Ryan Trembath (dot) Information

So I’ve been installing apps on my Blackberry and getting a feel for what’s out there. So far, I’m disappointed.

First shot, the facebook app. Hype around the web called this one Blackberry’s big reach for the consumer market. Unfortunatly, the missed the grab.

While the app let’s you do a lot of regular facebook’s functions the interface is clunky and linear. It’s a pain to check mail messages and does not sync with your web based account. So if you log in on a computer after checking messages on your phone, don’t expect things to balance out. I was back on the browser pretty quick after installing this app.

Next up, Gmail. I don’t have much to say about this one yet (I just installed it this afternoon) but I do have 1 question.

Why is big G trying to access my phone book info? And why, when I refuse access, must it crash the whole application and erase the mail I was composing?

Given that I used nearly a quarter of my monthly bandwidth to download these two cr-apps, I’m left saying: I want my bandwidth back!

Yesterday, a friend and I were doing some basic searches to see if his name came up online. Having deleted his myspace profile weeks ago, nothing should come up right?

WRONG!

Check out this little scraper site operating under the guise of a Myspace search engine. Looks like they’re scraping profile information and (for your added benefit!) putting their own Yahoo! and Kontera ads on the page.

There is nice little disclaimer noting that:

All profiles and associated pictures are copyright their respective authors. MySpaceProfiles.org is not affiliated or associated with MySpace.com in any way.

Does that carry any weight? I’m not a lawyer.

I did find, via the remove my profile link, that you can paste this code:

META NAME=”MYSPACEPROFILESBOT” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”

into your profile so that their robot won’t index your page. This will also (apparently) delete any existing profile on your id. But what if I already deleted my profile?

There is a form where you can enter your id and request it removed, which I have done for my friend. I will keep you posted on whether or not it’s actually removed.

Managing your image just got tougher.

This falls inline with Lisa Barone’s post yesterday. Lisa made all of her personal facebook information private and still ended up in the search results. Turns out that her friends don’t keep the same privacy settings she does.

Where’s my publicist!?

Big companies spend time and money managing their online appearance and now you will have to as well. It’s already a well documented fact that most employers will do the Google, Facebook, Myspace search on you. This wonderous two point oh world of search, social and advanced scraping has the potential to be a headache for us all.

Are you prepared?

So I finally got around to starting a facebook account. I’ve spent the last week re-making the “friends” I had on other social networks that are no longer web 2.0 enough for use.

It’s also opened the door for asinine back and forths with people I would avoid on the street. G R E A T.

When is somebody going to make anti-social networking?

I probably shouldn’t give away the gold like that, but since it’s out of the bag here’s some details I just thought up.

All uploaded pictures with people in them should automatically have corpse paint added to the faces. Also, people with more than 3 friends in their hometown network get their profiles deleted for being a poseur. We just need a name…I’m open to suggestions here…anyone?

Do people even read this?