A nice diagram at Experience matters caught my eye today, when reading this post.

Although it looks to me like the author of the article conflates application insecurities (buffer overflows, unvalidated form input, improper exception handling, etc.) with what we used to call cases of social engineering (popularly represented these days by phishing), the main point here is worth heeding: our dumb behavior on social media sites leaves us vulnerable to cybercrime.

What's worse: in the age of the personal brand, where there may be good prima facie reasons to "add" contacts you don't recognize, those tinyurl-filled twitter streams become a minefield. I think it's incontestable that now more than ever, it's easy to make a dangerous mistake.

Here's Lindsay's nifty flowchart, which may be of some potential use for those remaining credulous internet users we all know.

I lurked on Twitter for a long time, trying to figure out how best I could use it in the service of DLB. What is it useful for as a "tweeter"? A follower?

As far as I can tell, there are two distinct values that Twitter can provide you as a follower, and unfortunately, they are mututally exclusive. You can either (1) follow everyone you ever encounter and grow yourself a massive reciprocity-driven follower-base, thus boosting your social networking gravitas while subsequently ensuring that you're never going to cut through the fog of uninspired self-promotion-cum-egomania and find good, useful tweeted content, or (2) you can just follow really interesting and awesome people, and get some real content-value out of the service, but sacrifice a "gimme" at boosting your personal PageRank.^*

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