Smart Phones and the Internet for the over 60's: Tips and Applications to get you up and going!
There are one billion smartphones now on the planet and they have revolutionized the way we work and play. However one group which are yet to really embrace and enjoy the wonder of the digital age are the over sixties. Indeed as I was upgrading my phone plan just a few weeks ago my Dad was considering buying an iPhone only to be told be the sales assistant that older people couldn't get much use out of them! I don't think this is true. Smartphones are for all ages, its just about being able to embrace change and learn something new. Often its not an inability to adapt but a feeling of being shut out of what is seen as a younger persons interest.
Apps
Apps (or Applications) are programs which you put on your phone which can change your daily life. You can buy them from virtual shops such as the Apple Store or Google Play which are often already vitrucal shop hubs on your Smart Phone when you buy it and download them. Many Apps are also available for free so don't feel that the expense should put you off, there's plenty of great free content to enjoy out there.
To the detractors and those who say you cant use it I say yes you can! Apps like Evernote, Instagram and Foursquare can being you much joy. My Tracks is great for a full hike, but with Foursquare you can check in at landmarks and see how long it takes me to get to the next one.Foursquare is a good way to keep track of restaurants and places that I like. Cant remember the name of the restaurant where you had that great meal last month? You can find it easily on your Foursquare history. You can also go to Groupon.co.uk and check out the latest discounts for all manner of things from shop goods to food.
Another app that you may like is Share My Position. When you are on the road and take a different route, the first chance that I get, I will share my location with our children. If you get lost or the kids cant find you they will be able to do so easily with the App
Texting on a smartphone is also revolution compared to the old way of using a numeric keypad. It gets even better using voice input or when you install Mighty Text on your computer and your smartphone. You can send texts via my smartphone easily from my computer. It's a great way to keep in contact with the Grand kids or Grown up Kids.
You can also use CallTrack in conjunction with Google calendars. It records the date, numbers and durations of your phone calls. With the calendar app it is easy to synchronize with my Google calendar, which has everything from our church calendar to the local tide tables.
And if that isn't enough check out http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/tips-and-links.html which has lots of links and tips to help you out online.
Privacy
You may still be a little worried about your privacy online. You have probably seen in the new a few different stories about social media and companies getting hold of your personal data. If you are worried about it read my article available at http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/1/post/2013/01/new-years-resolutions-to-protect-your-privacy-online-5-top-tips.html which will give you hints and tips to stay safe online
Remember the internet and Smartphones can be fun and life changing if you use them correctly and take safety precautions. If you have any queries why not send me a comment or ask your grand kids. It can be a great way to bond with them.
Apps
Apps (or Applications) are programs which you put on your phone which can change your daily life. You can buy them from virtual shops such as the Apple Store or Google Play which are often already vitrucal shop hubs on your Smart Phone when you buy it and download them. Many Apps are also available for free so don't feel that the expense should put you off, there's plenty of great free content to enjoy out there.
To the detractors and those who say you cant use it I say yes you can! Apps like Evernote, Instagram and Foursquare can being you much joy. My Tracks is great for a full hike, but with Foursquare you can check in at landmarks and see how long it takes me to get to the next one.Foursquare is a good way to keep track of restaurants and places that I like. Cant remember the name of the restaurant where you had that great meal last month? You can find it easily on your Foursquare history. You can also go to Groupon.co.uk and check out the latest discounts for all manner of things from shop goods to food.
Another app that you may like is Share My Position. When you are on the road and take a different route, the first chance that I get, I will share my location with our children. If you get lost or the kids cant find you they will be able to do so easily with the App
Texting on a smartphone is also revolution compared to the old way of using a numeric keypad. It gets even better using voice input or when you install Mighty Text on your computer and your smartphone. You can send texts via my smartphone easily from my computer. It's a great way to keep in contact with the Grand kids or Grown up Kids.
You can also use CallTrack in conjunction with Google calendars. It records the date, numbers and durations of your phone calls. With the calendar app it is easy to synchronize with my Google calendar, which has everything from our church calendar to the local tide tables.
And if that isn't enough check out http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/tips-and-links.html which has lots of links and tips to help you out online.
Privacy
You may still be a little worried about your privacy online. You have probably seen in the new a few different stories about social media and companies getting hold of your personal data. If you are worried about it read my article available at http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/1/post/2013/01/new-years-resolutions-to-protect-your-privacy-online-5-top-tips.html which will give you hints and tips to stay safe online
Remember the internet and Smartphones can be fun and life changing if you use them correctly and take safety precautions. If you have any queries why not send me a comment or ask your grand kids. It can be a great way to bond with them.
