August 2009: Social Networking, Part II
© Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 31, no. 5, September-October 2009, pp. 29-32.
The August 2009 General Meeting again focused on social media, only instead of Apple applications the focus was on popular Web-based social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, with brief excursions into LinkedIn and GovLoop, and a finale of YouTube. But first came questions and answers.
Questions and Answers
Q.: Do certain Apple stores have better Geniuses than others?
A: This is an awkward question, since the obvious answer is “of course.” But in general, the larger stores have larger staffs, so can accommodate a larger and more divergent set of customers. More usefully, Apple stores tend to be busy on nights and weekends, and relatively sane on weekdays. So if you want personal attention, going in during the workday often gets a faster response and more attention than during a mad-busy weekend or evening.
Q: Updating to Mac OS X 10.5.8, I couldn’t complete the update even though I was logged in as an admin user.
A: Interesting problem! Obviously, this shouldn’t happen, but if it does, you might fire up Disk Utility and use the First Aid tab to Check Permissions. It probably won’t find anything entertaining, but it is free.
Another useful exercise: go into your Utilities folder and launch Keychain Access. Once open, go into the Keychain Access menu, select Keychain First Aid and, after typing in an admin name and password, have Keychain Access verify your Keychain database. (Keychain is the Mac OS X service that manages passwords.)
Q: Mail doesn’t show up in Apple Mail but does show up in Web mail. How come?
- There are a number of possible reasons, but two common ones: (1) You somehow have Mail set up to filter messages, and it is busy filtering things, filing them away and you can’t find them. (2) The local index for your mail is corrupted. In the former case, check on your mail filters (under Preferences > Rules); in the latter, consider rebuilding your mailbox (Mailbox > Rebuild). Rebuilding the mailbox rebuilds the local directory of your mail.
Q: Mail automatically enters addresses when I write to people. The problem is: the addresses are wrong.
A: Normally, auto-completion is quite handy: type part of an address, and Mail fills in the rest of the address. But if you made a typo at some point, or someone changed their E-mail address, it can be frustrating. Go to the Window menu (yes, Window menu), select Previous Recipients, and prune out addresses you don’t want. Note that deleting addresses from Previous Recipients doe not delete anything from your Address Book, so feel free to be ruthless.
Q: When I click on some files on the desktop, the wrong application opens. Why?
A: “Why” is not an easy question to answer, so let’s worry about a fix. Select such a file, select Get Info (File menu, Get Info), click on Open With, and pick the application you want to open this type of file. If you are absolutely certain of your choice, press the Change All button.
Q: How do you open E-mail messages and have them display in a larger font size?
A: In Apple Mail, go into Preferences > Fonts and Colors and select what fonts and font sizes you want Mail to use.
Another useful method of temporarily increasing the font size – and the size of everything on the screen – is to use Apple’s assistive technologies. Go into System Preferences > Universal Access > Seeing and click on Zoom. With Zoom turned on, Command-Option + (you need not press the Shift key for the +) makes things larger, and Command-Option – (you need not press Shift for the minus, either) makes things smaller. This trick works with anything, not just Mail.
Another technique: while reading a message in Mail, Command + (plus) makes the text larger, and Command – (minus) makes the text smaller.
Q: Sometimes I get messages in microscopic type. What can I do about that?
A: These are almost invariably sent by confused Windows users. One easy, quick way to fix the problem: reply to the message. The font will switch to your normal font, and the microscopic print should be much larger. You don’t have to send a reply, of course.
Q: My Windows friends send me messages that have attachments called Win.dat. What are these?
A: Microsoft Outlook sent an E-mail message that didn’t follow E-mail standards, and the extra junk (usually formatting) is in the Win.dat file. You can’t read it; just delete it. Do note that some viruses may also be attached to Win.dat files. The viruses can’t hurt your Mac, but they could hurt other Windows users so: just delete them.
Pi Business
Pi President Jay Castillo then addressed the audience, mentioning, among other things, parking. In September, George Mason will be back in session, so parking will be more constrained as the university awakens from the summer slumber.
The September General Meeting will also be different in that it will involve not only Washington Apple Pi but the George Mason University Mac computer club, which has been not all that active. Larry Kerschberg, a Pi Board member and a GMU professor in computer science, will deliver the main presentation, talking about cloud computing. It sounds heavenly; check the Pi Web site for details.
Jay mentioned that Snow Leopard should be out by September [he was correct; Apple released it for sale on August 28], so there will probably be some time set aside for discussion of this frosty feline.
Social Media Part II
The scheduled speakers could not attend, so Lawrence Charters filled in, giving him another opportunity to write about himself in the meeting notes in the third person. And why not? Social media is all about – me.
To illustrate, the TCS, the Pi’s famous computer-based forums, are message based. You can search for individuals, but the organization of the TCS is based on broad subject categories. The main subject categories – Macintosh computers, iPhones, and iPods – have been pre-selected through membership in Washington Apple Pi. Since the very beginning, Apple hardware and software have been the glue that holds the Pi together.
