournal page, which is so cool, as I don’t blog on there at all, except to sometimes cross-post, which this effectively does. I have a control-issue with other sites being able to delete my original content, so while LJ has its benefits, I even dismay the lack of an audit of the messages my friends post there, not to mention comments on my postings. I do believe there is an LJ archive feature, so I will be testing that out too.
  • I have kept every email I ever got from FB confirmations and additions.  As I receive them, as time allows, I reconcile them with my address book in Outlook.    I grab as much information as I can from every person I approve (which requires that they have a believable face and hopefully a believable name).  I know it’s a lot of work, but I could win a prize for my database skills using Outlook, which I like to brag I’ve customized the hell out of (particularly insofar as the fields and format of the contacts go). While I have not been able to overcome the limitation of using the embedded picture feature in the 2007 contact form, I do have a field where I drop as many pictures as I want of my contacts, but no matter how I name the photos, it won’t work for appearing as that person when I synch with my Windows Mobile phone unless I’m using the original boring contact form, which I did with only the oldest of contacts that I have in my address book (i.e., 1995 is when I first started using Outlook and I have an email archive going back that far).. If someone out there knows a solution to this problem, please let me know, because all of my research has come up blank.
  • I do not reply to any messages on FB. I will take the email from the administrative Facebook account that forwards the message to me, which I understand is a ploy to get me to visit the site and succumb to their advertising. I believe these messages always has the entire content of the message and so what I do is — rather than linking to the insipid message center on their site – I forward the email to the person at his or her bona fide email address through my Outlook mail reader (which of course contains my own domain accounts). This is the only way I know of to keep an audit of the messages I send!
  • As for what happened to my profiles, they would not explain and even though I’ve talked to members who said they have had their profiles reinstated, sometimes twice, I have not had any success with my appeal as there is no true due process there, which I suppose is their right to exercise, but it’s also my right to moan incessantly about it.  The one who got his profile reinstated twice said he knew someone deep within the organization. I don’t have any political pull there.  I’m pretty pissed that this is so arbitrary. My theory is that the first time I got knocked off it was for adding friends “too quickly” — an algorithm for which they won’t disclose, which I guess makes sense, but it’s intended to prevent bots from going in and adding everyone in creation to their lists.  There is apparently a limit of 5,000 friends, so not sure how much damage one person having that many friends could do.
  • The second time I probably was “reported” for telling one or more people who kept on trying to link to me with their faceless, closeted, fake profiles to drop dead (soon).  See my chat netiquette blog for my logic on these morons. I have no patience for people like that.  Now I’m a bit more clever.  I accept them, glean their email address so that I can write them directly from my email account with an impolite request to take a long walk off a short pier and then block them and remove them from my friend list on FB, usually advising them that they are being reported for having a fake profile. What gets me irate the most are the people who post a picture of a koala bear or some other object to avoid their wives from finding them.
  • Toward that end, this is what I say in my Facebook profile: “For all of my up to date content, check out my personal web sites: Haydennet.com & Trupa.com. I ONLY RESPOND TO PEOPLE VIA EMAIL. I will not send any more monitored third party web site messages. … Activities I do? Apparently rebuilding my Facebook profile every time it gets wiped on a whim without any due process or explanation. Please NOTE: I do NOT respond to messages on Facebook. If you send me a message, you will be emailed a response (if warranted) at your REAL email address. Likewise, I strongly prefer to receive REAL emails. I do not live on this or any other third party web site that controls MY content. Thank you in advance. Indeed, MY uncensored (but family-friendly) content is completely under my control on my personal web site at Haydennet.com, so please link to that for fresh pictures with captions, videos and blogs. Other sites I have include my family/genealogy site (Trupa.com) and my business site (Ursinet.com). Some netiquette for this site [which goes for all sites]: 1. Do not contact me without a clear face showing in your profile where you are unhidden by sunglasses. 2. Do not request a friend link if you are an organization. That’s what groups are for.”
  • Now I even have applications that synchronize the birthdays of everyone on FB that I’m linked to, as well as all events that I’ve been invited to, so that even if my profile were to be deleted for a third time tomorrow, I’d have the data that I’d need to almost completely reconstruct the profile that I’ve had with hundreds of people on it.
  • When I need to rebuild a profile, I can mass export the email addresses of my preferred contacts into a text file and then and use the Friend Finder on FB to re-invite everyone, albeit with their generic invitation about sharing “pictures” which is so outdated. Invariably some people get annoyed and the re-request, because they presume I had removed them.
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Inauguration Day was emotional on and off. I kind of teared up the way I did when Obama was elected, but since he was expected to win, I didn’t cry very hard at that point. Tuesday morning it was just wonderful to see real people take over leading this country. I was very touched, but nothing like that night when I got home and I started watching NBC News. A white woman with her two small children made me uncontrollably lose my emotions when she said that on the morning after the election she work up her children and said … (I’m choking up writing this) … "Martin Luther King’s dream came true last night." I had to call my daughter in and show the DVR’d news to her, as I wanted to explain why I could not stop crying. Then, moments later, a veteran of color who had served in a segregated army couldn’t contain his joy. I kept on crying harder, as if I haven’t heard an incredible number of stories of the aged trying to wrap their mind around what just happened. That day was truly glorious. Who is his right mind would not see the joy that this country is enjoying because of an invisible barrier that was broken?