Tips for protecting your privacy online-5 measures every user should take
Update your software
To ease you in an easy one. See those update notifications? Start using them! Hackers are like groundhogs. They like holes. Once they find a hole (or make a hole), they can crawl through your system, leaving backdoors and other points of entry to get back inside. But in order to do that, the hacker has to get in first. You wouldnt leave your roof leaking so dont leave your computer as Holy as the Vicar of Dibley either.
When companies discover holes, it is their responsibility to patch them up and send out an update to their users. We do hear the stories of attacking companies such as Adobe for taking their time to patch known vulnerabilities, but it’s in a company’s best interest to fix the hole, protect its servers, and protect you.
The only problem is that so many people don’t actually update their software. And I don’t just mean the software on Macs or PCs but on phones as well. When you see that little update button come through, whether it’s on your computer or your smartphone, take the time and go through the process.
You can use tools such as Qualys’ Browser Check to make sure your browser and related plug-ins are up-to-date. Try it right now, you might be surprised to find that some of your plug-ins are old and insecure.
Facebook- Dont let it become a Faceache
Clean out your Facebook profile and read through the company’s privacy documentation Your Facebook profile is an identity thief’s goldmine. It has your birth date, oftentimes your full name, your family members (their full names), your hometown, your current town, the schools you went to, your job, any groups you’re a part of, your political stance, your sexual orientation, your relationship status, and your photos. Anyone trying to answer a security question to get access to your bank account could likely find the answer on your Facebook profile.
You need to make sure you know exactly what is on there, and get rid of anything you feel could be used against you. If you’ve got 4,000 photos, go through all of them. If your posts were inappropriate when you first opened up Facebook, delete them. But don’t forget that anything you delete off of Facebook stays on its servers for some time, though the social network will eventually delete it completely.
You should also be aware of its privacy policies too. Facebook isn’t necessarily an evil, data-mining, privacy-upending machine. It’s a business that is trying to make money, and your data just so happens to be what it makes money off of. Get acquainted with what the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Data Use Policy say, and “like” Facebook’s Site Governance page. Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to vote on any of the policy changes anymore, but at least you can get to know them and provide constructive feedback to Facebook when you feel violated.
Smart Phones
Protect your phone and understand what your apps are doing How many of you have the banking application Mint on your phone, but you don’t have a pin or pattern password protecting the phone itself? As Lookout Mobile recently said in a blog post, “Our smartphone knows more about us than perhaps anyone or anything in our lives.”
The Federal Communications Commission recently created a set of simple tips smartphone owners should check out based on the type of smartphone they have, whether that’s iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or even BlackBerry. The tips only scratch the surface of how you can protect your phone, but it puts you in a security frame of mind. Check them out and download some of the suggested security apps before 2013 — a year guaranteed to be filled with all new exploits and hacks — gets underway.
But protecting what’s on the phone isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s the apps you’ve already downloaded that are taking too much of your information. We saw this early in 2012 when Path, a social app, was found to be siphoning off users’ contacts without permission.
Bitdefender, an antivirus company, created the tool Clueful that tells you what your iOS apps are doing when you aren’t looking. I typed in Angry Birds Free to see what it does. Clueful reports that it tracks my usage, can display ads, could track my location, uses an anonymous identifier, and encrypts stored data. Good to know. If you’re trying to download an app you’re unsure of, however, it’s probably good to do a little more research.
Websites
Don’t be fooled by phishing scams and spoofed websites One of the most successful ways hackers get your information is simply by tricking you into giving it up. Sometimes it’s a prince in Nigeria who is desperate to give you $50 million. Other times it’s less obvious, like an email faked to look like it’s coming from LinkedIn but is actually just trying to get your account information. When it comes to these “spoofed” emails, it’s always best to hover over any link in the email before clicking on it, so you can see the link’s true destination. (This only works on a computer with a mouse, not a phone or a tablet, obviously.)
You should also be very suspicious if a company is asking you for your username and password. Most companies guarantee that they will never ask you for a password or credit card information via e-mail.
But it’s not just emails that get spoofed. The websites that are often associated with those emails often take a digital polyjuice potion and pretend to be a trustworthy site as well. In order to catch these sites before you enter personal information, F-Secure‘s chief research office Mikko Hypponen suggests using Flag for Chrome or Flagfox for Firefox.
