Protecting Your Privacy When Using Facebook and Twitter

A couple of my friends have had their Facebook or Twitter account hacked.  As noted in an earlier post, cyber criminals have a variety of motives and some are malicious.  For example, the criminals may fraudulently assume your identity or use your account to send spam.  The best way to protect your account is to proactively change the account settings to require two-factor authentication for any account changes.

Two-factor authentication requires the user to identify secondary factor for account changes.  Sending a code to your cell phone and requiring that code be entered before making account changes is an excellent way to protect your account.  Computing World has a very good article, Protect your Facebook account from hackers with two-factor authentication online at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243428/Protect_your_Facebook_account_from_hackers_with_two_factor_authentication?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29

A similar process can be used for other social media accounts, such as Twitter.  If you are using other social media sites, be sure to search for the ability to create two-factor authentication. 

Visit to India

I leave for an eleven-day trip to India in less that 4 weeks. I represent MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) along with a team of oncology nurse faculty member and physicians.  As you may know, I am the editor for the MERLOT Health Sciences Editorial Board. The team is a part of Open Educational Resource Cancer (OERC).  OERC representatives will make presentations at the Indian Cancer Congress 2013 and also at academic medical centers in Kochi. The visa is scheduled to arrive tomorrow.  I am not certain about Internet access for blogging.  In case of access problems, I will plan to tweet during the trip.  I will be flying into New Delhi and out of Kochi.  I am excited to meet nursing colleagues in my travels.  Look for more information on how to access India travel tweets later. 

Want to use Twitter? Shorten that URL

If you use Twitter to share links, you will find that shortening the URL of a website is very helpful.  Shortened URLs are very helpful for other reasons, too - for example, when designing an online lesson or sharing a link in email.


Websites that provide the service are very easy to use.  Copy and paste the long URL to obtain a short one. A few websites that provide that service are noted below.  Did I miss your favorite site?  Please share others :-)

• http://goo.gl/ 
• https://bitly.com/ 
• http://delivr.com/ (will also create a QR code for the URL)
• http://tinyurl.ms/
• http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url 
• http://cli.gs/  

QR codes have so many uses! Because marketers often use them, some sites require a registration and/or small fees for the service.  Some of the sites also include analytics.  The sites listed above are all free.

Twitter

Learn more about Twitter at http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/104-welcome-to-twitter-support/articles/215585-twitter-101-how-should-i-get-started-using-twitter

Figure out why Twitter uses "hashtags" (#) and the @ symbol.  Share your experiences.
http://twitter.com/jeannesewell

Jing Update

I learned some new features with Jing today.  You can use the free version of Jing to create buttons that will automatically upload Jing files to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.  I created the buttons (use the history menu), but have not attempted the uploads.  Not sure how it might work with Twitter.