By the time lunch rolled around, I was asked by the guys I was going to eat lunch with to meet them on the corner of "Obama and Second." I thought there was an inside joke, but in a way it wasn’t — check out what they meant. Unfortunately by the time I reached them, the placard had been removed. However, it did remind me of when Bush One was running against Bill Clinton. A block from my home in Brooklyn was the intersection of President and Clinton. I lived on President and Henry. I was watching the national news one night before the election that year in 1992 and someone focused in on the corner, and then showed that there was an intersection between Clinton and Bush. Mind you, these streets were probably named at least 200 years earlier. Then they pointed out something interesting. Bush Street did NOT cross President. That was gleefully prophetic.

Last week I finalized my dirt cheap plans to travel to Las Vegas and Honolulu within the next few months. In both instances I’ll be staying with friends. I’m also going to try to harness an opportunity to work from my company’s New York office, so that I don’t have to use any vacation time to take a week and visit there on my own dime. There are several things happening in my life that have made this much travel for almost nothing possible. The big challenge will be to see my family in Italy this summer, as it’s been three years, but I will make sacrifices if necessary to be able to do that.I’m also exploring more plans to host friends old and new here in California, which gives me a chance to show off my area and spend quality time with quality people. I’m excited about my prospective new housemate too. He reminds me of myself having a passion to live in another part of the country that he has been to before. My other short-term goals are to plan a trip to Mexico City and maybe San Diego.

Something’s been bothering me since I first started DVR’ing D.L. Hughley‘s show. I was very excited that someone so witty and politically savvy was going to have his own show on CNN, when he started out as a comic, especially because he is an African-American. Then I started watching the show and I realized that part of the schtick was that half of the "news" he talked about was satire and farce – on CNN – as if he was Jon Stewart on Comedy Central (who I am also not the biggest fan of, even though I was on the show of his protege, Stephen Colbert). It started to take a bit of the credibility that I had grown to enjoy on CNN, despite Anderson Cooper’s constantly avoiding his sexuality, while talking about homosexuals in the third person.

 

What really bothered me, though, was when Dan Savage was on D.L. Hughley and was too polite. I agree with 99% of what Dan Savage says, but I think he should have caught D.L. (which ironically is the acronym for the "down low") on his supposed liberal stance. D.L. said to Dan, "While I don’t condone [emphasis mine] the gay lifestyle…" Then D.L. went on to say he did not see any problem with gay marriage in theory. Wait a minute. Who asked D.L. if he "condoned" anything? Who said we needed him to "condone" it? How can he be liberal and in support of equality for people of all colors and those who are homosexual if he still thinks we need him to condone us. Well, I hereby declare that I condone D.L. Hughley being heterosexual and black and male and whatever the hell else he identifies as. I hope he feels better because I condone him, even if he doesn’t condone me.

Today I finally got around to watching "300," mostly so that I would understand the satire of it that I intend to see where the woman from MadTV plays a bald Britney Spears who gets kicked into an abyss. I don’t remember the name of the satire off-hand. Did I think it was soft, homoerotic porn? I remember so many gay men having strong opinions about it one way or another. I do not. Some of the special effects were unique for me. For example, I never saw them cut the legs off a horse or otherwise hurt an animal in any spaghetti western I’ve ever seen. I trust no animals were harmed in the filming of the movie and that these animals and most of the heavily clad, particularly dark-skinned and effeminate Persians were probably computer-rendered, which would have made a lot of the graphic violence much easier to film than to have that many extras. The movie is blatantly racist. I can completely understand how Persians would be insulted, because I was. Ancient Persian culture is no less amazing and worthy than Greek, particularly the barbaric, Draconian aspect of Ancient Greece that was epitomized in Sparta, which had little respect for Athenian intellect. I know that good art is rarely politically correct, but this movie went out of its way to make the enemy look bad in a way that was so obvious like the Star Wars trilogy had Darth Vader in a black suit (although the storm troopers broke that mold by wearing white).