“It’s a handy extension which shows a flag in the URL bar of the browser, indicating the country where the website is hosted. This comes handy in more cases than you’d think,” Hypponen told VentureBeat in an email. “For example, if you follow a link that you think should take you to your bank’s website but the Flag shows the site is hosted in Uganda, you should probably close the tab.”
Accounts and Passwords
Organize your accounts and passwords This is going to be the most painful resolution: knowing where all your accounts are online. You’ve likely set up an account for nearly every website you frequent nowadays. There’s the obvious ones like Facebook and Gmail, but how about your favorite retailers, Amazon, Groupon, Gilt, your local newspaper, your blogging platform? The list goes on.
It’s important to know where you accounts are because it’s important to know all the avenues a hacker may take to get your information. Look at Wired reporter Honan. Earlier in 2012, Honan’s iPhone, iPad, and Mac were all wiped after a hacker got into his Amazon account. The information there gave the hacker enough information to answer Apple’s security questions and access Honan’s iCloud account. There the hacker held the keys to Honan’s digital kingdom. Cyber-criminals often use a daisy chain to hop from one app to the next until they get to their trophy.
Start with your Gmail inbox and write a list of every website that sends you spam email, you’ve probably got an account on each one.
Once you know where all your accounts are, you should divvy them up into different password categories. At the beginning of my career Dave Marcus, a director at McAfee Labs, suggested the tier system to me. Put your most valuable accounts at the top with unique passwords for each. This should include your bank account, Gmail, and Facebook.
The second tier should have one, difficult password for all your semi-important accounts, and the last tier should have one easy password for all the accounts you could probably get rid of anyway.
Right now people are saying that passwords are the bane of Internet security. But no one has found the safest, but still consumer-friendly, way to replace them yet (though companies like OneID think they’ve got the right solution). So, until then you’ll just have to use easy to remember, but difficult to crack passwords such as passphrases. (Think of three random words that mean something to you and put them together, like “dogpeppermintsport,” and you’ll have a workable passphrase.)
To ease you in an easy one. See those update notifications? Start using them! Hackers are like groundhogs. They like holes. Once they find a hole (or make a hole), they can crawl through your system, leaving backdoors and other points of entry to get back inside. But in order to do that, the hacker has to get in first. You wouldnt leave your roof leaking so dont leave your computer as Holy as the Vicar of Dibley either.
When companies discover holes, it is their responsibility to patch them up and send out an update to their users. We do hear the stories of attacking companies such as Adobe for taking their time to patch known vulnerabilities, but it’s in a company’s best interest to fix the hole, protect its servers, and protect you.
The only problem is that so many people don’t actually update their software. And I don’t just mean the software on Macs or PCs but on phones as well. When you see that little update button come through, whether it’s on your computer or your smartphone, take the time and go through the process.
You can use tools such as Qualys’ Browser Check to make sure your browser and related plug-ins are up-to-date. Try it right now, you might be surprised to find that some of your plug-ins are old and insecure.
Facebook- Dont let it become a Faceache
Clean out your Facebook profile and read through the company’s privacy documentation Your Facebook profile is an identity thief’s goldmine. It has your birth date, oftentimes your full name, your family members (their full names), your hometown, your current town, the schools you went to, your job, any groups you’re a part of, your political stance, your sexual orientation, your relationship status, and your photos. Anyone trying to answer a security question to get access to your bank account could likely find the answer on your Facebook profile.
You need to make sure you know exactly what is on there, and get rid of anything you feel could be used against you. If you’ve got 4,000 photos, go through all of them. If your posts were inappropriate when you first opened up Facebook, delete them. But don’t forget that anything you delete off of Facebook stays on its servers for some time, though the social network will eventually delete it completely.
You should also be aware of its privacy policies too. Facebook isn’t necessarily an evil, data-mining, privacy-upending machine. It’s a business that is trying to make money, and your data just so happens to be what it makes money off of. Get acquainted with what the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Data Use Policy say, and “like” Facebook’s Site Governance page. Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to vote on any of the policy changes anymore, but at least you can get to know them and provide constructive feedback to Facebook when you feel violated.
Smart Phones
Protect your phone and understand what your apps are doing How many of you have the banking application Mint on your phone, but you don’t have a pin or pattern password protecting the phone itself? As Lookout Mobile recently said in a blog post, “Our smartphone knows more about us than perhaps anyone or anything in our lives.”
The Federal Communications Commission recently created a set of simple tips smartphone owners should check out based on the type of smartphone they have, whether that’s iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or even BlackBerry. The tips only scratch the surface of how you can protect your phone, but it puts you in a security frame of mind. Check them out and download some of the suggested security apps before 2013 — a year guaranteed to be filled with all new exploits and hacks — gets underway.
