So here I was, about a month ago, ready to write an article about how to make your Facebook account air tight and secure.  In the past week or so, the stakes have changed and Facebook now has new privacy settings.  New, but not improved.  How would you like all of your information available on Google and Yahoo?  If you’re not careful, and don’t act immediately, you may find your life not to be as private as you want it to be…

Continue reading Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck →

I haven’t used Craigslist all that much in the past year or two.  I still have to be very careful of every ad I view since it is, after all, a free service.  In the past six months or so, I’ve had good luck getting rid of some of my old electronics gear and tools to some happy end owners.  (I even had one drive over an hour to pick up an old Sony reel-to-reel deck!)

While searching for another Zune player (to give as a gift), I came across an annoying problem: keyword spamming.  For each Zune listing, there were ten others that were completely unrelated. Only after I opened a couple of ads did I realize the problem: the bottoms of the ads all contained dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords that had no relation to the item for sale.

All I can offer is this: flag all keyword abuse as “spam/overpost”.  Recruit some friends to help you out.  Since the folks behind Craigslist don’t do anything about it (other than make the rules which do, by the way, prohibit using keywords), it’s up to the community–us–to clean it up.  As it stands, keyword spamming just annoys regular users, and it is making Craigslist even more useless.

One final recommendation, to the folks at Craigslist: give us an option to search on the listing title only.  If someone lists a Zune in the title, then that’s what I want to see.  This would easily weed out the pathetic folks who post dozens of keywords into their ads, trying to deceive us into clicking on them.  Something needs to be done.  I’m using Craigslist a lot less now thanks to these spammers.