Late last year I dipped my toe in the deep water that is Facebook. It was interesting to catch up with friends I hadn’t contacted in a while but that’s as far as the interest went for me. After a while the idea of being “poked” or receiving “wall comments” held little appear.

A couple of times I went to install an application and received a warning that the application would transfer my details to a third party. When it asked me was I OK with that I always pressed cancel; something was ringing those alarms bells and felt not quite right.

Last week after months of neglect and disinterest I cancelled my Facebook account.

Today I read that my concerns with privacy were not ill-founded. It has been reported today in the Sydney Morning Herald that a group of Canadian students have filed an official complaint about Facebook.

In a complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the University of Ottawa students said the popular US-based site sends users’ personal information to third parties for advertising and marketing activities without the users’ knowledge or consent.

If you, your business partner or even your kids are a member of Facebook then take this warning as one more reason to be very, very careful with the details you share on Facebook (and other social networking for that matter).

If you had the capacity to change anything about any part of any technology that use what would you change?  How would you make it better?

Over to you …

Congratulations to my friends at Saasu for taking at the top prize at CeBIT 2008 last night!! This is on top of winning the platinum prize last year as well.

I took some time as I was wandering around the CeBIT expo on Tuesday to catch with my main contact Marc Lehmann.  We are a great example of the connections that can be made in the virtual world without the need for face to face meetings and travel (even though we both live in the same city) Marc is a big fan of Twitter and last night while I was catching up on some computer work @marclehmann makes this announcement on Twitter.

Saasu.com wins CeBITs most sought after award again. So proud of our team!

I very proud to say that I’m a user of this top ranked application and a friend of one of the founders.  THey are a great example of the innovation in software that is available in Australia (if only people cared to look).

Have a look at some of the new features that their SaaS-based accounts and business systems package has - http://www.saasu.com/new-release-april08/

Q- I’ve notice more and more blog comments have pictures of the commentor (or another cartoon image) next to their comment. I was wondering what the are and how do I get one?

The images that you are noticing are called Gravatars - a shortened version of the full name Globally Recognised Avatars. An Avatar is a sanskrit word and in the online world it is the indentifying image that represents a person. They have been in forums and games for many years.

Unlike an avatar being fixed within a single application, a gravatar is an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.

In order to use it across mutiple sites the gravatar is associated with a nominated email address and each time that you use that email address in a blog comment, on a gravatar enabled site, your gravatar will be displayed next to your comment.

Gravatars were initialy created by the guys from Automattic, the same people that brought us Wordpress.

I expect that you are busting to get one and want to know the many convoluted steps, or special handshakes, needed to get one. Follow closely …

1. Go to www.gravatar.com
2. Click on the signup now link
3. Enter your email address
4. They will send you a confirmation link to setup your gravatar account
5. Upload the image you want to use as your avatar.

Tip: Make sure the image that you are wanting to use is already down at a reasonable small size (no more than about 80 x 80 pixels).

Once your image is upload then your gravatar will start appearing on blog comments everywhere.

I noticed that very few of the commentors here at Working Solo have a Gravatar so why not leave me a comment here and share your gravatar and thoughts.

(The image at the top of this post are of some of the gravatar-enabled commentors here).