Facebook, in contrast, is all about the individual. You put your digital face, so to speak, on the World Wide Web, creating pages that show your photograph, give your birthday, where you live, where you went to school, what you are reading, who you are dating, photos of your latest vacation or most recent traffic accident – anything and everything you might wish to tell the rest of the world. The service is free, and essentially without restraint: you can post pretty much anything about yourself, no matter how unwise or how true or false.
If this doesn’t strike you as a useful service, consider: there are over 250 million active users of Facebook, worldwide. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest on the planet, following China, India, and the U.S. You will probably discover, if you look, that a large portion of your family members, regardless of age, and a large portion of your coworkers, neighbors, church members, and virtually every other group you associate with is already on Facebook. Lawrence learned, for example, that the Pi has a Facebook account; search for “Washington Apple Pi” (and then Join the group, of course).
Facebook started out life focusing on colleges and college students, who built up social networks according to their college and additionally by their dorm, sorority or fraternity, campus activities (band, football, etc.), and academic major. This gradually expanded, due to job hunting needs, into the corporate world, and major and minor businesses added their own Facebook pages. Facebook entered the mainstream in the 2008 Presidential Election when Obama’s campaign created the most active Facebook account and used it as a platform for organizing local and regional campaign efforts. By 2009, state and federal government agencies were joining Facebook, too.
Similar in nature but more focused is LinkedIn, a social networking community aimed at professionals. It is heavily used by recruiting firms to find people looking for work, or by professionals looking for jobs. There are discussion groups for almost everything, including a number of Mac discussion groups. Unfortunately, there are also public relations representatives, and they have a bad habit of spamming discussion groups with press releases and overblown hype.
Even more focused is GovLoop, a social network for federal, state, local, and international government workers, government consultants and contractors, and students and professors of public policy. There are discussion groups on acquisitions, communications best practices, human resources, E-government, and pretty much any other kind of government topic you can imagine. One group that Lawrence is quite fond of, mainly because of the splendid irony, is “Ancient Media,” a group that talks about – books.
The last social media service covered was Twitter. Twitter is a service that is easily mocked since it has, as its sole purpose, sending and receiving “tweets,” short messages of no more than 140 characters. The limit is imposed by SMS (Short Message Service) technology used in smart phones for text messaging, since these are also limited to 140 characters. Using Twitter and a Web browser, you can send out short messages to anybody and everybody who subscribes to your account (these subscribers are called “followers” on Twitter).
Tweets can be sent to smart phones, such as the iPhone, or also to E-mail accounts, and can also be sucked into a Web page via RSS feeds. Useful applications include notifying followers of updates to a Web site, coordinating a conference, or emergency notifications of problems in a neighborhood or region. The usual uses, unfortunately, are inane postings of people with nothing to do, such as “Going out for pizza,” “Using the restroom,” “Thinking of cutting the grass,” and the ever-popular “Not doing much of anything.”
Despite the inanities, it is worth getting a Twitter account (they are free) simply to follow some individual or group of interest. The Smithsonian sends out tweets notifying followers of changes in exhibits, of IMAX movie schedules, and times of presentations. The pandas at the National Zoo have their own Twitter accounts. Barack Obama has a Twitter account, with over two million followers.
YouTube
If Facebook is big, YouTube is bigger. While not usually considered as a “social networking” site, YouTube is immensely influential. Each day, more original video content is posted to YouTube than all the television networks produce, worldwide, in a year. Companies, governments, and private individuals can all post material equally, and hundreds of millions of visitors get to rate the video, share the video, add the video to their own private YouTube playlists, post comments on the video, argue with other comments on the video…
Robert “Bo” Huttinger had intended to be at the meeting, but life, as it often does, decided otherwise. So Bo was represented virtually via a Keynote presentation (posted on the Pi site) that talked about YouTube, explained why it is important, explained why it is dangerous (“…a monumental time suck”), and then reviewed how to embed YouTube video into a Web page, how to subscribe to YouTube channels, how to mark YouTube favorites, and how to create your own channel, if you feel ambitious.
As a capstone to this presentation, there was a live demonstration of YouTube. The video honored was “Arlington: The Rap,”
which left the audience howling with laughter. It is hard to imagine this video becoming so popular so quickly via any other means.
September General Meeting
The two General Meetings on social networking are good preparation for the September meeting. This will be a joint meeting with the George Mason Mac User Group, and will address “Cloud Computing.” Since Snow Leopard was released on August 29, there will undoubtedly be information on this latest cool cat from Apple, too.
Resources:
Washington Apple Pi Forums:
http://tcs.wap.org/
Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/
LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com/
GovLoop, http://www.govloop.com/
Twitter, http://www.twitter.com/
YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/