When Social Media Sites Go Away

I’m just now mourning the loss of EONs, the social media site aimed at Baby Boomers. I didn’t use it all that much, but I loved the groups that talked about the iPhone and the iPad. The people my age and older using those devices were so knowledgeable and so willing to share their advice that I felt that no question was too irrelevant or just plain dumb. 

And some of them were using their iPads for very sophisticated things that I could never replicate. One of the members of the group always put up great videos he edited on the iPad. Another talked about how he used the device for many business applications.

 And one of the members of the group gave me a gift by letting Tech and the Baby Boomer use the story of her mother, severely impacted by arthritis, who could touch the iPad with her knuckles to tap out emails to her family and also to view photos from grandchildren. As you can see, these people made a real impact on me. 

So my question now is where did they go? Where are you OldMike? Louscraps? Techie44? SkeeterThompson1? LBretired? Where did all the posts go? Where are those great discussions? And the photos? I know many of the members of this group uploaded photos and videos to the site. If they were smart, they kept copies.

Officially Lori Bitter of Continuum Crew, who purchased Eons a few months ago, blamed the problem on the company’s service provider. This is what was posted on the Facebook page for the group in early May:

To our Eons members,

We know many you have all been waiting patiently for news on the future of the site. As a team, we have been working to resolve the business issues with our service provider. We have negotiated in good faith to restore the site and move forward. Unfortunately our provider is demanding a financial commitment that we cannot make at this time. We are at an impasse. While we have worked behind the scenes to try to come up with an alternative to get the site restored, none of those have worked out either. For the foreseeable future, the site will remain down.

As Matt stated before, there is no reason to worry about your personal data; it is secure. We will continue to pursue all avenues available to bring Eons back.

Also, the company Crew Media in Texas is in no way affiliated with Crew Media who owns Eons. Please stop the calls to their president immediately, as there is nothing he can do.

Thank you,
Lori and the Eons Team

If you are “into” social media, and that includes Facebook, the people on the sites become if not friends, then people you are looking forward to hearing from. You enjoy their discussions. You like what they have to say. 

Perhaps you’ve gotten involved on a gaming site where the same people play the games you like, and you’ve grown to enjoy playing with them. Or perhaps you like to talk about golf or baseball. In social media, the people who have similar interests to you become closer to you than you realize.

That is: you become close to them until the server is shut down, and all their conversations, past and those you might have had in the future, are unreachable.

For me, this brings up a larger question. What if Facebook went away? What if they closed in the middle of the night with no way for you to retrieve your Timeline? Or see your old status updates? How would all the millions of you who spend time on it day after day feel?

 

They say that nothing really goes away on the Internet. Somewhere in cyberspace those discussions about the iPad and iPhone will exist. Yet finding them will not be easy. So Lori, if you are reading this, and EONs doesn’t return, please at least make your archives accessible in some way and provide a way for the people who liked to hang out on your site to find each other.

 

Related articles

• Baby boomers gaining ground with online social media

  ---

Boomers: Your Photos May Disclose More Data than You Think

Recently, an ABC news video has been making the Internet rounds, exposing the fact that newer cameras and phones equipped with GPS chips are embedding location information into photos. This makes it easy for stalkers to find the addresses of the people who posted the photos. A lot of people are worried about this; I received the clip from three people in two days.

The iPhone, for example, automatically embeds the user's latitude and longitude in the "metadata" attached to each photo. If you don't want to be found for some reason, this could be dangerous. I can think of a few obvious examples: a battered woman who has left her spouse; a celebrity who wants to preserve some moments away from the paparazzi; a public official who doesn't want his "niece" found; the CEO of a financial organization that has lost its depositors' money who doesn't want journalists to find his home.

This ABC online story tells the tale of two researchers at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California who were able to find the private home addresses of a Playboy Playmate and some TV hosts. It was relatively easy to do.

It's always been relatively easy for a motivated individual to find your home address, even before these days of online look-up systems. You could just look in the White Pages. If the person was from out of your local area, you went over to the library and looked through the shelves of White Pages books stored there. Obviously, the White Pages had its limitations. In the past, if you didn't know where someone lived, you might have to go through a hundred telephone books to find them. In other words, you really needed to be motivated. And most people who didn't want to be found paid the telephone company for an unpublished listing.