But protecting what’s on the phone isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s the apps you’ve already downloaded that are taking too much of your information. We saw this early in 2012 when Path, a social app, was found to be siphoning off users’ contacts without permission.
Bitdefender, an antivirus company, created the tool Clueful that tells you what your iOS apps are doing when you aren’t looking. I typed in Angry Birds Free to see what it does. Clueful reports that it tracks my usage, can display ads, could track my location, uses an anonymous identifier, and encrypts stored data. Good to know. If you’re trying to download an app you’re unsure of, however, it’s probably good to do a little more research.
Websites
Don’t be fooled by phishing scams and spoofed websites One of the most successful ways hackers get your information is simply by tricking you into giving it up. Sometimes it’s a prince in Nigeria who is desperate to give you $50 million. Other times it’s less obvious, like an email faked to look like it’s coming from LinkedIn but is actually just trying to get your account information. When it comes to these “spoofed” emails, it’s always best to hover over any link in the email before clicking on it, so you can see the link’s true destination. (This only works on a computer with a mouse, not a phone or a tablet, obviously.)
You should also be very suspicious if a company is asking you for your username and password. Most companies guarantee that they will never ask you for a password or credit card information via e-mail.
But it’s not just emails that get spoofed. The websites that are often associated with those emails often take a digital polyjuice potion and pretend to be a trustworthy site as well. In order to catch these sites before you enter personal information, F-Secure‘s chief research office Mikko Hypponen suggests using Flag for Chrome or Flagfox for Firefox.
“It’s a handy extension which shows a flag in the URL bar of the browser, indicating the country where the website is hosted. This comes handy in more cases than you’d think,” Hypponen told VentureBeat in an email. “For example, if you follow a link that you think should take you to your bank’s website but the Flag shows the site is hosted in Uganda, you should probably close the tab.”
Accounts and Passwords
Organize your accounts and passwords This is going to be the most painful resolution: knowing where all your accounts are online. You’ve likely set up an account for nearly every website you frequent nowadays. There’s the obvious ones like Facebook and Gmail, but how about your favorite retailers, Amazon, Groupon, Gilt, your local newspaper, your blogging platform? The list goes on.
It’s important to know where you accounts are because it’s important to know all the avenues a hacker may take to get your information. Look at Wired reporter Honan. Earlier in 2012, Honan’s iPhone, iPad, and Mac were all wiped after a hacker got into his Amazon account. The information there gave the hacker enough information to answer Apple’s security questions and access Honan’s iCloud account. There the hacker held the keys to Honan’s digital kingdom. Cyber-criminals often use a daisy chain to hop from one app to the next until they get to their trophy.
Start with your Gmail inbox and write a list of every website that sends you spam email, you’ve probably got an account on each one.
Once you know where all your accounts are, you should divvy them up into different password categories. At the beginning of my career Dave Marcus, a director at McAfee Labs, suggested the tier system to me. Put your most valuable accounts at the top with unique passwords for each. This should include your bank account, Gmail, and Facebook.
The second tier should have one, difficult password for all your semi-important accounts, and the last tier should have one easy password for all the accounts you could probably get rid of anyway.
Right now people are saying that passwords are the bane of Internet security. But no one has found the safest, but still consumer-friendly, way to replace them yet (though companies like OneID think they’ve got the right solution). So, until then you’ll just have to use easy to remember, but difficult to crack passwords such as passphrases. (Think of three random words that mean something to you and put them together, like “dogpeppermintsport,” and you’ll have a workable passphrase.)
Tips for Maximising your Twitter Experience
Tips for Twitter
1. Upload a profile picture, its easier to follow and engage with a person rather than an egg. It didn't do humpty dumpty any favours...
2. Optimise your bio. You only have 160 words. Dont waste them. What is it you want to tell the world? What is important to you?
3. Put a link to your website or blog on your page. It allows people to find and link to your site more easily.
4. Select to recive an email when you get a direct message or new follower, its important to keep up to date with these things and respond to them.
5. Tweets are 120 charachters for a reason. Micro Blog on Twitter. Save the big posts for your blog on Wordpress or similar.
6. Interact with your followers- its the whole point of Twitter!
7. Link up other sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to your Twitter-but think carefully if you want your Facebook to remain private before doing so this is expecially truw if youre tweeting as a business.
8. If you have a work Twitter or business account dont Tweet personal content on it. You wouldnt bear your soul at work so why do it to your colleagues, clients and potential clients.
