Cheap one time passwords

How many passwords do you have to remember? 6, 23 maybe more? With the increasing amount of online services you login everyday plus passwords in $dayjob and others the number of passwords you have to remember has gone up from 1 to 2 (email, machine) to tens (flickr, twitter (possible, multiple accounts), facebook and so on). You do have different password for each service, right? Didn't think so. Some people try to tackle this problem by using different password levels, first level for non crucial data, second level for important data and third level for data you depend on. Each level having different passwords and of course third level being hardest to guess. What if you would only have to remember one password?

Featuring "cheap one time passwords". The idea is simple and you can already use it at some level on most of the services.

1. Forget your password
2. Click on the forgot your password link on the service
3. Use the password you got in your email to login
4. Change the password to something long and hard (use some random generator and make the password long)
   
5. Do what ever you want

voila, one time passwords done cheap.

This leaves your email password on being the only password you really need to secure and remember. Now if service providers could provide a "log in using one time password" functionality they could do step 4 automatically when you login. The email could even hold a direct login link with a timestamp so that the link can only be used for 15minutes or so.

I already use this method on some of the sites I login too irregularly to really remember the password, try it out next time you need to login to your you haved logged in in a while.

Social networking as a lifestyle

Every morning after I wake my laptop from sleep I first check my yammer client to see what has happened at $dayjob, tweetdeck to see what my $friends have been up to and mail to see all the rss feeds and new emails. Most days even before I have opened my laptop I read about 10 different news rss feeds from my mobile. All this takes time I could probably use better but I don't want to.

During the day I get notifications about new facebook statuses and tweets all the time, some I respond to, some I read and some are just ignored (reading them all would require 48hour days). Immersing oneself to social networking might be scary and require lots of time, but the results are interesting. Getting addicted to status updates and being online 24/7 has changed our life quite a lot.

Social networking has become a lifestyle and I'm not surprised at all. People make friends around the globe and keeping in touch with them in near realtime would be almost impossible without the tools provided today. Friends can read your status updates easily when they have time or chat in realtime through various tools.

Being online almost 24/7 has its negative effects also. Few days ago a burglar could not keep his hands off from a computer while robbing a house, he logged into facebook and left it logged in, I guess he will have lots of time to update facebook behind the bars. Some studies say that companies are facing almost 2% decline in office productivity for people using facebook and other social medias.

I must admit I have also used my working hours to check facebook, friend new friends and update my statuses. Nowadays I'm even obligated to update our "hearbeat" twitter account (yeah, I was the one who suggested it ;).

Social networking is here to stay, it might change its appearance but it is slowly becoming the norm.

Dinosaurs in Social Networks

X and Y generations are well represented in social networking, for them it is normal to use Facebook and other social networks on a daily basis. Studies show that people tend to use more online time on social networks than on email (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342757,00.asp).

Still Facebook has its largest growth from age group of 35-49. Having spoken with multiple people in that age group I can only wonder who those people are. Most of the people I have spoken with have newer visited Facebook and see it as a place for young people. Interestingly after some convincing they are very eager to try it out and will probably start to use it on a daily basis.

I've lost track of my thoughts but here are few articles to read later on :)

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Social Network Marketing: What Works?

Is social media a fad?

Social media is the fastest growing media ever!

First steps to social networking and media

"Social networking", one more buzzword used by marketing consultants around the world. It is such a wide term that it is getting harder to explain. Wikipedia article is only one sentence, google search finds 69million+ results. So what is it?

In short social networking is everything you do in the internet that links you and some group. Writing blog is just one example, your blog has readers that can leave comments and interact with you in the blogosphere. Facebook, Orkut and other social networking sites take this one step forward, you can comment on friends and create new groups for people to join in. Using Twitter to share your thoughts to the world every few hours (or even minutes) gives all your followers idea of what you are doing / thinking right now (if they care about it).

Now after using Facebook, Twitter and others for about a year or so and reading my friends statuses and blog posts I have noticed that I'm not really that interested on what they are writing. I've gotten more interested on how the group reacts to their writings. "Did they get any comments", "Is someone retweeting them" and so on. As the amount of Facebook statuses and Tweets keeps growing and growing getting your own message through the noise is getting hard. My guess is that Facebook and friends will probably start implementing some kind of filters for users in the near future, "filter out all messages about cats" would help for starters.

Why are the reactions of the group important? It's not. If you just want to write your thoughts somewhere it doesn't matter if someone reads it or not. When it starts to matter is if you want to leverage the network for you. Most companies have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages that share information usually before any other media. In corporate environment it does start to matter if anyone reads your messages or not. Writing messages is still someones job (even if it is not your main job) and takes valuable time, companies want something back for that time. If no one reads your messages about a new interesting product you are about to launch why is the message even written? Understanding the mechanics behind social networking is essential for companies to get results from the network.

So where to start? Start a Facebook page, write interesting blog posts, market your blog on the Facebook site and recruit friends to your network. Tweet about your thoughts and comment others. Building a web presence is easy to start but hard to keep up. Committing to write something each day can be a daunting task and building even small network can take weeks (especially if you start from scratch). It is easy to spend one to two hours per day just reading and commenting blogs, writing your own blog posts and updating pictures to your Facebook account.

Does it pay off? Especially some internet startups would probably never have surfaced without social media. First time I heard about Spotify was from twitter many weeks before any traditional media had written anything about it. Messages in social media spread like a forest fire, every tree that lights up tends to spread the fire to at least three other trees around it. There are even some studies about a message traveling around the world in minutes through hundreds of people. The possibilities for this kind of coverage are astounding, but only if you have a good story to tell.