However, it's now much easier, not to mention quicker, for unscrupulous people to find out where you live.  The New York Times notes that:

By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3905/) or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer (opanda.com/en/iexif/), anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map.

One article said that people who list items for sale on Craigslist could be setting themselves up for robbery, just by posting a picture of the item for sale on the website. Last year, I posted a photo, taken at my home, of an old TV I wanted to sell on Craigslist. I didn't give out my address; people contacted me through Craigslist's email address, and I only contacted people who were interested and whose identity I could verify.

The TV was purchased by someone who had a business in my local area, and I was able to confirm his identity online and match the phone number he gave me in the email with his place of business. But what if the picture of the TV had been taken by a phone that was GPS enabled and had included location metadata? Then any unscrupulous person could have known where I lived and what merchandise I had. Further, if I had shown the TV in a living area of my home, they would have been able to find out much more about me. This is very unsettling. So if you ever post pictures online --of your cute grandkids, your dog, the tons of snow in front of your house--you should think about the information you are sharing.

There are many good reasons to use GPS metadata in photos. It's very convenient, for example, to post pictures to services like Flikr which then "know" where the picture was taken and label it with the location. Pictures from your trip to Japan will have exact locations attached, which for someone who forgets to record that kind of info, is very helpful when organizing albums. If you post pictures from home, you are not at risk of disclosing your location if you choose to make your photos private (an option most photo sharing sites allow) and only share them with people you know. However, if you take a lot of pictures at home and make your albums public, then you should think about the risks associated with letting everyone who has access to the site know your location.

Prompted by one of the articles I read on this subject, I visited a website called I Can Stalk You, which bills itself as "raising awareness about inadvertent information sharing." This site has hints on how to turn off GPS tracking for photos on the iPhone. Here is what I Can Stalk You has to say about turning off the GPS location information on the iPhone 4:

To see your settings, go to Settings, General, then Location Services. From there you can set which applications can access your GPS coordinates or disable it entirely.

For the iPhone 3 series of phones, users have to jump through some hoops. iPhone series 3 users can turn off ALL location based services by going to Settings, General then set Location Services to Off.  While this is simple, I don't recommend doing this. You will never be able to use Google Earth, for example, or driving direction features that use your present location.

So if you want to turn off location data for the camera on the iPhone 3 series, this is what you'll need to do: Go to Settings, General, then Reset.  The rest of the instructions are borrowed from this page on  the website I Can Stalk You, which I strongly suggest you visit.

Be careful here! We want to select Reset Location Warnings, and then Reset Warnings. This restores all of our Location based warnings for each application to the default, which in most cases is "Ask on first use".

From here, once we enter into the default Camera app on the iPhone, we can select Don't Allow. This will prevent the Camera app from geo-tagging our photos.

Not everyone has an iPhone, and I Can Stalk You has some directions for Blackberry users and some others. Since every manufacturer has different instructions, it may take some digging for you to figure out how to disable your information on your newer camera or on your smartphone, if you choose to do so.

In this day and age it's not only technology that reveals your location, but sometimes your friends want to tag the location that a picture was taken on Facebook. ABC News provides the following information on how to protect your Facebook photos from friends who might want to disclose your location to others.

•  Go to your Facebook account.
•  Click "Account" in the top right corner.
•  Click "Privacy Settings.".
•  In the "Sharing on Facebook" section, click "Customize settings."
•  Scroll down to "Things others share" and make the option next to "Friends can check me into Places" read "Disabled."

So fellow Boomers, enjoy taking and posting pictures. I know you do it. I've seen those pictures of your grandkids! Tell your children about this too, and make them a little bit more aware of what data is hidden in those pictures they take and share.

iPhone and Kindle, Perfect Together

I’ve discovered one aspect of the Kindle that I absolutely love, but it has nothing to do with the actual device. Amazon offers a Kindle app for the iPhone.You don't even need a Kindle to use it, but if you have one it synchronizes the books you have on your Kindle with your iPhone and gives you access to them on both devices.