9. Put a link to your Twitter in your email signature.
10. Dont use splatter gun posts, think thoughtfully before you post and Tweet to those you want to generate or maintain connections with.
11. Dont engage in abusive, libelous or agressive behaviour. You wouldnt do it in Starbucks who why do it in the worlds biggest virtual coffee shop? You may run the risk of criminal sanctions if your behaviour is very bad. If in doubt hit the "Contact Me" tab above or follow the icons below and post your query.
12. Keep your content new and fresh. Tweeting the same thing over and over makes users shut off and wont look at your posts properly. This may cause them to miss out on something new or important which you do say. Dont be the boy who cried Tweet (or should that be Tweeted Tweet...?)
1. Upload a profile picture, its easier to follow and engage with a person rather than an egg. It didn't do humpty dumpty any favours...
2. Optimise your bio. You only have 160 words. Dont waste them. What is it you want to tell the world? What is important to you?
3. Put a link to your website or blog on your page. It allows people to find and link to your site more easily.
4. Select to recive an email when you get a direct message or new follower, its important to keep up to date with these things and respond to them.
5. Tweets are 120 charachters for a reason. Micro Blog on Twitter. Save the big posts for your blog on Wordpress or similar.
6. Interact with your followers- its the whole point of Twitter!
7. Link up other sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to your Twitter-but think carefully if you want your Facebook to remain private before doing so this is expecially truw if youre tweeting as a business.
8. If you have a work Twitter or business account dont Tweet personal content on it. You wouldnt bear your soul at work so why do it to your colleagues, clients and potential clients.
9. Put a link to your Twitter in your email signature.
10. Dont use splatter gun posts, think thoughtfully before you post and Tweet to those you want to generate or maintain connections with.
11. Dont engage in abusive, libelous or agressive behaviour. You wouldnt do it in Starbucks who why do it in the worlds biggest virtual coffee shop? You may run the risk of criminal sanctions if your behaviour is very bad. If in doubt hit the "Contact Me" tab above or follow the icons below and post your query.
12. Keep your content new and fresh. Tweeting the same thing over and over makes users shut off and wont look at your posts properly. This may cause them to miss out on something new or important which you do say. Dont be the boy who cried Tweet (or should that be Tweeted Tweet...?)
Making the Most of your Twitter Experience. Useful Links
Looking through your Feed
You can of course do this on Twitter itself but there are also other options available you you depending what type of computer, phone or browser you are using.
Windows
Madtwitter; Twitteroo; Twitterlicious
Mac OS X
Twitteriffic
Linux
Deskbar; Twitux
Mobile phones
Twittter for iPhone; Twitterberry (for BlackBerries); hahlo.com (iPhone and others)
Firefox
Tweetbar
Finding people
Whoshouldifollow.com . Give your username, it will look for other users with some overlap with the people you follow, and suggest them as people for you to follow. Add some of the names there and then repeat the process, and you'll quickly build up a large network.
Twitdir.com, a directory. Find people, and quickly see the top 100 most-followed and busiest twitterers.
Twitterholic.com, the top users and accounts: choose, then repeat as above.
Searching and organising
Summize.com, search for a word or phrase across the entire Twitter feed. You can plug the search in and view the results; or take an RSS feed, which will automatically update when new tweets match your search.
Quotably.com creates threads of discussions between people.
Terraminds.com, another search engine, for users or phrases.
Tweetscan.com, search by user and time.
Twitterlocal.net finds twitterers near you.
Interaction
Twitthis.com, lets people looking at your site or blog share the URL via Twitter.
Twitturly.com, what's being most linked-to and talked about?
Tweetmeme.com, what sort of topics are being discussed?
Twittervision.com, real-time Google Maps mashup showing where the latest tweets are being posted.
Twitterverse, tag clouds based on the messages flowing through twitter.
Fun Links
Twistori.com, love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish: what people are saying where the tweets use those words.
Twittearth.com, processor-heavy, but fascinating, visualisation of tweets, put onto a spiralling globe.
Tweetwheel.com, which of your friends are already following each other?
Tweetspeech, Yahoo Pipes module that converts (incoming) tweets to speech, playable via RSS.
Tweeterboard, a "leaderboard" of who the busiest, most popular, most chatty users are.
Twitter fan wiki, lots more Twitter information and applications.
Twittersnooze.com, hit the "snooze button", briefly, on verbose friends.
Twitter balloon, your tweets superimposed on an image of your choosing.
Latest Scores, latest football scores, as tweets.
twerpscan.com, avoid followers who befriend everyone: may be spammers.