This is true confession time. I never, ever thought that reading on a little screen like the iPhone’s would be enjoyable for me, but it really is. With the iPhone app, unlike the Kindle which requires the push of a "next page" button, you can turn pages with a flick of your finger. Even though pages have very little content, reading is fun. The iPhone Kindle App is better suited to reading a novel than reading a text book, I must admit. However, it is extremely convenient to have a book available to me to read at any time.

One of the features of the Kindle that this app preserves is the ability to change the size of the font, so if you have trouble reading small print, you can choose larger print. And you can change how the print is rendered. I chose a soft sepia tone. The reader can also sync to the farthest place read. In a text book where the reader often is assigned chapters out of order, this isn’t such a great feature; however, with a novel that is read linearly, finding the last page read means never losing your place. It’s tantamount to an electronic bookmark!

I took my phone to the hair salon the other day, and instead of leafing through Cosmo, I read a couple of chapters of Bombay Time.  I know there are other book apps out there to try, and I’ll get around to them, but for now I highly recommend that boomers give the Kindle App on the iPhone a try.

For other opinions of the Kindle app on the iPhone try CNET  or InformationWeek.

How to find a Restaurant Using an iPhone

Yesterday, I walked down 45^th Street near 5^th Avenue in New York while looking at my iPhone GS, which can be a dangerous thing to do in New York! There was a method to my madness. I was trying out a feature on the Yelp! app that lets you see reviews for the restaurants you are walking by while you are walking by them. Anyone out there who has found themselves in a strange city either on business, pleasure or family business knows that finding someplace suitable to eat can be challenging. Yelp! is an application for the iPhone GS  that takes the fuss out of this process using something called “augmented reality.”

Now, you know I’m venturing into strange territory when I begin writing about “augmented reality,” but that’s what I plan to do in this entry. No, I’m not reviewing Star Trek. I am discussing something that will be very useful for boomers. Like many of these applications, it took me a little time to figure out how to use it, but with the help of my son, I think I’ve got it.  That’s one of the things I keep forgetting to say. Most of the applications I’m talking about were shown to me by others first. They seemed baffling to me when I started to use them, but became easy once the “magic” was unveiled.

After you download the Yelp! app from the app store,  you activate your GPS on the iPhone GS so the phone knows where you are, and then you open Yelp!. The first thing you see is the Feed page, which lists recent reviews of nearby restaurants, with some painfully honest comments. If you wonder how far away from you the restaurant is, you can see the mileage right on the Feed page. An icon at the bottom of the page will say “nearby.” When you go to the “nearby” page the fun begins.

The real magic is up at the top of the “nearby” page, on the right, and in a little button that says Monocle which only appears on the iPhone GS. I'm sorry to say other iPhone users don't have this. When you hit that button, you activate the augmented reality feature which works with the iPhone’s camera. If you are walking down the street looking for a particular restaurant, the Monocle feature actually leads you to it. This is helpful when you are walking down a street with a lot of restaurants, and you only want the one you picked out. Or it helps you select from a lot of different restaurants on the same street. Just click on the reviews until you find the perfect place.

So if you are in downtown Manhattan (or anywhere USA) just walking around, use the Monocle feature on Yelp! It’ll let you find a good restaurant and take you right to it. It also will help you find the nearest bank, a nail salon, and many of businesses for which you may be looking. I’m sure a lot of boomers will find this application amazingly helpful. I did!

Brain Games--Expanding the Boomer Mind

In searching around for ways to expand my boomer mind, I found some brain games on the iPhone GS3 which are easy to play. Some of the applications are free.

My latest download is Brain Toot (Free) by Vertical Moon. This app has four exercises on it to test thinking skills and reaction times, something we boomers need to do. Brain Toot was easy to find at the app store; all I did was use the search function for brain games. It was easy to download with instructions that were easy to follow. It's amazing: an application I can use right after it downloaded! There was some confusing language, saying that the application used to be known as Brain Toot Lite, but now is called Brain Toot (Free). However, when I downloaded it, all of the graphics say Brain Toot Lite, so I guess they forgot to change those.

Not withstanding the confusion, the games are fun and do test my abilities. There are three levels of difficulty, so you can challenge yourself a bit. After all, getting better at this is supposed to expand your brain. One of the games that uses a hidden ball in a Three-Card Monte kind of scheme seems to stump me. I can't seem to locate the right ball. Maybe my visual acuity needs some upgrading! Anyway, I'll keep trying. The company has a pay version available which is only 99 cents, but so far the free version is fine. I'm sure it will get boring eventually. One annoying thing: the app keeps reminding you to upgrade to the pay version. I guess I shouldn't complain. App developers need to make money somehow.

Flashlight for iPhone

Maybe using the "App Store" from Apple is easy for you, but it wasn't for me until someone showed me. But learning how to use it is worth the time. For example, you can download a free application from the "App Store" on your iPhone that turns your phone into a flashlight! The whole screen lights up! You can use it to read menus in dark restaurants and find your way around strange hotel rooms.  It's a great little application and especially useful for us boomers. You just tap the flashlight and the screen turns bright white!

Flashlight is from John Haney Software. I'm still not sure how people find applications like this without a lot of digging or without someone to show them. It wasn't in the featured applications, but it was in the top 25 free apps. Maybe Apple's Genius software will help. I want to find applications that are relevant to me, so I'm  going to give it a try and report back on how that goes. In the mean time, if anyone has an application to suggest, please let me know.

Gaslighted by the Apple iPhone

I'm just a boomer, but everything Apple does is supposed to work right the first time right?  Wrong. I guess I've been brainwashed by their commercials.

Apple has a voice memo application that comes with the iPhone 3GS. It's handy to use to make notes to yourself. If you're like me you'll want to use it all the time to leave yourself messages about where you put the keys or where you parked the car at the airport or mall.

Anyway, I liked this feature when I finally learned how to use it. Who knew the little red circle under the microphone had to be pressed to make a recording? When you press it using the touch screen a meter appears and you know you are recording. At the same time, the button turns into two little red lines. But doesn't that usually indicate pause? Well, yes it does in many other places, but on the iPhone it means you are recording. I can learn this! I really can. Actually, you do hit the button with those two lines on it to pause.


Then how to do you play back? That was really hard to figure out. There's another gray button that takes you to the list of recordings you've made. To play back you touch a little arrow on the left of the recording you want to hear. Only sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't!

Oh, Apple, my Apple, how can you do this to your boomer users?  When I first ran into this, I felt as though I'd been gaslighted!

But I knew what to do. I went out on the web for a solution, that is, I searched Google for problems with Apple's voice recorder application. Someone suggested turning the iPhone off using the button on top of the phone (held down for a couple of secs) and then restarting the phone. It worked. The recordings miraculously began to play. Alas, this fix doesn't last. Before you know it, you are pressing the arrow and nothing happens.

There are all kinds of suggested software repairs out on the web for this glitch, but I'm not phone software savvy. I'm just a user who wants to use my voice application the way it was intended. Oh, Apple, help us boomers, and fix the voice memo problem. Thank  you.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, which I hope won't be just another voice out here whistling in the wind. My name is Esther Surden, and I am an experienced journalist who for many years specialized in the business of technology. Now, I want to address the 50ish consumer who is adventurous enough to want to try out Facebook and the Apple iPhone, but is unsure of what to do and how to do it. I also wanted to speak to the manufacturers of phones and the developers of sites, to explain just how many barriers there are to adoption of their gadgets and sites for many of us. While I have a lot of experience writing about the business of technology, this is the first time I've tried to write about my frustrations with using the stuff. I recently joined Facebook; posted my resume and reconnected with colleagues on Linked-In; purchased an iPhone; and now I am using an Amazon Kindle as a part of my publishing course (I'm getting a masters degree in publishing). As part of this experiment at Pace University, I promised the Kindle folks feedback and I will be giving them the same feedback that I give you. Since I come to these gadgets and websites without much user knowledge, I think I can help others in my age group figure out these things out. As they used to say in the world of TV, stay tuned.